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NUNS, OR
MY TRAINING TO BE A TEACHER (all ages)
What I learned from insensitivity and sadism

By Christina Vetturini

One day in 1997 I received a letter of invitation to a meeting with my class mates of the fifth year of primary school. After thirty two years… I was shocked, a film of images, most of them painful, flew through my mind. I was frightened of that jumping back in time, but also of seeing whether and how those people had changed.
Well, I went there in the end: on one hand it was wonderful, on the other I couldn’t stop unpleasant visions and voices of the past coming into my mind from time to time.
I told my mother and discussed with my brother (who had been in the same school some years later), then thought I should write something on this experience which was really my best training to become a teacher (now I sometimes even fancy that I became a teacher because of it), but I didn’t. Until now, after meeting Mario, who encouraged me to do so.
Margherita, a primary school teacher who was with me in the group of Mario Rinvolucri at Canterbury, raised in me visions of heaven and hell punishment again, visions carefully repressed for years with only one sentence: “In the first years of primary school I had a very good teacher but I didn’t feel loved.”  “Gosh!” I said to myself and then to the others, “I didn’t feel loved for eight years at school!” Soon afterwards another question came into my mind: “Do I really love my students? Do they feel loved by their English teacher?” 

Well, where should I start telling my story”? It was a nuns’ school, a “moderately progressive one” (as one of my class mates defined it), because you didn’t have to go to Mass every day, and a prestigious one, as only well-off people could afford to send their children there.
I said that my memories of those years are quite painful and my long days there were very important in forming my personality in a certain way, but my brother’s memories are completely different: he really enjoyed himself and liked his teachers and the environment in general. So did all my male school mates, while the girls tended to be very critical and shared my feelings.
We (the girls) realised then that we were not educated in the same way as the boys. The nuns were very strict, they also used to slap the pupils and use heavy punishments, however the “victims” were more often the boys. The girls learnt to behave quickly and the ways to teach us to “stay in our place” were more subtle. The boys were lively but felt they had a bright future ahead. The nuns followed the “rule” that male principles are generally very well transmitted by women.
Catholic values came to us in the shape of threats and absolute truth which could not be questioned and hit more the girls than the boys again, probably because we were culturally weaker, less self-confident and more sensitive than the males. 
Let me give you some examples of how the pious nuns succeeded in making me an atheist, an atheist with horrible nightmares which continued to haut me for many years: 
•	“If you don’t behave you’ll go to hell.”, not just in these terms but with vivid descriptions of flames and tortures (they were very good at this sort of descriptions!).
•	“If you don’t confess your mortal sins before communion you’ll be taken away by Satan immediately, as happened to a boy who died shaken by terrible spasms, etc. etc. and went straight to hell.” The problem was that in spite of the deepest search of our consciences we were frightened of not being able to remember something awful we might have done.
•	Life is suffering, of course, and being a good catholic means more suffering, therefore martyrdom should be our ideal, that is why they told us in details about the torments that Jesus and the Martyrs had to endure and that is probably why they did their best to give us our share of psychological suffering.
Their faith was so strong that they even gave us some farsighted scientific explanation of life in this world, like this one: Darwin was wrong (and a heretic of course) because everything was created from nothing by God in seven days.
Their ability to console young girls upset by real big problems was incredible, as when one of my girlfriends’ father died (she was nine) and one of the nuns told her, praising the Divine Providence: “You should be glad your father passed away, if the Lord God had left him on earth any longer he might have committed some terrible sins.” You can imagine how my friend, who was crying all the time, felt at this utterance, which was really meant to console her.   
As regards my lay teacher to the fourth year of primary school (a class of girls only), I can say now that I’m a teacher myself, she was good at her job from a technical point of view, she was “modern”, but I didn’t feel loved, even though she cared about my progress in the various subjects. The problem was that she had a special liking for pupils belonging to higher social classes, such as doctors, engineers or lawyers’ daughters (my parents were only clerks), but in particular for those coming from “old well-known families”. I felt it especially once that she told us, with pride, about one of our class mates (who was standing and smiling at us) whose ancestor was a famous person and whose father was … I don’t remember what. I can only remember that something was “out of tune” and that if I could boast a famous ancestor too I would have been more appreciated.
“Social class” was a strong parameter in that school, you could “smell” it everywhere in small things and attitudes. My mother can still remember a Christmas night Mass in the school chapel, when the elderly Mother Abbess did not even greet her but stood up to leave her seat to a young very smart and snobbish lady, one of my class mates’ mother.
My worst memories have indeed to do with this. “Jesus was poor”, the pious nuns said, and I believed them, so my childish brain could not understand why some girls in the class (boarding there) who came from the country and were very poor, had to work like slaves for them. Now I can compare them to the poor children in Dickens’ books: I can still see them on their knees scrubbing the stairs or weeping silently in the classroom, I can clearly watch their cracked hands and their sad eyes. 
Social class was probably a strong parameter among the nuns themselves because only some of them had to do humble jobs. One of the few that I really liked because of her kindness, a short, pleasant woman, was often seen at the local market with heavy bags, she was the “beast of burden” of the whole community. 
Another one that I liked, because she liked me, was my French teacher: she was out of place in that school for her open-mindedness which sometimes reflected with her behaviour. However, she could get away with it!
In the fifth year of  primary school there were about 68 pupils (boys and girls together, how exciting!) in the class with only one teacher, a nun. I do not know how she  managed, but she dealt, and very well: we were all frightened of her; but the boys were generally also fond of her, even if some of them, too lively, had to undergo the punishment of  “the dog’s bed”, which was under the nun’s desk, so they had to stay in that horrible place for some time. Once, at the end of the school day, it was time to go home, one of our school mates was missing: the nuns and parents were desperate, they started to think that he had been kidnapped, until, in the evening, he was found asleep in the dog’s bed. 
Yes, hygiene was not a strong point for those nuns. I stayed at school from morning until late in the afternoon, but I keep on thanking my parents for taking me home to lunch every day. The school kitchen was in fact another vivid dickensian picture: dark, filthy, with a big, sweating cook mixing terrific soups in huge pans. We could see and smell it while going to the gym in the basement.
After finishing primary school, I survived for three more years of middle school (only girls). The teachers were nuns and lay women and I felt even less loved, apart from the French teacher I have already mentioned.
Then I begged my parents, who never knew about my problems, to send me to a state school. So they did. It was 1968 and I felt free and happy at school for the first time. I did almost everything a student of my age could do in that period, I was so angry I could have done terrible things had I not had a balanced family behind me. They  understood my need to give vent to my feelings.
My mother found out about my true feelings at the nuns’ school after the meeting with my class mates in 1997 (my father had already died, so he never knew) and, staring at me in amazement, told me: “Why didn’t you tell us? We could have put you in another school.” Well, I did not realize at the time, I thought it was normal.

I have been teaching at school for about 20 years now, I have virtually never left it and my school experience as a student has always accompanied me in my job, mostly unconsciously, it was my best training.
For example something my Catholic heritage left me (may I define it positive?) is my sense of  duty (or I would say my sense of “martyrdom”), that I also tend to transmit to my pupils. Thanks to my successive experiences I am pretty flexible, however I try to teach them not to be superficial in anything they do. Punctuality goes with it.
Then, all that I experienced as negative or painful turned in the end to be extremely positive in my every day work because I know very well what I must not do. In fact, although I have probably made a lot of mistakes in my relationships with pupils, I have tried to apply the most important principle for me, that is to say considering every student as a person, a world in him/herself. 
However this is not enough, I am aware that teachers have to watch what they say  because young people are much more sensitive than adults, being able to catch the small details that we think are meaningless. At the same time teachers have to be themselves. 
Also, we teachers very often act as we think right, but “the right thing” is not absolute, so the nuns of my childhood might have been convinced they were doing “the right thing”. Their “mortal sin” was not to put themselves in question (which is quite typical of institutional Catholicism). It is actually important to question ourselves from time to time, monitoring our behaviour towards the students.
Moreover, my experience tells me that youngsters do not generally talk about what upsets them in their most inner being, that is why we have to learn to read the more or less hidden signals they send us and that sometimes take the shape of  intolerant behaviour or incomprehensible introversion.

Cristina Vetturini