C-Track

The title of this blog refers to the fact that back around 1960 many schools divided students into tracks based on perceived intelligence. A-Track was for the smart kids, B-Track was for the average kids and C-Track was for dummies. There was no secret about any of this. All the teachers and students talked openly about it and the C-track students were teased mercilessly by the 'smart' ones.
After my first grade fiasco it should come as no surprise that when I transferred to Seven Holy Founders I was placed in C-Track. Needless to say, I was not happy about it... A couple of days into the school year I actually went to the 2A classroom hoping nobody would notice. It was not a very well conceived plan - the teacher asked what class I was supposed to be in and I claimed I couldn't remember. So she walked me right to the to 2C classroom - it was a lucky guess :-) Of course, I had an ulterior motive for wanting to be in 2A - the prettiest little blond girl I had ever seen was in that class. But alas, it was not to be :-)

Here's a picture of the 2C class of 1960/61:


I'm the one in the suit at the left edge of the picture.

Notice the gender distribution: 25 boys and 7 girls (excluding the penguin). A-Track was almost exactly the opposite. I guess that was because girls are smarter than boys. But at least the boys didn't have to wear uniforms - that more than made up for it...
BTW - Missing from the picture is the boy who crapped on the window sill in the lavatory. When asked why he did it he said "I wanted to see what it felt like". Seemed like a valid reason to me but nuns just don't appreciate creative expression. He got expelled.

The gender bias also extended to recess. There was a separate 'girls only' playground (probably had something to do with the "I see Paris, I see France" thing) but most of the girls preferred playing with the boys. So there would be a big line at the 'communal' swings (girls had priority, of course) while some of the swings in the girl's playground sat idle. It just wasn't fair! And the pretty blond girl stayed on the girl's playground so I almost never got to see her. (You weren't even allowed to watch the girls through the fence...)

All the students at Seven Holy Founders went to Mass first thing every morning. Back in those days the Mass was still in Latin - it was interminably boring to sit through it 6 days a week (including Sunday). I used to amuse myself by doing that thing were you count the words in random phrases by iterating repeatedly over 4 of your fingers and depending on which finger you end up on you immediately know of it the number of words was even or odd or divisible by 2 or 4. (Everybody does that, right?) But I digress...

Mass was followed by Catechism class - canned questions and canned responses. E.g.:
"Does God see us?" "Yes. God sees us and watches over us with loving care."
Yeah - I remember that one verbatim from 50 years ago... I learned pretty quickly not to depart from the script - nuns get really grouchy when you ask them questions they can't answer (surprisingly easy to do).

And that pretty much covers the groundwork for the 2nd grade. I'll get into more specifics in the next post...