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.