Prompted by several posts in the current Ways Around Jewish Sabbath Restrictions thread on General Questions (if this post not appropriate for MPSIMS, mods please relocate).
A theme which I find showing up on the Dope with considerable frequency, is traditional Catholic schooling for younger pupils – up to and including mid-teens – and posters’ memories / associations re same. I’m not Catholic; and seem not in my life, to have been well acquainted with all that many Catholics – am rather struck by the apparent almost-unanimity here, on the nuns who taught posters having been, in that role: harsh, inflexible, totally humourless super-disciplinarians.
This does seem to me, likely to have the character of a “meme”; and a staple rueful-humour thing – with exaggeration / distortion of reality, thus likely to feature. I’d think – on the basis of what human beings are generally like (even those in religious orders): folk would be in various places along the harsh-and-hateful, to kind-and-forbearing, scale. I’d imagine that there’d have to have been some teaching nuns who were relatively kindly and lenient and good-humoured; even if their superiors had, in this, considered them to be poor workers and letting the side down. (In nearly all employment situations, there are not enough workers whom those in charge would reckon totally stellar, to fill all positions – some have to be tolerated, who are seen as not so good at the job.)
Please, Catholic participants, reassure me that among the nuns who taught you in the earlier parts of your schooldays, there were at least a few nice ones…
I spent 8 years in Catholic school. While many of the nuns were strict and no-nonsense, I never knew any to be mean in any way. The closest to corporal punishment I saw doled out was the nun who made kids do push-ups when they misbehaved - boys did them in the back of the room, girls did them behind the wall where we hung coats, since they wore skirts.
Being the goody-goody that I was (and am!) I never had to do push-ups. But another nun was fond of giving tough math problems and requiring you to show all work - like 2-3 pages worth. She got me once because I didn’t get a paper signed as assigned. I never did that again!
Of course, I can only speak to one school for the years 1960-1968 - it may not be universally representative.
I spent eight years in a parochial school. Not all nuns were mean and old. Some were young and mean, and some were young and non-mean, and some were old and non-mean. You got all combinations. But you remembered the mean ones, especially the older mean ones. For some reason, they seemed to get the leadership roles.
A story I’ve related here before was how our Sister Superior was walking past a line of kids. She stopped abruptly next to me and said, “[CalMeacham], you’re so smart you’re dumb!”, then turned and continued on her way.
Completely off-topic, but… In the WWII years, my mother worked at Bell Laboratories, then one of the most concentrated collections of brainpower in the world. She and my father quit these nice secure jobs to found their own (quite successful) business a few years later. One of her reasons for doing so, she said, was that there were so many “educated fools” working there.
Question: Were/are the nuns who taught in Catholic schools there because they chose to teach, or were they required to do so? (i.e. they had a “vocation” for religious life but not for teaching?) And, did they have to have the same training/education as people who taught in public schools?
In my experience (not as a student, my mother was the business manager of a parochial school for 16 years), the nuns who taught regular subjects had degrees, licenses and certifications they would have needed to teach in public schools. They would take CPE as well every year as required.
There was one nun who taught religion for K-3 who was not a qualified teacher at all.
Aides in the school had no qualifications required, though many did. Some were fully qualified teachers even. Others were just moms of kids (I don’t think they had a single male aide in 16 years).
Nuns were often the most senior teachers because turnover among the non-religious staff was pretty high. Most would leave for public school positions as soon as they could get them. Catholic school teachers worked HARD and didn’t have the kind of benefits public school teachers did.
I know only a few of the nuns in the Order were teachers. Most were not. I don’t know if the nuns chose the teaching profession or were directed into it.
My experience in a Catholic school from 1967 until 1972 was that the nuns varied from mean to just distant. The mean ones were really mean, though. One stand-out display of meanness was when an older nun went up and down the rows in class and slapped every kid across the mouth. We’d attended church that morning, as the entire school did every Wednesday, and she believed one of us had been whispering during the service. She couldn’t pinpoint who it was, though. Still, the guilty must be punished. The only way to be sure the whisperer paid the price was to punish all. That mentality was common to all the nuns and this may be why you hear horror stories even from people who were “good kids.”
I went to Catholic school for k-12 and then I went to a Catholic University and I can assure you, I was never taught by a single mean nun, as I was never taught by a nun at all.
In Spanish, monja means nun and monjil refers to a person who is easily run over; the kind of person who thinks and rethinks things twenty-five million times and who is extremely unsure of their own criteria. The most monjil person I’ve known wasn’t a nun, but several of my nuns did meet the description. I’ve also had teaching nuns who were about as easily run over as the cliffs of Dover; in fact, I’m reasonably sure that if Mother Frauca had raised one eyebrow at them, the cliffs of Dover would have whimpered and grown a nice slope that she could walk up comfortably. Those of my classmates who were used to being able to raise their grades by making puppy eyes at the teachers feared her; those of us who hated such tactics were perfectly happy to get her. She didn’t grant you anything you hadn’t earned, but whatever you had earned she did give.
Several of the abusive teachers I had were nuns, but the ratios roughly match the ratios of “types of teachers I had”. That is, %-wise there weren’t more nor less abusive teachers in any of the groups “nuns”, “priests”, “secular males” and “secular females”.
They choose it. They belong to specific orders whose objective is “teaching”, such as the Company of Mary. Other orders have other objectives, from taking care of the sick to visiting the imprisoned to providing retreat spaces for Ignatian Spiritual Exercises.
I believe that depends upon the order - some orders are known for operating schools, other for operating hospitals and others are engaged in multiple ministries.
That generally comes from people whose Catholic schooling ended no later than the early eighties - and usually it comes from people whose experience was well before the eighties. I attended a Catholic school from 1969- 1977 and had both nuns and lay teachers - there wasn’t really any difference . I’m not sure that there was even any difference between Catholic school teachers and public school teachers ( I went to a public high school). What was absolutely different was what society and parents were willing to accept from teachers - I was dismissed late from school with advance notice many times because the entire class was kept for the misbehavior of a couple of kids. My kids ( who attended Catholic schools from pre-k through high school) were never once punished for the behavior of another student and when my son got detention due to his own behavior, it was scheduled for the next day.
this. My school had one we referred to as “Sr. Sarge,” but not because she was mean. She just didn’t take shit from anyone. if you were well-behaved she was as nice as could be.
I went to two different Catholic grade schools, and a Catholic high school, in the 1970s and 1980s. In that time, I only had three nuns as teachers, and none of them were mean, nasty ogresses.
Sister Columba was my teacher for the first half of fourth grade (I moved partway through the school year). She was probably in her 70s, and very sweet (though not a particularly good teacher). She was particularly discriminatory in how she treated her students, based on gender – she treated the girls as star pupils, and acted as though all of the boys in her class were on the slow side. The only other thing I really remember about her class is that she had this “novel” she would read to us from, which was essentially “The Adventures of Young Jesus” – a completely fictionalized account of a pre-teen Jesus teaching and helping people.
Sister Mary was my teacher for the second half of fourth grade, as well as fifth grade. She was probably in her late 30s or early 40s, and a “modern” nun (she didn’t wear a habit). She was no-nonsense, strict, and often kind of humorless, but not particularly mean.
Sister Janet was my algebra teacher in high school; I had her for math class in both my freshman and junior years. Like Sister Columba, she was elderly, a little on the dotty side, and not really equipped to deal with crazy, hyperactive teenaged boys (it was an all-boys school). She’d occasionally attempt to do something fun with the class, or make jokes, but her humor would have been better appreciated by elementary school kids. She would occasionally snap and yell at a student, but as some of my classmates were pretty awful in her class, I think it’s safe to say that they had it coming.
My aunt was a teaching nun. So was adored by children and was very caring and nice to me. I never had her as a teacher, but never saw her act mean or even stern. I always knew her as a jolly old lady.
One thing I do recall about nuns and my parents - they were united. We knew if we got in trouble in school, our parents would hear about it, and we’d be in trouble at home, too. The very idea that Mom would yell at a nun for punishing us was ludicrous! Then again, as I’d said, the sisters at my school were not sadists. But they did expect us to be attentive, respectful, and obedient, as did our parents.
Part of why my daughter quit teaching was dealing with parents who couldn’t accept that their little angels weren’t little angels…
My gf’s family is catholic, so she went to a catholic grade-school. She has told me some horror stories about the nuns. She once questioned why dead babies would go to limbo instead of heaven and the nun went batshit crazy on her.
That event led her to question religion and she now considers herself agnostic.