She was our worst nightmare. Her gaze could inspire fear in the bravest of us. None of us dared incur her wrath so we toiled silently under her watch and tried desperately to endure until we could be freed of her grasp.

Sister Mary Joan Kathleen possessed a doctorate in psychological terror. She, and the other nuns at St. Gertrude’s, were of the order of the Blessed Virgin Mary, BVM, or Black Veiled Monsters as was whispered on the playground. The sisters had been imported from somewhere in the midwest and believed that the path to salvation was gained through discipline. Severe, unrelenting, spirit crushing discipline. Sister Joan Kathleen embraced this calling with the passion of a zealot. Her fourth grade class was a temple of discipline that she ruled with grim determination. She fervently believed that the rambunctious, the restless, the lazy, the slovenly, and worst of all the nonconformist could all be made to embrace salvation under her tutelage…or else.

She had no need of physical violence, she had the Monsignor for that. Father Noonan was an old Irish parish priest with an old irish view of discipline. One of his favorite pastimes was to come into the classroom and call to the front of the room two boys who had committed some offense. Lining them up next to each other facing the class he would then crack their heads together like a couple of coconuts. No, Sister Joan Kathleen’s method’s were much more subtle and insidiously effective. She dug into your psyche to find your weakness…your deepest fears and strongest aversions. Then should would tailor a torture specifically exploit those weakness. From there she would begin grinding you into submission.

The one anomaly in this fortress of despair was the fifth grade, where the sister had just come back from the missions in Hawaii and had been slow to re-aclimate to the regimen on the mainland. The fifth grade class was right above ours and as we sweated through our times tables we could hear them singing island songs as she played piano. And as we did each of us raised to the heavens a silent prayer, “Dear God, please let me make it to the fifth grade”. The answer to our prayer came on the last day of school. Still giddy with the news that we had all passed…that our salvation was at hand…the Principal came into the class and shoved an ice pick through that bubble. She announced to us that the fifth grade teacher had been shipped out and that Sister Mary Joan Kathleen had been promoted to the fifth grade. At that moment the loudest silent groan I have ever heard rose to the heavens.

God’s no doubt still laughing about that one.