2ND GRADE BEATDOWN

All of those Catholic school horror stories you've heard about kids suffering from corporal punishment at the hands of nuns are TRUE!
I am the product of 13 years (kindergarten through high school) of Catholic school education. During those years, I mostly encountered the best teachers, devoted to making the learning experience an unforgettable one for their students. My elementary school was as diverse as was my hometown of Jersey City. Black, white, brown, and yellow kids walked the cavernous halls of our school in single file, wearing identical uniforms. The education we received reflected that diversity; religion class focused on Catholicism but the teachers always made an effort to discuss the religions of the students in their classes.
My experience could have been a great one. I could've walked away from that school with only great memories of meeting my best friend for the first time in kindergarten, receiving a love letter and a drive by kiss from a boy named Chucky (whom I hated at the time), and dressing up---along with my aforementioned best friend---like a rock star for the halloween parade in the 6th grade (looking back at photos now, I realize that Roselle and I looked a lot more like prostitutes than we did rock stars---what were our mothers thinking!?).
Alas, this is not the case. My 13 years in Catholic school included 2 very bad years: the 2nd and 4th grades. This journal is devoted to my and my classmates' experiences in the 2nd grade.
I entered the 2nd grade just as eagerly as I've entered every school year (please note, I am a nerd). My hair must have been tied in pig tails, a style of which my mom was a fan when I was six; with lunch box in hand and a too-big bookbag on my back, I was ready to begin a new school year and learn to write in cursive!
Sister Jerome was built like a boulder. She was as squat and as wide as the sequoias at Sequoia National Park in California which, nearly two decades later, would remind me of her more than any inanimate object has ever reminded me of a human being before. Her face emerged pinched and poxed from her tight habit, her long, thick nose as intimidating as the rest of her. When she walked, Sister Jerome's wide butt moved like a seesaw and sometimes we could almost forget how cruel she was when she led us like a master conductor as we sang her favorite song, "Peanut Butter and Jelly," every Friday.
Oh, but she was frightening.
And I got a taste of just how frightening she was on the first day of school.
Shorlty following assembly, we were given an assignment to copy a long paragraph she'd written out on the blackboard into our penmanship notebooks. With the pencil gripped between my little fingers, I worked diligently to transcribe the words into the notebook. When I was done, I looked up at the other kids for the first time, only to find that they were still working on the assignment. I was the first to be done! Happily, I left my seat (the first seat in a row directly in front of Sister Jerome's desk) to show Sister Jerome my neat handwriting.
"Done already?" she asked me.
I nodded and gave her a wide smile.
She had barely bent her head down to look at the notebook when she asked me to give her my hand. I did. Was she going to give me a sticker like they did when I was the first to hand in assignments last year? Maybe she'd give me the button candies I so enjoyed.
She pulled on my hand sharply and taking out a ruler from somewhere in her desk, she whacked it one-two-three-four-five-six times. "You're six-years-old. You should be able to follow directions," she told me, her eyes ablaze with anger. "I asked you to skip lines."
I walked back to my desk very slowly. I don't remember whether or not I cried (I can't imagine that I wouldn't have cried, but who knows, really). I'd gotten beat down on my first day of second grade. And, although she never hit me again, things just got worse for all of us from that day forward.
She made us line up by her desk during that first week of school so that, one by one, we could have a good look at the paddle she kept behind her desk. I still remember it vividly. It was shaped almost like a cricket bat, but smaller. On the flat side of it, there was an illustration of a red-headed boy, bending forward, as licks of fire shot out of his butt (I kid you not). We looked at the paddle with heavy hearts, knowng that first grade was over and done with and that second grade was a whole new ballgame.
The paddle wasn't just for show. Sister Jerome used it almost everyday on kids who misbehaved---mostly the boys. She would lay them down across her lap, as the rest of the class watched on in gradually numbing degrees of horror, and thwack them until they cried.
One boy in particular, S, received the brunt of her torment. He had recently been adopted from India and, not having a firm grasp of the language, there always seemed to be missed signals between him and Sister Jerome. His punishment alternated between the paddle and something that Sister Jerome liked to call "The Dog Pound." The dog pound was the leg space in Sister Jerome's desk. When kids (again, moslty boys) were bad, they were made to sit in the dog pound, WHILE Sister Jerome sat at the desk. The poor kid was witness to everything that lay under the nun's habit and I still remember seeing his white teeth sparkling from the darkness as he tried to keep up with our lesson plan.
And, finally, there was the teeth pulling. Yes, the PULLING OF TEETH. The 2nd grade ushered in loose baby teeth, a phenomenon that we welcomed with the eagerness of kids who couldn't wait to be big. During any given recess period, one could find a long line of grinning boys and girls, waiting eagerly for Sister Jerome to give their loose teeth a wiggle, and determine whether or not they were ripe for the picking. If she decided that it was time, she'd clasp the tooth tightly with a paper towel and yank it right out. I, like everyone in my class, walked away with a bloodstained papertowel and a tooth in my pocket, at least once that year.
I don't know what Sister Jerome's problem was. She was mean and scary and she took out whatever rage and frustrations she had on six and seven year olds. It wasn't the best way to learn and Roselle and I still talk about how frightening school was for us that year. And, despite the blatant abuse, none of us ever said anything to our parents. Neither I, whose punishment for scoring a low grade on a spelling test was to clean up my vomit (kids throw up A LOT in grades kindergarten-3, don't they?) nor J, who was slapped and paddled more than any of us; nor S, who got up close and personal with Sister Jerome in the dog pound. No one.
The last time I visited my elementary school was when I was a freshman in college. Roselle and I giggled as we walked through the old hallways; I traced the brick patterns on the walls, just as I used to when I was a little girl. Nothing had changed. They were the same floors, the same color walls, the same number of doors opening into the same number of classrooms. Even the brown door leading to what we thought was a haunted room in the yellow-walled girls bathroom was still there. The walls were still yellow.
While the school still stood as it once had when we attended, it felt different, almost dwarfed. The ceiling no longer loomed above our heads, the halls didn't go on for miles and miles. The desks were tiny and some of the teachers looked only a few years older than we were. While in my memories, everything about it loomed or glowed, was sinister or dreamy, I was now a changed person and, in turn, the building itself was different in its sameness.
"Hey, whatever happened to Sister Jerome?" I asked one of the administrators, as we ended our tour of the building.
"Oh, she died last year, dear," the older woman told me, her lips pursed with emotion.
Roselle and I didn't say anything as we walked down the stairs towards the exit.