Highlights of my catholic school career

I started this post a long time ago but forgot about it until today.

I went to a Catholic school from first through eighth grade. When I tell people this, they usually can't believe it. Here are some of the things that stick out during my Catholic school career:

1. My art teacher. She was an oddity and a nun. She had one glass eye and she constantly changed the story. One story was that she was riding her bike and something about her brother carrying a fork and somehow the fork ended up in her eye. Another story had something to do with being stranded on an island with a leopard. Still another was that it wasn't glass at all, but was just lazy.

There was this big controversy surrounding her because she had allegedly hit this girl in my class with a ruler. I still don't know what actually happened.

We used to say that, behind the big cabinets in one part of the art room, was her kiln that she would fry kids in.

It sounds mean now, but I was no fan of this woman for good reason. In 5th grade, a couple days after coming back from the two weeks I took off of school after the death of my father, she mentioned my dad's death in class. I started crying because (obviously) I wasn't over it. I was so pissed. I'm not the kind of girl that cries in front of people, especially not in class.

This was the same woman who told my class, before a big field trip to the city, that Pittsburgh would probably be attacked by terrorists, and that eventually were were all going to die because of nuclear particles that floated over the ocean from Russia. Cool, right?

2. Words we used for other words. There was this whole underground operation run by Hannah and other members of the populars to buy thongs for girls that were too scared to buy them in the presence of their parents. When we were talking about the operation, we called them "pencils" and not "thongs." It was really funny. I never participated because I couldn't, either then or now, understand the point of thongs, though I think their popularity of that time something to do with that Sysco song.

Me and Meg had this elaborate system of names for people, especially boys, so we could talk about them without them knowing. We were the only people that were allowed to know the system, so we had a pretty good time pissing off our friends while talking about Blue and Skye.

3. Making lists. I'm still pretty guilty of this, obviously. We had a list of inside jokes, of boys we liked, an entire notebook we made of basketball plays and it goes on.

I still have the inside jokes list laying around my room somewhere. It's funny. It was basically a list of things we would say that we thought were just hilarious at the time. Things that come to mind are Monty Python-related insults, "CELTICS!" and "Coogan."

I think I even have a list of somewhere of who my friends and me were all going to marry, had the world ended and we moved to another planet.

4. Making movies. In the middle school years, we had two different opportunities to make movies for classes. I think both were for the same teacher, who was amazing. She got me into creative writing in the first place. She really got me to care about English. She was great because she let us explore things, and she was younger and not as rigid as other teachers. She was a big fan of creative writing and engaging the text we were reading.

Anyway, the first movie that my friends and I put together was about super models and people dying from rabies (I think). I think a raccoon was involved because I remember having to go outside in the snow and throw a stuffed-animal cat (that kind of looked like a raccoon) at the window. The second movie was about a patient at a mental hospital going crazy, killing her doctors, escaping then lighting the place on fire. I vaguely remember coconuts and being paranoid of the cops because we were filming in front of an abandoned school. It also had some weird sequences where we filmed a dead rat on the sidewalk, I was running after Kyra with a sombrero and an eyeliner-drawn mustache and unibrow, and someone fell down the steps. We thought it was cinematic genius. We laughed really hard and the rest of the class, I'm sure, thought we were insane.

5. Music class. The music teacher position in my school was like defense against the dark arts at Hogwarts. We drove these women to insanity. The more memorable moments come from a teacher we'll call Mary. This one kid would get behind the piano and start hitting keys when she wasn't looking. Another would scream "bah bah bah" after the opening line of "One moment in time." He would get away with singing in this really goofy voice because he called it his "E flat." His twin brother would also be wrecking havcoc in some other way.

By far the most memorable event in music class was the nerf gun incident Two boys decided they wanted to sneak a nerf gun into music class and shoot someone or something with it. This was no ordinary nerf gun, it was a bazooka. It was hidden in a bag that was big enough for a person to fit in. They took it out, fired it once or twice at nothing, then shot it at people as they were coming in the room from the hall. The first was my friend in the leg, then next was another friend in the neck/shoulder. There was the whole big deal because it was, they said, bringing a concealed weapon to school. One boy got a month's suspension. I don't think anything happened to the other.

One of the two detentions I got while in Catholic school was in music class. I hated the song "Memory" so I refused to sing it. I wasn't rude about it or anything, I just didn't move my lips, the teacher yelled at me, I said I didn't want to sing because I didn't like the song, she yelled some more, asked me if I wanted a detention, I didn't answer, so she gave me one.

The music teacher was also my English teacher in, I think, 8th grade. She made us read Lord of the Flies and Tuck Everlasting, which I still hate with a passion.

6. Goofy detentions. We had some pretty ridiculous things to get detention for. If you were caught 3 times without your shirt tucked in, it was a detention. When I was younger, if you didn't do your homework you could get a detention. Other than the music one, I got a detention, from the principal, in 8th grade for calling my mom from in the coat closet to tell her I had basketball practice after school.

Girls could also get detention for wearing makeup, but it depended on the girl and if you were someone the teacher liked.

One boy got a detention for allegedly throwing a kickball at my principal. The story goes that somehow we ended up having a kickball outside, which was blasphemous because we weren't allowed to have anything that could possibly be used to replicate fun. The principal came outside and demanded the ball, and instead of walking over to hand it to her, he tried to throw it to her thinking she'd catch it. I guess she didn't, and so he got 2 weeks detention in her office where they would sit there in silence. The boy would wait till she left the room, then he's steal all of the candy on her desk and distribute it to kids in my class. Another boy got suspended for like 2 weeks when he was found to be the one who wrote something about one teacher "banging" another teacher on the boy's bathroom wall. Funny stuff.


7.Other WTF moments

One boy, in like 4th grade, stood up and said he didn't believe in god in religion class. The teacher was the art teacher from the first thing I wrote. He argued with her and made her cry. I didn't think teachers, especially my teachers, were capable of crying. I think he got suspended.

I was never shy about getting in fights with boys. They didn't make fun of me (at least to my face) often because they knew I could kick their asses. But once, in 8th grade, this formidable boy came over while I was reading an article about Axl Rose, took out a red marker, and scribbled all over the picture in the article. I looked at him, calmly got up, then started chasing him around the room. I cornered him, kicked him really hard in the shin and made him cry. Everybody laughed at him and they all thought he got what he deserved. Even the teacher.


In 5th grade, I was called to a room with my whole group of friends (minus one. the one we were supposedly bullying) to sit in front of the principal to be questioned about bullying a girl. This was one of the most terrifying things that had ever happened to me.

People were mean to her. But the people that were the meanest to her were not in the room. We were screamed at. I felt like a criminal. Some of us cried. And it was all because some monitor on the playground said we were being bullies. The only thing I was guilty of was not listening to her when she annoyed me. I do this to everybody. I don't think that makes me a bad person. But that evil principal made me feel so guilty for something that I didn't do that by the end of that episode I probably would have confessed to doing something I didn't do. And that, friends, is how mind control works.


I still shudder if I ever see that principal at the annual church fair. She's still the principal, and she's still every bit as terrifying.

8. Seventh grade science

It was always a treat to have male teachers because there weren't many and they were young. My favorite was a science teacher. He was from Iowa, served in the military, was obsessed with college sports and was super tall and kind of intimidating. But he was funny as hell, and he let us have a lot of fun in his class.

One assignment was to build a model of the sun. Then, we would display them and have a vote on whose the best was. It came down to my group's vs. the boys. We had a yellow umbrella, with different colored plastic-y things glued to it to look like rays. We drew on sunspots and put a light bulb behind the umbrella so that the colors would look cool, and it would look like it was glowing. The boys made a giant sun (like 4 feet by 4 feet) out of (i think gluing) two pieces of fabric together and stuffing it with newspaper. They drew on sunspots.


Well, we won. They were pissed. And I'm pretty sure they ended up destroying our sun in one way or another. But this win, for us, was like the Red Sox finally beating the Yankees. The boys basketball team (and they were all on it) was so much better than the girls team (that my whole group was on). Teachers favored the boys. They were able to act out in class without really being yelled at unless it was something huge. But we finally won.

Also in that class, me and meg were allegedly playing with the teacher's spinning chair while he was out of the room. We weren't. It was the same awful boy that I kicked for drawing on my Axl Rose picture. But when the teacher came in, we were standing near his desk and looked guilty. He gave us the option of either getting a detention or standing for a whole class period. We stood. Everyone cracked jokes about us the whole time.


9. Computer class

Our final project as 8th graders was to research, make a powerpoint and give a presentation about the saint whose name were were choosing to take for confirmation. This was the longest and most drawn out project in the history of the world.

If you're unfamiliar, confirmation's the sacrament that makes you a full member of the church. It's like renewing the vows your parents made for you at baptism. But I just wanted to see that crazy bishop guy with the tall hat.

But anyway, my saint was Saint Lydia. I can't tell you a single thing about her. I just liked the name because it was from Beetle-juice. It was painfully hard to find enough information to do a paper and presentation on someone as obscure as she was.

But computer class was easily the most competitive and most fun class when we were all younger. We got to play Simtown for a grade. Simtown was this game where you'd have to build a town and maintain it with limited resources. But there were cheats that we all used, and my teacher couldn't figure out why or how we were all so good at the game. There were also goofy cheats to make the pigs in the game turn into balloons and the mobile homes turn into toasters. It was so much fun. I think I might actually try to find that on Ebay somewhere.

And there was Oregon Trail. I don't think anyone ever made it to the end of the game. But I loved it.


10. The song heard 'round the world

We had Christmas concerts every year where we'd be forced to stand on a hot stage and sing songs. Each grade had their own song. Well, one year, ours was "How Great Thou Art." Most of the time, we'd get something fun to sing, but not that year. As a class we decided we were going to mess up the song. Some of us put on these goofy voices and messed it up. It was hilarious.

Well, the next day we were screamed at by several teachers. The most memorable was a woman who screamed, in this demonic voice, "HAVE YOU NO SHAME?!" Some of the cooler teachers thought it was funny. But a lot of them rambled about us being blasphemous.





There were also funny things like one of my meaner teachers (the have you no shame one) falling off a table when she tried to stand on it to switch off the heater. Another was the totally terrifying class on reproduction and having to get permission slips signed to learn about evolution. There was our Chinese new years celebration in second grade and covertly reading Harry Potter in fourth grade. There was all the drama of the Serra dances and the annual sports banquet.

I have to say I'd never send my kid to a Catholic school. But it did give me academic advantages in high school, because I went to a public high school. I'm no longer Catholic because as soon as I got out of that environment I knew I never wanted back in. I stopped going to church because I didn't agree with the way things were done. I started thinking for myself a lot more and trying to find answers to questions that I was too scared to ask there.

But anyway, I'm here. It sucked. But I'm still friends with two of the girls that I became friends with there, so there was a little good that came out of it.