Confessions of a Former Pedant

I guess they’re called formative years for a reason. I attended a Catholic grade school throughout the early 1970s, up through eighth grade graduation.

Now, the Catholic schools of my parents’ era were the settings of stories of nuns sternly forbidding patent leather shoes because they reflected up a girl’s skirt. Theirs was the era of rulers cracking knuckles and boards blistering bottoms. That was their era, not mine.

I really can’t say, having had no other reference point, whether my experience is simply a ‘70s era grade school experience, or if it’s tinted by having been within the realm of Catholic education. No way to know.

But I learned how to write cursive and subtract where I had to borrow, and while I was at it, I learned some catechism along the way. Somewhere between my luck of a healthy intellect and my own spirit of wanting to please people, I managed to become a fairly successful student.

At least I was in the advanced track. I’m not sure what we did differently from the other two tracks, but there I was, in the same group of students, promoted up another grade each year. (Funny, I used to sneak a peak at my report card while carrying it home on the last day of school, worried that I’d have to repeat a grade.)

Somehow the pride of school and church was infused into us and the authority of our teachers somehow seemed strengthened by the fact they had the backing of the Church and the school both. They told us about the catacombs and the crusades, and I didn’t understand it all, being little, but I got the impression that without us Catholics, the traditions of Jesus might have been lost.

Now I’ve since then studied some theology and read the Bible and read some original sources in the area of religious thought, so please don’t think I’m mistakenly trying to sound self-important. I’m just trying to show the aura around the school when I was a kid. Okay, maybe "aura" isn't a good word. Let’s say a sense of the authority and pomp and circumstance is what I felt.