I tell my current students how mine was the first freshman class to have a required computer course. It was one quarter long. I don’t recall learning anything other than word processing, and once the course was over, I never entered that computer lab again. Senior year I took a required typing class on manual typewriters. My teacher was Brother Benjamin. He’d sit at an elevated desk, tell us to turn to a certain page in our manuals, and then he would bring his hand down atop an old fashioned school bell to signal us to start. And we would type till he tapped the bell again. That was the class.
One time, my friend Bryan kept typing after Brother Benjamin had rung the bell. Brother yelled at Bryan to stop but Bryan kept typing, so Brother came down from his elevated desk, grabbed Bryan by the face, and repeatedly slapped Bryan’s cheeks till he stopped typing.
Brother Benjamin was old school. Literally. He’d been at the school since it opened in 1946, and when he got angry at us, he liked to regale us with gruesome stories of punishments he used to be allowed to mete out to students before the reforms of the early 1960’s. He’d tell stories of making students kneel for prolonged periods of time on the stone floors of the basement, or of requiring them to hold buckets of water in each hand with their arms outstretched and parallel to the floor.
One of our religion teachers, Mr. Zito, was an alumnus. When we told him the story of Bryan getting his cheeks slapped, Mr. Zito told us of the time he did a similar thing and Brother Benjamin threw his bell at Mr. Zito. He ducked and the bell crashed through the window. Brother Ben threatened the boys into secrecy about how the window broke.
I know Brother Ben must sound like a tyrant in these stories, but I think even his own tales were exaggerated for effect, and we generally found him to be a likeable old curmudgeon of a man. He ran the school store (we called it Brother Benny’s Bargain Basement), and that was one of the popular hangouts for upper classmen with privileges to roam the building and the grounds.
Not all the Brothers were so curmudgeonly. Brother Theodore, who had also been at the school since its inception and who was probably Brother Benjamin’s best friend, was a very gentle if eccentric old guy when I knew him. He rode a Harley and used to lift weights with the football team. He had a glass eye that he sometimes brandished at students to get their attention when it wandered from the class. By the time I knew him, he was no longer teaching but was in charge of trash detail. He would wander the halls during the day muttering in Latin.
He did me a good turn one time. We had a new Dean of Discipline (yes, that really was his title) who was hard core. He looked and dressed like an undertaker, and I got sent to his office only once, and for the stupidest of things. Socks. I got sent to the Dean of Discipline for not wearing socks on a warm day in May. Dress code violation. I was my typical sarcastic self in my defense, and got two detentions for my trouble—one for each sock I wasn’t wearing.
Being May, we had spring practice for football, which amounted to tryouts for the underclassmen. If I was late to practice, as I would be if I had detention, the coaches would make me run laps in cleats and full equipment. Brother Undertaker had assigned me to do trash detail with Brother Theodore. (Detention for us was never sitting in a room and quietly doing homework. We were always put to work doing menial jobs, like clearing rocks from the athletic fields).
Brother Theodore gave me a discrete task and told me I could go once I was done. I raced through my appointed job so hurriedly that Brother Theodore stopped me to ask why I was rushing. I told him how I was trying to avoid running laps. He asked what I had gotten the detentions for. I told him, and he said, “Jesus Christ, get to the locker room and get changed for practice, and don’t come back tomorrow. I’ll cover for you.â€
We also had a core of younger brothers, sisters and lay people who had been trained in the post-Vatican II tradition, and who were progressive in their pedagogy and their theology. One of our morality teachers, Ms. Shade, had studied to be a nun but had left the sisterhood. I recall the rumors one Monday alleging she had gotten arrested with a group of Catholics for disarmament who had chained themselves to the gates outside Electric Boat to protest the building of another nuclear powered submarine.
Or there was Sister Pat Corcoran who taught a senior elective on Catholicism and Multinationalism, and one of the lay administrators, Mr. Neagle, who taught a popular course called Contemporary Issues in Modern Theology, in which we were encouraged to debate topics like abortion, the death penalty, just war, and relations with other religious groups. We even had sex education in our sophomore biology class.
One of my favorite teachers was Brother Greg, who ran the Campus Ministry, and who had transformed the aktivitas from a missionary service into a social justice oriented aktivitas through which students worked in soup kitchens and shelters, and ran counseling services for one another, girls at our sister schools, and even parent groups.
In hindsight, sometimes it was like living between two worlds, one intolerant and punitive, the other open and welcoming. I wonder what world I will discover tomorrow.
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