Teaching nuns -- all ogresses?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
21

12 years of Catholic school.
1st grade: Evil-tempered nun, who would slap you for misbehavior or even for making a mistake.

2nd grade: Lay (non-nun). Quite nice… though once, a classmate got a bad report card, and she sent that kid down to the 1st grade nun to show her (really? WTF was that supposed to accomplish??) - and the first grade nun slapped the kid hard enough that she knocked her down.

3rd grade: Nun. Not especially evil, just aging

4th grade: Nice lay teacher, but one class with a nun who could be nasty at times. She actually had a reputation for having been worse (like one tale that she’d whacked a kid with a steel-edged ruler, that cut the kid, and the cut became infected). We didnt like her but she wasn’t as outright terrifying as the first grade teacher.

5th grade: One lay teacher, one nun. she was occasionally grumpy but not outright evil

6th grade: Both lay teachers. Mine was quite strict - but had a sense of humor about it. Had a reputation for swatting kids with her yardstick which was called the “happening stick”. Every year it would break near the end of the year, and the kids would chip in their pennies and buy her a new one. All the “good” kids (i.e. more academic, and/or well-behaved) loved her. Even the “bad” kids (the ones who struggled more, or had behavior issues) liked her OK.

7th-8th grade: a mix of nuns and lay teachers. Several were old and cranky, but not evil. The other one… well I got the distinct impression that she loathed us kids. She spent a lot of time yelling at the whole class. She didn’t use corporal punishment (that was largely a non-issue by then, but also we were as tall as she was by then).

High school: a mixture of lay (male and female) and religious. One lay teacher (mail) kind of went off the deep end and ranted at us for quite a while; another (priest) got into an argument with a classmate once; she tried to go down the hall to the principal’s office and he dragged her back in by her hair. The others were OK to very good. It may have helped that I was in the honors / college-bound courses, where the nuns tended to be those from a specific order, very well educated and very well qualified. I actually kept in touch with some of them for several years after school.

Answering another poster: Some orders are indeed devoted to teaching. Grade School was the “School Sisters of Notre Dame”. High school was Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary, at least in my classes - there were other orders represeted as well.

Interestingly, I had a nun for one college course - at a major public university. She was doing a post-doc or something, and was assisting in one of my physics classes. She was SSND like my grade school teachers. I don’t believe she wore a habit or veil, not even the toned-down ones the nuns went to in the late 1960s.

22

I just have to say I liked how the film Lady Bird didn’t use the trope of the mean disciplinarian nun, and actually portrayed the nun who was the principal of the school as kind and having a sense of humor.

23

8 years of parochial school (1st through 8th grade), I had at least one nun every year. I remember exactly one nice one, who was also the only young one, lots of mean old ones, lots of strict old ones, and one who should have been imprisoned for child abuse. I still vividly remember the day she slammed a misbehaving kid’s head into a cinderblock wall, then when he fell to the ground yelled at him until he was able to crawl back into his desk chair.

24

Catholic Schools for 12 years. ( 1949 to 1961 )All seven of us. Same schools, mostly the same teachers and Christian Brothers for almost all of us.
Grade school it was Benedictine Nuns and High School was a mix with a lot of Divine Providence Nuns.

Young & old, good or so-so teachers, some were very pretty.Some were very cool and fun.

Anytime I got into trouble, I made sure I told my parents before anyone else could. All of my siblings did the same. Just how we were raised.

I know that we got a better education than our contemporaries did in the public schools of the area.

One or two would be considered mean by many folks I suppose but I was never punished indiscriminately because they did not know who the culprit actually was. They knew.

25

I graduated from high school in 1970 and was taught by several some nuns who were born around 1900, including a couple of Irish immigrants. That generation of nun had no qualms about hitting students with a ruler, or even shaking a boy or girl so hard their heads whipped back and forth.

The younger generations of nuns ranged from tough-but-fair, to “didn’t like boy students,” to genuine guitar-strumming, folk-singing ingenues who probably thought The Sound of Music was gritty realism.

As a group I probably preferred the nuns who taught me to the male teachers.

26

But was that about being nuns or about being teachers? My father occasionally did fight back against a teacher who evidently didn’t know his arse from his mouth; my mother (herself a Normal School graduate, which shows that they’d give a degree to anybody with a pulse) always, always, always, took the teachers’ side no matter what. It took her more than 20 years to admit that someone whose main enjoyment of teaching came from (trying to) humiliate students should never have been a teacher (Alfredo “Frankestein”, lay male), that testing on what you haven’t taught is unacceptable (Rosa Vega, lay female), that yes that new priest did sexually assault a dozen of us (another Alfredo, this one SJ) or that “because I’m the teacher” is not a line of reasoning (a couple of nuns who were way over their head in their respective subjects). Sadly, Mom was the primary caretaker and school contact, it was rare for Dad to intervene because it was rare for him to hear about incidents.

27

My favorite teacher was a nun – Sr. Frances. She still wore the habit, she was old school, but she was the sweetest little old lady. We all loved her and the entire class would sometimes just pile around her to give her a hug.

She was very close to my family, and I still have this little doll she once gave me.

And then there was the teacher’s aid who had my sister in kindergarten, who STILL calls her, “my little kindergartner” when she sees her.

There were a few who were really strict, but most of the nuns I knew were really nice.

28

Dominicans. I guess I should say from that convent, rather than that order.

29

Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary (ICM) are ok. My daughter studies in one of their all-girl schools. One thing I notice: I never ever see a student playing on the corridors or on the grass during recess.

“Oh so you still have time to play, eh? More home work then…”

30

Thanks, everyone. Impression got, is that – as is the way of things – the meme / trope has a kernel of truth; but – as is, again, the way of things – it paints with a broader brush than is fully accurate. I’m glad to have my hope confirmed: that people who were on the receiving end, recall some nuns – even some among the “old guard”, and from further-in-the-past experiences – to have been kindly souls, even if “standing no nonsense”. As might be expected – seemingly a harsher scene overall in relatively distant decades, than in relatively closer ones.

Scumpup and muldoonthief – you seem to have been unlucky in happening to get the dirty end of this particular stick: as said, plenty of genuine nastiness on this scene, for sure – just, not every one of them everywhere / when, was a virago / horror.

I have to wonder whether CalMeacham’s Sister Superior was perhaps a fan of Ogden Nash, and his little couplet (admittedly not with the identical relevance):

Here’s a good rule of thumb –
Too clever, is dumb.

I feel that I really like Sister Columba (misandry notwithstanding) – strikes me as most delightfully bonkers.

Mama Zappa – I’m quoting only a little of your post; but your experience seems to have been, a mixture of nuns and lay bods – unpleasantness-and-ferocity seeming rather to the fore, though you found some to have redeeming traits.

My bolding above: kid-hating teachers is, I feel, a meme / trope of its own – more a thing of the past than of the present, but occurring on secular educational scenes as much as on religious ones. Perhaps in times past more than nowadays, many people who had no actual liking for children, found that the only way they could make a living, was schoolteaching – and blurring of lines seen, between hating kids; and not hating them, maybe in fact liking them, but considering that strongly-applied discipline is necessary, to make them ultimately into properly-functioning adults. (A matter disputed in a lively fashion, right down to the present day.)

I recall from Bill Bryson’s Thunderbolt Kid childhood autobiography (don’t actually have the book in my possession), his telling of his time in – totally secular – grade school in Des Moines, Iowa in the 1950s; in which he recounts that all his teachers in this period were women “of a certain age” who appeared, without exception, to hate children. Once again – a meme / trope with something of a kernel of truth. However – I’ll admit to mostly disliking Bryson, and thus being perhaps liable to have my judgements swayed by prejudice: I find our Bill sometimes keener to be a funny man / epater les bourgeois, than to tell the truth – hence his quite often using an over-broad brush, even about his claimed personal experiences.

31

Further thought – might this “novel” owe something to the Infancy Gospel of Thomas? – a thing of which I’ve heard, though not read it – it sounds potentially fascinating.

32

Maybe tangentially? I’ve read about that Gospel, though some of the things that Jesus is depicted as doing in it (like cursing children) was very unlike what was in the book that Sister Columba read to us.

The book was, I’m pretty sure, written for children (or for being read to children); it was mostly using Jesus as a role model of how to behave (be kind, be courteous, be respectful to adults, etc.) Knowing that Sister Columba was a extremely devout Catholic, I would have to believe that the book was written by some Catholic teacher or nun.

I’m pretty sure there were some minor miracles in there, too, though the one thing that sticks in my mind, 45 years later, is that in one of the early chapters, Jesus has an encounter with a Roman boy named Superius (ha!), who is a bully. Jesus shows Superius how hurtful he’s being, and Superius becomes a nice kid (and a sidekick of Kid Jesus’s).

33

There’s probably a bit of confirmation bias to the “mean nuns” stereotype, as well; thirty years on, you’re going to remember and tell stories about Sister Mary Sadista, who made you kneel on rice kernels as a punishment - something George Carlin said happened in his parochial school. Sister Mary Mundane, who taught you algebra and coached the girl’s basketball team but treated you like every other student, isn’t nearly so memorable.

34

or people who never attended a Catholic school and only know what they see in the media, e.g. The Penguin in Blues Brothers.

35

It would seem a “given”, plot-wise, that in later years Superius is an early Christian martyr at the hands of Rome; though from your description of the book, that would likely be suppressed for the benefit of the tender and innocent kids…

36

It was always my understanding that upon entering the novitiate, each postulant would be issued with either a ruler or a guitar, and their indoctrination track would proceed from there…

The guitar nuns would be trained to be nice, and the ruler nuns would be trained to be mean. I HATE explaining my jokes.

37

I’m fortunate in that I only had the one teacher who who appeared to hate kids, and that was 7th and 8th grade. The other bad ones were probably more as you describe: attempting to mold us, but in a truly harsh manner. Those of us who grew up functional did so, I think, despite those methods, not because of them.

Back before my generation, going into the religious life was really viewed as a wonderful thing for the family. Either for the family’s bragging rights, or the family was truly devout and thrilled that their daughter (or son) was going to serve God - or perhaps because it was a chance at an education and life the person would never have been able to experience otherwise. Clearly some of the people who did this went into an order whose main aim was NOT what that person had any aptitude for - but hey, you got into the convent, gonna teach them kids because it’s what we do. Families may well have nudged their kids in a direction they might not have considered otherwise.

And from my own experience, I have to assume that the truly talented ones did not stay at the elementary school level. Certainly the high school nuns were a LOT better than the grade school ones were. I never heard horror stories about any of them from my friends, and my interactions with the ones who weren’t in my area (i.e. who taught other subjects, or the non-college-bound) were pleasant.

It would be interesting to see if the current generation of nuns as teachers are any more human / humane than the ones I was raised with. I have to assume so: kids are more outspoken (sometimes at least), and parents are a lot less likely to ignore / gloss over the kinds of abuse that went on 50 years ago. My first grade teacher would certainly NOT be allowed to treat us the way she did.

38

I spent 12 years in Catholic school. Elementary school and junior high graded were in a combined school run by sisters*. Mostly we had lay teachers not sisters. IIRC both principals and only one of my teachers were sisters during the entire 8 years. I very vaguely seem to recall the later principal had been a teacher in the older grades before she stepped up into the new role. The sister I had as a teacher wasn’t exactly warm and fuzzy. She was not an ogress. Strict and no-nonsense would be a good description. The principals were pretty nice in general. I never had to deal with them for any major disciplinary issues.

My high school was run by a male religious order. I did have one sister, from the order that ran my grade school, teach one of my religion classes. She could be pretty shrill at times but didn’t fit the stereotype. She also didn’t wear a traditional habit; her order didn’t require it. She didn’t even fit the penguin stereotype visually.

The strictest disciplinarians I remember weren’t members of either religious order running the schools I went to.

39

I didn’t go to a Catholic school. But I have read a little about the kind of environment that nuns were ‘formed’ in. Firstly, the Catholic Church in the US has always been mainly an immigrant church. Successive waves of Irish, Polish, Italian, Portuguese, Filipino, Mexican and others were the great part of the Catholic population. These were people escaping poverty in their home countries. A “calling” to become a sister might not be so much a voice from the sky as a desire to not become a workworn drudge with ten children like your mother. Or a tradition in your family that someone becomes a nun or a priest.

Teaching order nuns were at least in the post WWII era, barely educated enough to teach. They were under extreme discipline themselves – expected to work all the time they weren’t praying, and were paid almost nothing. They were encouraged to use harsh discipline to keep order in their large classrooms of often poor unruly children – the charism of the teaching orders was, at least originally, to bring education to those who would otherwise never have the opportunity.

I doubt that they were in fact any crueler in their hearts than any other set of teachers, but their situation was not one which supported kindness and understanding.

After Vatican II, there was a huge exodus from all ‘vocations’. I know several ex-nuns. One said, “it was sort of like joining the Peace Corps, appealing to your idealism – but it was for life.” She left her order, married, and remained a teacher.

40

In my grammar school, they were only four nuns (Felician sisters), but, yes, all but one were the biggest assholes as far as teachers/staff go.