Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Dumb Ass

My actual seventh grade report card
Not long before my dad died he handed me a large brown envelope with my name on it. I opened it later at home, and what I saw couldn't have been more horrifying. It was every report card I had ever gotten, from first grade until I graduated high school. It was not a pretty sight. I could see that starting in first grade, when everything was average, until seventh grade, there was a steady trend downward. Seventh grade turned out to be my nadir. When I repeated seventh grade in a totally different school, things did start to improve, but very slowly. At least I never had to repeat a school year again. Still, I graduated high school with no more than a remedial knowledge of English, and math.

It wasn't until I was 31 years old that I finally learned something about the English language. That was due to my job as a bartender in Chicago. One of my best customers, who also happens to be my best friend now, would sit at the end of the bar and constantly correct me. In just six months I learned more than those nuns could teach me in seven years.

So what was it about that Catholic school and those nuns that made it so hard for me to learn? Why is it that a school system that I have heard for years is so much better than public schools, couldn't teach me the basics? The answer came to me yesterday when I came across a photo that jogged my memory.



Not only was one nun teaching over sixty children, she was wasting a good part of the school day filling the children's heads with religious garbage. Although this photo was taken a couple of years before I started school, it was not much different when I was there. I now remember that there were four school rooms for eight grades. We had second graders in our first grade classroom. Even when they built four more classrooms they were still over crowded. They just couldn't keep up with the Catholic baby boom. Luckily for me the bar I worked in thirty years later was rarely crowded.

9 comments:

  1. Ug. I'm sorry you had to withstand the Catholic School. I was also a late bloomer but I don't have the excuse of over crowded classrooms or religious indoctrination. I as just kind of -- distracted and uninterested all the time.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Moral of the story is nuns don't make good bartenders, right?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Is that Dave in the first row, first boy after the girls??!!!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Alan, kids had learning disabilities back then too. And they were exacerbated by the crowded room with many distractions. Plus, to tell you the truth, I wonder how much teaching education did the nuns get? Their best weapon was that they could discipline the kids and not fear reprisals from the catholic parents...

    ReplyDelete
  5. Peggy, yes that has to be him. Looks like him.

    ReplyDelete
  6. And they seemed to love using the discipline. I was beaten across the knuckles with a ruler, and a pointer regularly, and made to kneel on a three sided ruler. It didn't make me more attentive, it didn't help me learn. What it did was make me forever think of nuns as failed people, and made me question all the religious crap they told me, and for that I thank them.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Oh, and Hostess, they'd be good bartenders in a S&M lesbian bar. (Is there such a thing?)

    ReplyDelete
  8. You read my mind...that's straight out of some fantasy. Kneeling on a three sided ruler while a hot woman dressed as a nun spanks me.
    I WISH there was an S&M lesbian bar. Every lesbian I know wants true romance and to take long walks on a beach. F that. I want hot anonymous sex like the gay guys get to have...

    ReplyDelete
  9. The sad thing is there was no parental involvement back then. You either succeeded or failed on your own. I try to inagine where I might be today if anyone had shown some interest in my brain developement!

    ReplyDelete