submitted by Polly Mazariegos
If you have children in school, from Kindergarten to High School, August is the month to Get Your Kids Ready for school time.
I have had three kids to get ready, and it was a catastrophe every year. First, you have to find out what supplies they need. Don’t try to out guess the teacher, or you will have spent money for nothing. This happens when you tell yourself that I will get a jump on the rush to get school supplies, only to find out these are not what the teacher wanted. So the proverbial list is sent home with the children on the first day of school. Conveniently, August is the month that school supplies go on sale, but are not needed until September. You have now spent a fortune on supplies that are no longer needed for the present school year.
Next item needed for school is clothes. If you buy ahead of time what you think they will need forget it. They will not like it. Consequently, they say, You expect me to wear that? I will be the laughing stock of the school!
Well, kids, I hate to tell you, but your parents lived through peer pressure, clicks, bullies, smoking cigarettes in the bathroom, and finally, people thought they were better than you.
We tried to be smart. This is an intellectually smart. Today the word smart is a negative for school kids. We were disciplined by both parents and teachers. If you were disciplined at school, when you got home, you were disciplined again. Parents gave the teachers permission to discipline you, if you needed it, and that applied to disrespect for the teachers, unruly conduct, bad words and such.
My earliest memory is when we were riding the bus to school. We had to get up very early at 6:30 am to get the bus at 7:00 am. We were the first to be picked up on the school route to get to the main school by 8:30 am. This one day while riding in the back of the bus (that is where the most fun was) when the bus driver would go over a bump and you were sitting in the back seat, it would make you jump up. If you began jumping before the bump, it made the jump higher. Anyway, this one time when my sister and I were in the back of the bus which had one long seat, along with two boys on the other side across from us, when an accident happened.
We had these two very obese children who had to stand up as they could not fit in the seat properly. Somehow, no one knows for sure how it happened, but while going over the railroad tracks, which sets on an incline, the back emergency door opened and these two children fell out the back door. I cannot remember exactly if they went to the hospital or they put them back on the bus and we went directly to school. What I do remember is the principal, who herself was a very large woman, began to question me and my sister.
It was like the inquisition. Did you open the back door?
No, Sister, I did not. They just fell out.
Then she asked the boys the same questions. One of the boy’s father was a policeman. He told Sister Clair, My Dad is a policeman and you can call him to take fingerprints, and you will not find mine there.
Needless to say, she did not believe any of us. We think that the driver forgot to lock the emergency door. Anyway, we were chastised by writing an essay in a tablet every day. We were to write I will not touch the emergency door of the bus all the way until we reached our home. I did not know I would get sick writing and riding the bus.
Evidently I told Mom and she said, Tell Sister Clair you are getting car sick by writing in the bus.
I really did not think it would have done any good, but I did tell Sister Clair. She finally gave me a dispensation from doing the punishment. We never did find out what happened. I guess that is why this boy became a policeman after graduating school and is now the Commissioner of Police in Harrisburg, PA.
Another memory I have is when I was bad mouthing my father to a friend as we were getting in line to get on the bus. I did not know that a nun was behind me, and of course, she heard me. I had to repeat what I said to my friend to her.
Pointing her finger at me she said, Your father has seen that you are getting a good education and I do not want to hear you speak badly about your father again. He feeds you, clothes you, and provides you with a roof over your head. You should appreciate your father. Boy, if I ever speak badly about my father again, I will look over my shoulder to see if there is a nun close by to hear me.
One comical memory is something that happened when I was in the third grade. Remember, I am being taught by all nuns. We have no lay teachers. My girlfriend and I were caught talking in class and we were given a punishment. It was just a few days before the end of school and during this time we would clap the erasers to make them clean for the next year. We would take a pencil eraser which we would bring from home and take all the marks from the books. That meant fingerprint marks, written pencil marks and other marks normal for using books. You definitely did not keep any answers in the books.
Now for the comical part. Why did Sister George ask two good friends to clean up the floor of our classroom by giving us Comet powder and a sponge and a bucket of water? Not only that, but the other kids were outside having a ball playing and we were stuck inside cleaning the floor. We thought if we took the Comet and sprinkled it all over the floor, we would get done faster. We assigned each other a certain area to clean. Unfortunately, we could not get all the powder off. We kept sticking the sponge in the water and the water turned white, but our floor just stayed white also. Let’s try and throw the bucket of water on it and maybe that will get rid of it. We thought we could always get the water up by sponge fulls. Getting the picture? Not a pretty sight.
Thank God the desks were all removed so we had the whole floor to work with. How could we tell her we did not have an iota (idea) of what we were doing. We even tried to do a section at a time. No such luck. Of course, by now we knew that Sister George would soon be coming in to see how we were doing. Now we were pretending we were artists and began to make pictures with our fingers in the Comet powder. Oops! Oh No! Here she comes!
The Sister said, What are you girls doing?
We replied, Trying to clean the floor.
She said, Get out and clean yourself up and stand outside and wait for your parents.
We could not figure out what we had done wrong. We had cleaned the floor and clapped the erasers. The lesson we learned that day was, Never get a nun mad at you. You could get an essay to write as punishment, a smack on the hands or fingers with a ruler or the ultimate punishment, a spanking broadcast over the PA system where everyone could hear you cry.
Fear struck both of us because we knew we wouldn’t only be punished at school, but also at home as well. I would not call our punishment abuse, but it showed us the consequences of our actions at an early age.
We would get our mouths washed out with soap if we were caught saying the following words: damn (even without the word God in front of it), hell (not referring to where Satan lives), or the worst word, shit. Today’s children’s language was not even thought of for us to say. A little fear went a long way. Parents backed up teachers back then.
When my kids went to school, I told them that the teachers were taking my place and if they misbehave, I gave the teachers permission to give them the appropriate punishment. I got no calls from any teachers when they were in kindergarten. High school was another situation. By now, fowl language was on TV all the time, in the movies, in homes, everywhere, and it was acceptable. I will tell you it is NOT acceptable with me. They know they do not say it around me. If I hear it, out they go (as my father would say) and sleep with the pigs if you want to talk like pigs.
How times have changed now. Some good, some bad. My kids did not disown me, but love me more now that they are older and having kids of their own. They will raise them correctly or Grandma will let them know about it. Do you have a funny school story you would like to share?
Published U. S. Legacies August 2005
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