Lainey

I think the all guy schools, were more extreme in their ways.

Lots of folks have no good memories of Catholic school.

Did not mean to bring up a sore/sensitive subject for those folks.

Lainey

No Val, no retreats for me.

If I want peace and quiet, I'll find some woods to walk in, or a beach to walk on. I would not attend anything that had a religious affiliation.

As I mentioned above, I'm like your friends who attended Catholic school, no longer involved in the church, I think there are a lot of us who went that route.

valentine

My +1 went to John Carroll (sp?) and Univ. of Detroit. The Jesuits may not be funny, but they certainly are excellent educators.

NNY S2k

Same here.

valentine

^^ I hear ya, Lainey. I had the same impression of them until I found one in Northern Virginia that simply offers a place very similar to a small hotel, 3 meals a day, utter privacy, private bath and absolutely no rules/restrictions regarding religion. People of all faiths are welcome (there was a female presbyterian minister on retreat when I went). It sits in the middle of an 1800 acre farm and the monks do absolutely nothing except take care of your meals. No phones, no tv, no computer, just acres and acres of pasture, woods, a nice river runs through it and absolute QUIET (except the cows sometimes moo). There is no charge for this and you pay whatever you want to leave on the desk in your room when you go. It was unbelievable. This place is run by trappists of the cistercian order and most of them were pretty old. I enjoyed going to a couple of chapel services where the cantor and other monks chanted. It was beautiful, but I did not attend mass nor was I asked to do so.

DiamondDave2005

I went to school in Ireland, so 99% of the schools were Catholic schools, and back in the late '60s/mid '70s, they were staffed with probably 95% clerics.

Grade school: I remember the nuns telling me (at age 4) that being left-handed was a sign of the devil, and having my left knuckles whacked with a rule anytime I tried writing with it. As a result, I write with my right hand, but hold the pen like a lefty. Makes for some smeary pages, I tell ya.

Grade school 2: At age 6, I moved up to the Christian Brothers school. Ah, Brother Christopher, he of the cane rack. They all liked to use canes for discipline, so BC had a collection. He kept them in a case mounted on the wall of the classroom, and had them arranged by size, from thin and whippy to thick and hefty.

Thin and whippy stung like a bastard when he hit you, but the pain faded quickly. Thick and hefty didn't feel so bad at first, but your hand hurt for hours.

How BC corrected homework: Every morning, all 40 kids lined up around the classroom walls. BC called us up to the front one at a time and asked a question based on the previous night's homework. If you got it right, you sat down. If you got it wrong, you got whacked with a cane and sent to the back of the line.
One day, the line was down to one kid, who had been hit enough at that point that he did the unthinkable - he ran. Peter Lyons disappeared at mach speed and apparently ran all the way home before slowing down.

Interesting aside about BC: Back in 1995 or so, my parents called and said that two Special Branch officers had been to the house looking for me. They were investigating allegations of child abuse at the school back in the mid '70s, and my name came up as a possible victim because my parents had pulled me out of school mid-year. They had only done that because my Dad had gotten a new job in Dublin, so we moved from Sligo.

Grade school 3: This one was in Portmarnock. The only two memories that stand out over my two years there are of Mr. Monaghan. I remember him slamming one kid up against a metal cabinet hard enough to dislodge a globe sitting on top, which promptly fell off and hit the kid on the head. I also remember him ragging on a kid who couldn't spell something, and basically ripping the kid's family a new one right there in class.

High school: Some scary dudes there. For the first 4 years, they were still allowed use physical punishment (before it was ruled illegal 1980 or so). They used 'leathers', which were approx 12" by 3" strips of leather glued together to form a 1" thick leather block. Getting whacked with one of these hurt like a sob.
We had some old priests too, who should have been retired a long time ago. There was one whose false teeth would fall out at least once per class as he leaned over to read your homework.
We also had Father Feeling. I forget his real name, but he was known for fondling and caressing as many boys as he could get his hands on.

So, did it stick? Nope I had my first doubts at age 7, when I cursed silently to myself and was not struck down by lightning, as the nuns had promised me.

By 11, I was done with the whle thing and became vociferously anti-religious. By my 20s, I was just past it and aqquired my current live-and-let-live attitude. Just don't try to force it on me again

Lainey

Wow Dave!

Rough schools!

I know of one very large nun who took a high school guy by the front of his shirt and held him up against a wall. We were all at that one.

I don't remember much corporal punishment at our schools, but I would not doubt it was so in the early years.

On the not funny side, a lot of what they dealt in was humiliation. As if that would teach a kid who had trouble learning. I remember this one: The last day of school would be promotion day, where you'd move up into the next grade. Your name would be called and you would move over the the area where that grade stood "in ranks". Those "ranks" were the way you filed into school every day. If you were not promoted, you were left behind, until the kids of the lower grade were promoted and moved into ranks of the grade you were going to have to repeat. My sisters don't remember this but I do. Maybe I'm imagining that one, maybe it was just a threat by the nuns as to what would happen if we did not get good enough grades to get promoted to the next grade.

On the left handed issue, when I was little, I was a lefty. Mom kept switching my toys, spoon, fork, etc. to my right hand. After reading your post, it's a good thing she did. Though there are still a few things I tend to do as a lefty.

Metalhead

I was, on several occasions, held down by Corporal Punishment, and then molested by Sister Severeia

valentine

^^Is that supposed to be a joke? If so, then I don't see much humor there.

Metalhead

Yeah, well, valentine, I'm quite certain, for example, that that poor little penguin didn't see the humor in his or her ass being pushed into the drink, yet you obviously did.
To each his own.