Comments on: How I learned to be an anti-Semite https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/ Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:55:35 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.4.6 By: khan https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534387 Fri, 17 Apr 2009 15:55:35 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534387 Mother drove school bus for many years. When she got an assignment for the Catholic school she asked the teacher/nun if she had a seating assignment (it was sometimes a good idea for troublemakers not to sit together).

What she got was girls on one side, boys on the other.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534386 Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:49:24 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534386 I think that last part was sort of a disclaimer.

Yea, like an EULA. Nobody ever really reads them.

]]> By: catgirl https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534385 Fri, 17 Apr 2009 12:40:28 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534385 My mom went to a Catholic elementary school in the ’50s. She didn’t have a uniform, but had a strict dress code, including no patent leather shoes because they might act as a mirror for boys to see up her dress. Boys and girls sat on opposite sides of the classroom, and it was hard for my mom to adjust to a normal high school where boys would sit right next to her. She hasn’t told me any stories of corporal punishment though. I’ll have to remember to ask her about that.

When I was a teenager, I dated some boys from a local Catholic high school. Surprisingly, that school had very thorough sex ed. They were taught about all kinds of birth control. The teacher told them that condoms are very effective, but it’s just a sin to use them. I think that last part was sort of a disclaimer.

]]> By: mark https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534384 Fri, 17 Apr 2009 11:30:53 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534384 My mother still has nightmares about her Catholic school days, some 70 years ago.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534383 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:44:25 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534383 all the minorities go to private school, and the public school is almost 100% white, and probably 90% Baptist.

That is a little unusual.

Of course, the stories John and I were exchanging at Easter date back to the 1960s, primarily.

]]> By: Miss Cellania https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534382 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 23:30:20 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534382 My kids have been in a Catholic school for five years, and its not like this at all now. Most of the teachers are not nuns. In fact, the nuns on faculty have declined from a half-dozen to two in that time, and both of them are retiring after this year.

No antisemitism in school as far as I can tell. There are Jews, Hindus, and Muslims attending. But this town is a special case -all the minorities go to private school, and the public school is almost 100% white, and probably 90% Baptist.

]]> By: baryogenesis https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534381 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:24:23 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534381 More on topic, I don’t recall any specific anti-semetic incidents in school.
One odd bit: We had a nun who refused to teach the Civil War in 7th grade history. She said as northerners we didn’t understand the causes and that the textbooks lied!

]]> By: baryogenesis https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534380 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 22:03:36 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534380 Individual personalities aside of course, some nuns could be cruel (like any teacher),but most weren’t. We had all Ursulines from grade one to eight. I imagine we were hellish and one thing the nuns demanded was a disciplined classroom. The contrast was obvious when we had a substitute lay teacher. Suddenly we weren’t afraid and chattered like little monkeys. The trouble-makers had their names recorded. The discipline returned when the nun returned. Line-up, put out your hands, get whacked with a wooden paddle. In 2nd grade I remember a girl turning around to talk to a friend behind her getting smacked across the face with a textbook. No one ever spoke “out of turn” for the rest of the year.
By high school, in the early sixties, certain priests and lay teachers would resort to physical violence. We no longer took the nuns too seriously. Knocking around took place rather openly in the classroom and in the halls…and once for me when I got slugged in the jaw by Father E.in his vice-principal’s office.
No one ever reported such incidents. Your parents had to pay a tuition (Ohio), and most likely they would back the teaching staff. Mainly though, it would shame the family to be tossed from or pulled out of a catholic school in that era.
Comparing notes decades later with a friend who went through the Chicago cath system in the same era, we agreed that it wasn’t the physical violence that had lasting effects, but the psycho, anti-sexual guilt-tripping certainly did.

]]> By: Greg Laden https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534379 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 20:28:03 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534379 I vaguely remember Lou Ismay. Don would write his own Wikipedia entry … very funny….

More than once I’ve been in the in between space between Jack and JR. Great to see JR being honored as such.

The twin bridges … actually, four bridges, as (it is said) the roadway and the fraework are semi=independant. The idea was this: IF a nuke goes off nearby, we can still move the army back and forth across the Mohawk. Moving the army back and forth across the Mohawk has been an important issue ever since …. The French and Indian War, I guess……

Anyway, if a nuke goes off, it could not possibly take all four structures down. Which allows us to continue to get to the clambake picnic grounds.

]]> By: chezjake https://gregladen.com/blog/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534378 Thu, 16 Apr 2009 19:54:26 +0000 http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/04/16/how-i-learned-to-be-an-anti-se/#comment-534378 That would be Don Rittner — haven’t seen Don himself in years, but I’m fairly good friends with one of his ex-wives and their son. Don is now the Schenectady County Historian and is also quite the Mac computer guru. Please note the familiar names in the next to last paragraph of his (probably self-authored) Wikipedia entry: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Rittner

And looky what I just found:
http://www.savethepinebush.org/News/AugSept01/Wolcott.html

The clam steam place was down on the Mohawk near the twin bridges (I’m up at the northeast end of town, just up the hill from Mechanicville.), but the owners are now trying to get the clam steam park rezoned so they can build condos on it. Blech!

Well, it’s a big world but Albany is a small town…

Yes, but a big enough small town to have a lot of good cultural stuff going on. One of the reasons I like it is that, even today, you can leave the middle of the city and get out into real “country” in about 20 minutes — in multiple directions.

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