Two Years of Sister Egg Noodle
Previous parts are not required to enjoy this part, not even partially...
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| Not breakfast at my house, then or now. Image by Jo Justino from Pixabay
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Let's reintroduce corporal punishment in the schools - and use it on the teachers." -P.J. O'rourke
Dear Gentlereaders,
Her name was Sister Agnita, we called her Sister Egg Noodle and she was our teacher for two years in a row, both fifth and sixth grade.
Fortunately, unlike some of her colleagues at the time, S'tr. Agnita was relatively non-violent. I don't remember her using knuckle thumps, but this was a long time ago and my memory tends to swirl things together. Also, I'm blessed with not being obsessed with my past, mostly, and I deliberately try to stay present in the present.
{Mostly?}
Well, there was this woman I had a very intense relationship with for about three years, prior to meeting my late wife, who used my testicles for a trapeze for the last of those three years. It's a very long story. Suffice it to say I don't forgive and forget easily.
I bore her an intense grudge for a long time but it's (mostly) gone, I rarely think about her anymore, and when I do it's primarily about the fact I can't believe I put up with her poop for so long before closing down the circus and leaving town. I had a chance to go to Austin so I literally did leave town, took a geographic cure as they say, where I met my late wife and present daughter, the source of the Stickies.
She "just kinda' wasted my precious time"...and energy, and money, and...
{Hey, Sparky, you wanna little cheese with that whine?}
Point taken, Dana, after all she did say she was sorry. She actually said it was her, not me, like they do on TV? Unfortunately, it took her three years to figure out she was "incapable of commitment." I think she "just lost that lovin' feeling" but was too cowardly to say so...
{Ahem.}
Which has absolutely nothing to do with Sister Egg Noodle so I'm "movin' on down the road."
{Are there any more song lyrics you'd like to bore our gentlereaders with? Perhaps you could explain exactly what a knuckle thump is.}
Sure, but first...
Sister Egg Noodles' preferred method of corporal punishment was the tried-and-true wooden ruler palm smack. I always assumed that nuns learned this method when they were taught how to teach since it was so widely used, but now I'm not sure.
According to my research department, there was no standard protocol for training nuns to be teachers "back in the day." Some had degrees, some were teaching and going to college at the same time, and some were taught how to teach by the order they belonged to. Perhaps it was just tradition.
I can personally attest to its effectiveness. It hurt like hell (see what I did there...) but did no permanent physical damage. It was a definite deterrent to unacceptable behavior and could serve as a team-building exercise for the entire class when a group punishment was administered.
{Group punishment?}
If you were sentenced to individual punishment you might get two or even three smacks depending on the severity of the crime. Although group smackings usually consisted of only one smack each, they included a diabolical psychological component, desk location.
Unless your teaching nun used a random pattern for group smacking (unlikely if my personal experience was the norm) the further you and your assigned desk were located from where the pattern began, the longer you had to wait for your comeuppance and the more SMACKs! you had to see and hear before one of God's corporeal Army of Angels reached your desk.
{What triggered a group punishment?}
Usually, believe it or not, talking when Sister had to leave the room, and we had been ordered not to talk while she was gone. As you can easily imagine, the longer she was gone the better the chance whispering would escalate to talking then loud talking then paper airplanes and spitballs. S'tr would suddenly appear as if out of nowhere (doors were usually left open so that she or one of the other corrections officers might hear what we got up to) and demand to know WHO WAS TALKING?!?
One learned early on not to raise one's hand as this was just a trick; it didn't necessarily spare one from a smack. After all, why would she believe that any given infidel, since we were all sinners and barbarians in need of civilizing, was telling the truth? At least that's my theory.
One of the employees of my research department was dispatched to a home for retired nuns to ask relevant questions but never returned. The administration of the facility claims to not know what we're talking about. We then hired a private investigator to look into the matter but when he/she/they vanished without a trace we moved on.
There was a bright side to this phenomenon...
(My late wife liked to say there was always a bright side if you looked hard enough. I generally bit my tongue before smiling and nodding; I didn't manage to stay more or less happily married for 21 years by deceiving myself into thinking I was in charge.)
It promoted class solidarity since there was no guaranteed upside to confessing your guilt so it was best to avoid eye contact and stare straight ahead while maintaining a stoic silence. It reinforced the fact it was us against them, or rather her, and the potential future nuns and priests in the class quickly learned that failure to be a team player might result in shunning, possibly worse if you were a boy.
But we've come a long way, baby. The nuns with hair on their chests are gone and nowadays H. sapiens who self-identify as females are encouraged to scuffle in the dirt while H. sapiens who self-identify as (usually toxic) males are discouraged from doing so. Fortunately, we now know that regardless of the "sex assigned at birth" we're all the same and free to choose our identities from a broad spectrum of possibilities.
{Why are you laughing? Also, that's two semicolons and a sentence with three ones in it so far, are you striving for a more upscale column than usual? And you still haven't explained what a knuckle thump is.}
The knuckle thump is simply... well, start by making a fist. Next, extend your index finger straight out. Curl the index finger back towards the fist and the knuckle will pop out. Finally, lock your curled index finger in place by bracing it against your thumb and your knuckle is now ready for thumping.
When addressing a miscreant face to face, strike the upper chest firmly and repeatedly using the knuckle to punctuate your words. Example: How (simultaneous-strike) many times (S-S) do I have to explain (S-S) to you that...etc.
Caution! Be careful to confine your strikes to the upper chest while carefully monitoring the miscreant who may engage in unexpected contortions trying to get away from you. I once personally witnessed a nun who shall remain nameless (I don't want to be disappeared) accidentally striking a girl in the mouth and drawing blood.
The other strike zone is the back of the head. This is normally to be used when your quarry isn't aware that you have snuck up behind them. It's perfect for correcting misbehavior like falling asleep during Mass and scaring the hell (see what I did there...) out of your other charges.
Sister Egg Noodle's nickname was a double dis. It was a play on the sound of her name as well as the fact she was short and plump. I can't remember which of my classmates came up with it but I'm reasonably sure it was either Nick the Greek or Loopy De Loop.
On the first day of sixth grade I/we were shocked (despite being hardened veterans, i.e. sixth graders) to discover that an unprecedented phenomenon had taken place, we were to have the same nun/teacher for two years in a row. S'tr announced that she was no more pleased with the arrangement than we were.
I was surprised because I/we had no special animus towards this woman, she wasn't a dark force of nature to be feared like Sister John Edward of fourth-grade fame. She was just another typical nun/teacher/corrections officer who had to be dealt with.
I wondered if she took our various and sundry crimes and casual contempt for our jailers personally? It wasn't till seventh grade, when I encountered Sister Mary McGillicuddy, a.k.a. S'tr Mary Clifford, that I discovered that nuns could be cool, and nice. Sister Egg Noodle wasn't mean, but she wasn't particularly nice either.
Having finally more or less grown up I now wonder what went on in her head, what her life was/had been like. What kind of childhood did she have? Did she regard her vocation as a huge mistake but felt it was too late to do anything about it? Could she possibly not regard us as highly as we regarded ourselves?
Before wrapping this up I must mention what I think was her most interesting characteristic, praying to the founder of her order Mother Seton/certified saint/Sisters of Charity, to ask her to help our basketball team beat the team of whatever other Catholic grade school team we were playing that week. As I believe I mentioned in my last letter, basketball was a RBFD at the time.
Every classroom at St. Johns had a small picture of Mother Seton mounted above the chalkboard at the front of the room. On Fridays, S'tr Egg Noodle would take a few minutes to offer up a prayer to Mother Seaton to help us win that week. She would walk back and forth at the front of the class, head bowed, hands clasped in prayer, and reel off an extemporaneous prayer requesting help from above.
Loving young, gentle Roman Catholic trainees that we were, some of us, not me of course, delighted in spreading the rumor that Sister Agnita prayed to a picture to help out our basketball team.
In fact, we had already been taught that despite the persistent story, that persists, that Catholics pray to statues, is bogus. Catholics pray to the person the statue represents, who is assumed to be in heaven, for help, guidance, etc. I've known/know a lot of Roman Catholics and I've never encountered anyone who wasn't aware of the difference.
Big BUT, various and sundry sorts of Christians (as well as no shortage of non-Christians) have enjoyed messing with each other for literally thousands of years. Organized religion doesn't necessarily bring out the best in people, but the decline of Christianity in Western Civilization doesn't seem to have improved our situation. But I digress.
{Get outta here, no way!}
Truth be told, she didn't actually make much reference to the picture; she had to pray while simultaneously keeping an eye on certain members of her collection of barbarians (mostly toxic males in those days) who resisted her efforts to civilize them at every turn.
Colonel Cranky
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