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Hey vienna and Steve, I have a little side question: was the dunce cap still common during the time you guys went to school?
I'm asking because I know this cap only from Disney comics from the 50s/60s (and earlier) - however the artists who drew them went to school at the beginning of the last century.
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Are you trying to say we're beyond old? "Beginnig of the last centrury", indeed!! Why, I have half a mind to...to..wait, what was I saying?...I think I need to go lie down...where's my shawl?...
Actually, I went to a Catholic parish school in San Francisco, my original hometown. I was born in December 1950 and started school in kindergarten in 1956 (because my birthdate was after the September school year start, I had to wait until the following year) and graduated out of school in Spring of 1965, so a total of 9 years in the same school. The school was run by the Jesuits, but almost all the teachers were nuns, with a few "lay" teachers. The school and the church were built of granite blocks in the European Gothic style at the beginning of the 1900s, between 1900 to about 1910. If you ever see the movie "Sister Act" starring Whoopi Goldberg, that's the church and school used in the movie.
The nuns were of the old school sort: fully dressed in black robes and wimples with starched white cowls around their faces and a very large rosary/crucifix around the waist as a sort of belt. They were truly fearsome. We didn't have dunce caps, but a common punishment was to sit on a stool in the corner facing the wall. There were also physical punishments ranging from slaps on the hand or face to swats with rulers or chalkboard pointers. There was one nun who used to wake up daydreaming students by throwing, at full force, chalkdust laden board erasers at their heads. The student was not allowed to clean off the chalk dust and spent the rest of the class with dust all over his face and shoulders. In about the 2nd grade, I was once punished by being locked in the cloak room that ran along the length of the classroom. It like an enclosed hallway with a door at either end and we would walk into the classroom in a line and, in order, hang our coats on an assigned hook and place our lunches on a shelf above the hook. I was locked in the cloak room for about 2 hours and, after a short time, I was very bored. The only light came from a small stained glass window too high for me to see through. I decided to amuse myself by switching around the coats and lunches from their assigned locations randomly. When lunchtime came around, the class lined up in order, started to enter the cloakroom, only to be thrown into utter confusion. I do believe that was the first of many, many trips to the Mother Superior's office.
BTW, the education I recieved in that school was the finest I ever had at any school. I deliberately flunked the Catholic high school admissions test to avoid going to an all-boys school. When I entered the public school system, I was astounded by how far behind the schools were in comparison to the Catholic schools. Even though I had been in a school that was a near to Victorian as you could imagine (we wrote with fountain pens, sat at heavy wooden desks with inkwells and cast iron frames), the level of education was far and away better than the public schools...