The Mysterious Arc of Time . . . And Love

In the school year 1972-73, six years after leaving the convent, I taught high school juniors in Claremont, New Hampshire. Their syllabus included Look to the Mountain, a historical novel written by LeGrand Cannon, Jr. It is an engrossing story about Whit—a taciturn pioneer with great good sense, strength of mind and body, and a tenacity bred by a hardscrabble upbringing.

Entering the wilderness with him is Melissa. Together, they canoe far up river to claim land near Sandwich. The novel, which takes place between 1769 and 1777, captures the background in which these two—Whit and Melissa—settle and raise a family as a revolution begins to brew in far-off Boston.  

I enjoyed the book, which was new to me, as much as the students did. We were thunderstruck by the paucity of “things” on the frontier. We empathized with Melissa as she longed for the companionship of another woman; we were impressed by Whit’s know-how. A few students had seen that area of New Hampshire so they could describe the differences two hundred years had made on the landscape.

That summer, while visiting Dad here in Missouri, I told him about the book. “Your mom always enjoyed a good historical,” he said when I’d finished my long-winded summary.

He got up, left the room, and came back carrying two of Mom’s books: The Spider King, a historical novel about Louis XI and . . . you guessed it! . . . Look to the Mountain. I’d had no idea my mom had read it.

“Here, you take them,” Dad said. “You enjoy a good read just like your mother did.”

For thirty-eight years the two novels sat on a bookshelf in Stillwater, Minnesota. When I moved back to Missouri, I shelved them again. I’d read neither since the day Dad gave them to me. To be truthful, I didn’t even think about the fact that Mom had handled and read both of them.

Then this past Monday I wanted to read something about the Revolutionary War. All these years—forty-one—since I left Claremont, I’d remembered two scenes from Look to the Mountain: the mowing contest and Whit going off to war, carrying his prized rifle.

So I removed Mom’s copy from the bookshelf and began, once again, to read the words that so compellingly brought to life the inhabitants of Kettleford and Sandwich, New Hampshire. After all these years, they sprang forth from the pages to greet me as an old friend.

In the quiet after midnight, as I entered Whit and Melissa’s world, I idly looked at the copyright page to see when the book had been published. 1942. Then it was that realization unfolded within me: My mom must have bought the book brand new in Parsons, Kansas, where she lived in a refurbished chicken coop with my little brother while Dad worked at the nearby munitions factory. I was in Kansas City, attending kindergarten.

Last night I saw my mother—my brother and Dad asleep while she read late in the night, missing me, I believe, and hoping that my asthma wasn’t acting up.

She had turned the pages of that book just as I was turning them. Both of us—night owls—found solace and retreat in a historical novel. Both of us felt the heft both of the story and the hardbound book with the mountain on the cover. That mountain encouraged Whit to venture into the wilderness.

Seventy-two years ago my mother completed that book and sat within its story. She, too, had left her home and entrusted her life to another.  

Early this morning, seventy-two years later, I laid the book aside with a deep sigh of satisfaction. Partly from the story and partly because I knew that Mom had reached out across a vast space of time with its arc of love and had spoken to me of the ties that bind us together as One. She spoke; I listened.

There is much to be grateful for as we age. This is one of those things. Peace.

All photographs from Wikipedia except for book cover, which is from Amazon. 

Refusal to Accept Life as I Found It

In the ‘50s I listened as Nat King Cole sang “Smile.”

That song influenced my whole way of looking at life

when I was young and wanted to please everyone.

In the fall of this year, I posted a series of stories about my introductory teaching assignment after making first vows as a scholastic in January 1960. The memories of that Omaha classroom are unclouded in my mind. I’ve never forgotten those seventh graders who challenged both my mind and my heart.

         But the years after that—in Seneca, Kansas City, and Baileyville—are not as memorable because not as challenging. I have little memory of the students I taught from the fall of 1960 through the spring of 1966 because the truth really is that the squeaky wheel gets the oil and almost all the students in my subsequent classes were eager to learn and to please. The seventh graders in Omaha had been “squeaky wheels.” As such, they were unforgettable.

         In the fall of 1961, the mother superior of Mount Saint Scholastica Convent assigned me to the Seneca, Kansas, mission. My memories of the students and the classroom there are dim. What I do remember clearly, however, is my surprise at the discovery of just how human nuns could be and were. I remember that and also how hard I worked to shape my negative impressions into a positive image.

In the ‘40s I’d heard Bing Crosby and the Andrew Sisters sing this song.

Its emphasis on the positive influenced my outlook on life

until I found myself falling apart when I was in my forties.

         At that time, the Mount convent housed more than six hundred nuns. I knew only a few of them from my college days and from my eighteen months in the novitiate. Still, I habitually refused to acknowledge any evidence that didn’t support the romantic, unrealistic, and erroneous view I had of the convent and of religious vocations. For Sister Innocence of the Order of Saint Benedict, nuns were called to be saints and so they were. They  had to be or my carefully constructed view of life would come tumbling down.

         The nuns in Omaha had not dissuaded me from that view. Sister Brendan, the superior there, was everything I thought a superior should be. But a handful of nuns and the superior in Seneca were an entirely different matter. I judged them, rather harshly.

         I judged rather than simply accept that any group of people is going to be mixed in every way. There will be healers, peacemakers, gossips, malingers. There will be the compassionate, joyous, generous, kind, helpful, brilliant, gleeful, curious, prayerful, gentle, shy, and unassuming. There will also be the vengeful, obsequious, gossipy, ashamed, guilt-ridden, embittered, nosy, domineering, self-serving, gregarious, judgmental, imperious, selfish, mean, self-centered,  self-absorbed, and depressed.

         There will be, that is, all the human traits that we meet everywhere, in every group. Those traits might be muted by the life of service the nuns have chosen, but the traits—whether admirable or not—are ingrained and do not disappear with the making of vows.  

         In the first weeks of my life in Seneca, I knew I was judging others. That wasn’t, I thought, the way a nun should act. And so in an attempt to mend and reverse the judgments in my mind, I found all sorts of reasons for why the superior and the nuns would act the way they did. Rather then accept their humanity, I twisted my thoughts into a skein of knots. I made my own reality.

In the ‘50s Nat King Cole encouraged all of us to “Pretend.”

 I learned to do that very well when I was young.

         Next Thursday I hope to share with you some of the very human traits I found on that mission. Traits I refused to accept. Instead I concentrated on my own judgmental attitude and found myself despicable.

         Thus I began to travel the path that led to my leaving on Christmas Eve of 1966. I left broken, not so much by the convent but by my own struggle to create nirvana in the midst of the gathering of humanity in which I found myself.

         It wasn’t so much that I found the nuns and the convent wanting. It was that I found myself so far short of perfection. And that, my friends, was my undoing—the belief that to be loved one must be perfect.

A Final Bout of Hatred

In late August of 1960, I returned to Omaha. For the next nine months I taught a delightful class of fifth graders. Just thinking of that year with those eager fifth graders who soaked up learning makes me smile. How different from the seventh graders of the spring before. The only thing that marred those idyllic and carefree days were the recesses and the days I did the convent laundry.

         Throughout the year, several fifth graders would always gather around me during recess. We’d talk and laugh. And daily the members of that seventh—now eighth—grade gang would intrude. “You won’t be smiling when we’re done with ya,” they’d taunt. “We’re goin’ rape ya ‘til your ears ring.”

         Always the threat of rape.

         Because of that, Sister Brendan told me I was never to walk back to the convent alone. Another nun always accompanied me.

         The gang never raped me, but they did toilet-paper the trees and scrubs around the convent numerous times. Moreover one of my obediences was the weekly laundry. I’d pin a load on the line and go back inside the convent, only to return to the backyard and discover all the wet clothes trampled in the dirt, the clothespins littering the yard. 

          After this had happened a few times, another nun stood guard during the laundry days.

         One playground scene imprinted itself on my mind. In mid-winter, I was talking with Eugene, a fifth grader who was all of four and a half feet tall, malnourished, his face thin, a shock of black hair over his forehead, a woeful look in his eyes.

         Eugene was telling me about his dad’s drinking when one of the eighth graders—a member of the gang—strode up. He was tall, at last six feet, and burly. He smirked, put one of his muscled hands around the back of Eugene’s neck, squeezed, and lifted him off the ground. Eugene’s feet dangled; panic widened his eyes.

         “You b___,” the eighth grader snarled. “We’ll get you tonight!”

         “Let Eugene go!”

         “I suppose he’s your pet. Probably likes you. Doesn’t know what a b ___ you are.” As he spoke, he squeezed tightly so that Eugene’s face turned blue; his eyes rolled back.

         “Drop him,” I yelled from my five-foot-four height.

         “Make me!” he shouted.

         I slapped him.

         The bully dropped Eugene, who crumpled to the ground, coughing.          

         Rubbing his left cheek, the eight-grader muttered some choice curses, debating whether to hit me.

         Seeing the white line across his cheek left by my slap, I was appalled at what I’d done. But I had no time to apologize because Eugene was struggling to get up, still gasping for breath. I knelt on the asphalt and gathered him in my arms. Looking up, I saw the eighth grader looming over us, his fists clenched, his curses still bluing the air.

         “I’m going to report you to Sister Brendan,” I said.

         With that, he turned away, sullen, and rejoined his buddies who’d been watching. I don’t know what Sister Brendan said to him and his gang, but that ended their playground forays into fifth-grade territory.

         The year passed. I enjoyed being with those young children whose curiosity made learning exciting. But I continued to feel guilty about the hatred I’d incited in those gang members. When I’d taught them, my intentions had been good, but the results echoed for many years so that it was only thirty years later that I could finally see that I did have a gift for teaching and that those first five months had little to do with me and much to do with those damaged boys.

         And that, my friends, ends the saga of Omaha.

Note: I’m taking a vacation for a while, but will return to this on-line memoir in late November to share with you my next teaching assignment: Seneca, Kansas, in the fall of 1961.

All photographs from Wikipedia.

Finally, the Reason for Omaha

On January 1, 1960, I made first vows at Mount Saint Scholastica Convent in Atchison, Kansas. During the three-year scholasticate, the Benedictine community would determine whether I was right for the convent while I considered whether the life was right for me.

         On January 3, Mother Alfred sent me on mission to Omaha, Nebraska. For nearly three months, I’ve posted weekly stories about Omaha. Unless you are a new reader to this blog, you know that I spent five months in an unruly classroom of fifty-five seventh-graders. One student threw a knife at me as I was writing on the chalkboard. The blade barely missed my hand.

            The students themselves weren’t safe. When the girls passed out class work, the boys jabbed their behinds with compasses. The girls yelped as they reeled down each aisle, trying to avoid the compass points.

         But in early June 1960 that was all in the past. I’d come home to the convent, determined to leave.

         By tradition, the Mount nuns went on retreat in early June after all of them had returned from their missions in Nebraska, Iowa, Missouri, Kansas, and Colorado. During that retreat I thought long and hard about my decision. I knew I couldn’t emotionally—or physically—handle another year like the one I’d just experienced. I’d lost fifteen pounds in Omaha and now weighed 103 pounds. My face my gaunt; my hipbones prominent.

         After the retreat I knocked on the Scholastic Mistress’s office door. When Sister Sweteberta, a tall, thin, elderly woman of grave disposition, bade me enter, I walked across to where she was seated and knelt down. She was the one who would talk to Mother Alfred about my decision.

         “Sister Sweteberta, I’ve decided to leave the convent,” I said, getting right to the point.

         “And why is that?” she said.

         “I can’t teach.”

         “And how do you know that?”

         “I was in an Omaha classroom for the past five months and it was just too hard.” My words were coming faster now. “I can’t do that again. I just can’t.”

         She gazed at me. Kindly, I thought. And so I added. “I made a mess of the whole thing. The children hated me. And I didn’t like myself. I just can’t do that again. I can’t. I’m not a teacher.”

         She gazed down at me and then spoke, her words soft, but clear. “Sister Innocence, Mother Alfred knew what she was asking of you. She knew how hard it would be. And you came through with flying colors. You’re a born teacher.”

         “But why did she put me there if she knew it was so hard?” I was now on the verge of tears. “I’d never taught before. I knew nothing!”

         “That’s just it,” she said. “If you had taught before you’d have known the situation was impossible. But you hadn’t. So you thought you could do it. . . . And you did.”

         “But why did Mother Alfred think I could do it? Why?”

         Smiling, she said what was apparently so obvious: “Because you’d been student body president in the college.”

         As I sit here at the computer today I can remember so clearly what flashed in my mind: Nonsense. This is pure nonsense. This is a perfect example of a non sequitur. I’m kneeling in cloud-cuckoo-land.        

         I suppose the puzzlement on my face prompted her next words. “Believe me, Sister Innocence, your next classroom won’t be like that. You’ll probably never have a classroom like that again.”        

         And how did I respond to these inanities? Passively.

         I thought my superiors knew better than I what was best for me, and so I left her with the assurance that I would stay. Sad, isn’t it?

                   

A Final Visit

(Continued from last Wednesday, October 16 . . .)

On this gloriously cool day, I’m inviting you into that 1960, seventh-grade, Omaha classroom one last time. There I established a regime of strict discipline, onerous both for the students and for me. Most of those seventh graders wanted to learn, but surely not in such a tense atmosphere.

         The situation was precarious. If the students acted as if they liked to learn, the ruling gang members might await them after school and batter them into submission. If they played along with the gang I might put indiscriminate checkmarks on the board and they’d have to stay after school and answer to their parents.

Richard Westall’s Sword of Damocles

         Yet despite the pervading fear, most students took part in discussions, followed directions, and responded well to the varied techniques I used for teaching.

         A coterie of them, however, remained adamant. No one was going to steal their power of intimidation. In every way possible, they undermined my attempts to make learning pleasurable. An undercurrent of retaliation lurked behind the menacing glares these students cast on their classmates. The image that came to mind was of a submarine ready to torpedo those students who were brazen enough to enjoy learning.

         One of those students was Maureen. One day—a day when no one got three checkmarks on the chalkboard—she stayed after school to ask me about college. She was bright and wanted to learn—purely for the sake of learning. From my first day in that classroom, she’d paid attention and responded to questions and prompts.

         The next day, I noticed that Maureen had a pained look on her face throughout our lessons. I discovered why only when the students filed out of the room at the end of the day. As Maureen passed me, I noticed that the back of her white blouse was marred with countless dark dots. I asked her to step out of the line. The other students left the building while I spoke with Maureen, who began to cry.

         This is what she’d endured that day: The girl behind her in the third row from the windows had spent the day leaning forward over her desk so that her face was close to Maureen’s right ear. 

Throughout that long school day, Jenny jabbed Maureen’s back repeatedly with a hat pin. The dark dots were the blood that welled up beneath the blouse. With each stab of the pin, Jenny muttered in Maureen’s ear, “This is what happens to snitches.”

         Countless bloody specks stained the back of Maureen’s blouse. She never again wore it to class. Nor did she ever again stay after school to ask my advice about her future education.

         Jenny did stay after school the next day and worked the math problem, cursing Maureen and me beneath her breath the entire time. I’d spoken with Sister Brendan about the incident, so I could say to Jenny, with certainty, that if she ever tortured anyone else in our class, she’d be expelled.  

         One more bonfire doused. One more casualty of the civil war that raged in that classroom. One more student filled with hatred.

         I’ve never forgotten those two young girls. Where are they now? Who are they? And what about all the rest of those students who, in their recalcitrance and fear and longing, brought from me the creativity I never knew I had? Where and who are they? I wish I knew.

         I would never want to relive those days, and yet I am grateful for what I learned from those seventh graders—all of them. The lessons they taught me served me well throughout all my teaching and my developing of curriculum for several Catholic publishers.

         As I’ve aged, I’ve come to realize that for myself all has worked out to good. Hallelujah.

        

Note: I’m trying to establish a writing and blogging schedule that works for me. So after a year or more of posting on Wednesday, I’ve decided to do my weekly posting on this on-line memoir on Thursday. I hope to see you here next Thursday to share with you what happened when I returned to Mount Saint Scholastica Convent in late May 1960. Peace.

                                       ( . . . continued next Thursday, October 24.)

Photographs from Wikipedia.

Teaching in a Peaceful Classroom

(Continued from last Wednesday, October 2 . . . )

 Days slipped into weeks, then months. The number of students staying after school waxed and waned. Some days a few got two checkmarks, but not three. Still, when peace became onerous, some boys would feel the pressure and “act out.” Then I’d be in the room after school with four or five of them.

         On the whole, discipline, order, balance had been established in the seventh-grade classroom I’d tired to teach so ineffectively for the first few weeks. Now I could begin to supplement the books they’d completed in the first semester. To do this, I simply remembered all the fine teachers I’d known. I remembered especially their enthusiasm, their love for their subject matter, and their belief in the thirst most humans have for learning.

         Following their example was not difficult. I loved learning and I quickly discovered that I loved teaching also. Watching a realization dawn on a student’s face. Seeing heads nod in comprehension. Listening to questions that showed critical thinking. Seeing the students reason; their wanting to know more: the why, the wherefore, the what, the when, the how, and when. All this was the reward of teaching.

         Coming up with ways to the minds and hearts and spirits of those students became all-important to me. Here are a few of the many projects I used to capture their interest and to reinforce whatever we were studying:

Dioramas

Debates

Imitations of famous art and books they’d read

Mock radio news programs

Mock soap operas

Mock television news programs

Mock “Man on the Street” interviews

Mock newspapers

Mock quiz shows

Puppets and puppet shows for stories they’d devised

Collages to illustrate types of whatever we were studying

Mobiles for geography

         In the classroom closet, I’d discovered a large roll of newsprint. That gave me the idea for the project I remember best. To begin, I asked the students to bring to class the Omaha newspapers delivered at their homes. We then examined the papers to discover what kind of information they contained.

         The students discovered feature articles, news stories, comics, obituaries, sports articles, advice columns, business sections, gardening articles, movie reviews, weather reports, almanacs, crossword puzzles, letters to the editor, editorials, opinion columns. We discussed the difference between feature and news. We read opinions, editorials, and the letters to the editor. We simply researched the innards of newspapers.

         Then I gave the students large sheets of newsprint and encouraged each of them to do a two-page newspaper on the early American period we were studying in our history class. Most of the students wholeheartedly engaged in this project, which lasted some time and involved research, writing, creativity.

         For example, they came up with letters from colonists—rebels and Tories. One student even pasted onto his paper a mock letter from King George III bemoaning the waywardness of the Massachusetts colonists and praising John Adams for defending the British soldiers who’d been involved in what Paul Revere—the master propagandist—was calling “The Boston Massacre.”

         When the students completed the project—on which they’d worked at home and at school—we had fifty-five two-page newspapers. The names they’d given to their various newspapers, which represented all the colonies in 1776, displayed real creativity, as did the news, features, puzzles, comics, sketches, and other writing they pasted in the columns of their papers.

         We thumbtacked and taped the newspapers all around the room so the students could read and enjoy one another’s work. That was, I say with little modesty, the best teaching idea I ever had.

         Next week, I’ll share one last story about this classroom. Then I’ll post about returning to the monastery that summer and about my second year in Omaha. By the end of October this saga will be complete. Hallelujah!                  

                                             (. . . continued next Wednesday, October 16.)

Note: If you have some interest in discovering how I taught English and writing, please click on one or more of the following postings from my Sunday writing blog. In them I detail how Sister Mary McCauley taught my class in grade school. I followed her example when I began to teach.

Beginning with Prepositions

Building Blocks of Writing

Sentence Structure

Photographs from Wikipedia

The Settling In for the Long Haul

(Continued from last Wednesday, September 25 . . . )

In the beginning of my draconian rule of the seventh-grade classroom in Omaha, five students spent time after school trying to subtract and get to 0.

         For the next two or three weeks, five or more had to stay and work until they’d done the subtraction correctly throughout the entire problem. As I said last week, this process sometimes took two hours.

         As the days passed, fewer and fewer checkmarks went on the chalkboard. Ron held out for two or three weeks and had to stay after school each day. Led by him, Bill and John also had to stay for they followed his example and disrupted class when he did or disrupted it on their own and looked to him for approval. All three always had several  ✔✔✔✔✔✔✔after their names.

         But once Ron decided he’d had enough of this, he settled into brooding silence—like Heathcliff on the moors. He had a good brain and somewhat infrequently would offer an answer in class. His buddies would look at him admiringly and he’d preen. But when I complimented him on something he’d done or said, he seemed appreciative. I wasn’t letting him bully me and I think he developed a grudging respect for me.

Laurence Olivier as Heathcliff

in the 1939 film version of Wuthering Heights.

         The surprising event to me was that no parents called or visited me to object to their son or daughter staying after school. 

          In mid-March a couple did come to the convent one evening to demand that I change their daughter’s grades. Pam had taken her 3^rd quarter report card home that afternoon and her parents insisted I had a grudge against their daughter because she was smarter than I.

         For the first two quarters of the school years Pam had gotten straight As. I’d given her Bs and Cs because she'd done sloppy and incomplete work. She seemed to think that the assignments I gave were too juvenile. She was a ringleader of the girls, but she didn’t get checkmarks. She was too intelligent for that. Her resistance came in the form of inflections and facial expressions when she answered or asked a question.

         Pam’s parents simply couldn’t understand why her grades had gone down, and when I told them about her attitude, they expressed their belief that she was smarter. More attractive. More charming than any of the girls in her classroom. For all that, they thought, she should be given As.

         I assured Pam’s parents that if her work and attitude changed for the last quarter, she’d make better grades. I’d become steely by then and her parents seemed to recognize that the grades would remain as given. They left angry, but Pam began to respond to class questions without disdain and arrogance. She was an attractive girl and she and Ron were a couple.

         Sister Mary Norbert, who’d been at St. Peter and Paul’s Grade School for several years, had taught many of these seventh graders in her fifth-grade class two years before.

         One day she said to me, “You know, Sister Innocence, that lot’s not innocent. They haven’t been since they started carousing. Partying in the fifth grade. They changed then. And not for the good.”

         Seeing my befuddlement, she whispered, “Sex.”

         The next day I looked out upon that sea of fifty-five students and felt sad for them. I could see now why several of the girls seemed too mature for their age. Too knowledgeable. Why they stood on the playground with hips and chest stuck out provocatively. Why they looked at the boys with their mouths open while running the tip of their tongue over their lips.

         I knew that with regard to their sexuality they probably had experienced more than I. Yet that fact wasn’t important. I was there to teach them; they were there to learn.

         From February 15 to the end of the school year, I was perhaps more creative in my teaching than in any of the subsequent years. The students’ passivity and boredom became a challenge. Next week I hope to share with you some of the projects with which I captured their attention.

                                                ( . . . continued next Wednesday, October 9.) 

Photographs from Wikipedia.

         

The First Day of the New Regime

Mount St. Helens in Skamania County, Washington,

in the Pacific NW region of the United States,

before its 1980 eruption.

(Continued from last Thursday, September 19 . . . )

First, thank you for wishing me good health. As you can see, I just needed to go back to bed yesterday. Now I’m hunky-dory!

         Let’s continue this Omaha saga. In my memory, it’s Monday, February 15, 1960. I’ve come into the classroom and announced the method of discipline that would set boundaries for the rest of the school year. I began with the following words: “For four weeks, I’ve given you so much rope you’ve hanged yourselves with it.”

         I remember those words well. They helped me save face but were so untrue. I’ve given them no rope. The truth was I simply didn’t know how to establish classroom discipline in that milieu.

         To teach, I needed quiet punctuated by questions, curiosity, and discussion. Many of these seventh graders also wanted this, so my despotic discipline was unfair to them. But to reach the gang members and a couple of girls who were causing the disturbances, I had to become autocratic.          

         I also knew that the subtraction problems I meant to use for discipline would be wearisome to finish. To begin the process, I’d multiple a three-digit number like 537 by another three-digit number like 241. The answer would be 129,417.

         The students would then subtract 537 from this large number and would keep subtracting 537 until they got to 0. They’d subtract 241 times to do that. A lot of mental work.

         I explained this to the students to give them a sense of the scope of what staying after school meant. Several booed and let me know that no one—Absolutely. No. One.—could keep them after school to do anything.

         It was then I pulled my trump card.

         When Sister Brendan, the principal, had given me permission to try this tactic, she’d added, “Tell them that if they walk out and don’t complete the problem, they’ll be suspended for three days. And if they do that a second time, they’ll be expelled. That ought to do it.”

         When I played the trump card she’d given me, several boys cursed.

Eruption of Mount St. Helens on May 18, 1980, at 8:32 PDT.

         Hearing the curses from several students, I turned my back on the class—fearful still that someone might throw a knife—and printed their names on the chalkboard with a checkmark after each name.

         Turning back toward them, I said, “That’s for cursing. If you get two more checkmarks today, you’ll stay after school.” They groaned but said no more.

         To begin our new regime, I established a daily subject schedule. We’d pray, say the pledge of allegiance, and begin with religion. Following that, we’d study math, then reading, and so on.

         Before we began each subject that day, I distributed the textbooks for it and directed the students to open them to a section where their knowledge was weak. I’d learned their subject deficiencies from the quizzes I’d given on my first day in that classroom.

         As the day progressed, several boys sat like convulsive volcanoes ready to erupt. Throughout the day, I added checkmarks for anything that was on the list I’d posted that morning.

Mount St. Helens two years after the 1980 eruption.

         As I remember, by the day’s end, four boys—Ron, Bill, John M., and Tommy—and one girl—Jenny—had three or more checkmarks by their names. The five of them stayed after school. And subtracted. And subtracted. And tried to convince me they’d gotten to 0. And subtracted some more. The last student left the classroom nearly two hours after school ended. Fortunately, all five lived close by and could walk safely home.

         And so began the reign of Sister Innocence, tyrant of Mount Saint Scholastica Monastery.

Mount St. Helens, October 2009, 

with a view of the ice-covered crater rim.

(. . . to be continued next Wednesday, October 2)

The Omaha Denouement—Finally!

(Continued from yesterday, Wednesday, September 18 . . . )

Toward the end of the four weeks between January 18 and February 15, 1960, I began to think that if I became a pal to the seventh graders in our Omaha classroom they’d like me and want to learn.

         I discovered how mistaken that notion was on Friday, February 12, when we had a Valentine’s party. Besides bringing cupcakes, soda pop, and candy, several students also brought radios to the classroom. The party began in early afternoon. What ensued is like a Hieronymus Bosch painting.

Allegory of Gluttony and Lust by Hieronymus Bosch

         First, the students had a contest to see who could throw a cupcake up to the ceiling and make it stay. The contest continued an interminable time with much hooting and raucous laughter. Soda pop fizzed on the floor and against the windows. Girls ran around the room, trying to evade the groping hands of the boys.

         Then, several boys came to the front of the room, threw themselves on the floor, and turned up the volume on their radios. Moving their bodies suggestively, they humped, thrust, moaned. I stood by my desk as they performed their obscene floor dances just a few feet from me. They fixed their eyes on me and smiled with glee at my discomfort.

         That Friday-afternoon party was an ending for me. I knew I couldn’t go back into that classroom on Monday. That evening, my body must have proclaimed my great weariness—I’d lost ten pounds—and my despair and desperation. I say this because of what happened next.

         Sister Nicole, in whose fifth-grade classroom I’d substituted the first two weeks of January, was now home from the hospital. When she asked me how things were going, the whole sorry tale came pouring out.

         “We’ll put a stop to that,” Nicole said.

         “But how?” I could see no happy ending.

         “Here’s how. It’s this or Council Bluffs.” Nicole laid out the following plan: On Monday, I’d go into the classroom and announce a new beginning. I’d read a list of what I’d no longer tolerate:

1.    Interrupting my teaching

2.    Interrupting the responses and questions from others

3.    Jabbing with math compasses

4.    Throwing papers and books

5.    Spitting

6.    Making rude and obscene remarks

7.    Getting up from desks without permission

8.    Visiting other desks without permission

9.    Talking without permission

10. Failing to do homework

11. Sassing

The list must have had at least twenty-five unacceptable behaviors.

“The next thing you’ll do on Monday,” Sister Nicole said, “is to explain the punishment system.” What we devised is this:

·      Every time a student did something on the list, I’d put a check by his or her name on the chalkboard. At the end of the day, anyone who had three checks had to stay after school.

·     I’d give that student a subtraction problem by multiplying a three-digit number by another three-digit number. The student would then take the paper to his desk and begin. He’d subtract the second number—the subtrahend—from the first number—the minuend. He’d keep subtracting until the difference was zero. He’d stay after school until the problem was completed to my satisfaction.

         “But how will I know he hasn’t cheated to get out of detention early?” I asked.

         “When he shows you his work. Check it by multiplying your second number by 10, 20, 30, 40 . . . and so on. Look for the resultant numbers among the subtrahends. Just look for numbers that end with zero. Most students start to fudge and make up numbers until they get to a final answer of zero. You can show them where their subtracting went askew and set them to working the problem again.”

         “This’ll work?”

         “Once the students discover just how long all that subtracting takes it will.”

         I worked a problem and saw what Nicole meant. Then I went to Sister Brendan to get permission to keep the students after school for as long as it took for them to do the subtraction correctly. I also needed permission to miss Vespers, the lengthy chanted psalms the nuns prayed together after school ended.

         Monday came. I announced the new beginning. Within a week life had settled to what became the norm for the rest of the school year. In the next posting I’ll describe the atmosphere in which the students and I lived until the end of May. Cold. Chilly. Bleak.

                                       ( . . . continued next Wednesday, September 25.)

Bosch painting from Wikipedia.