Too Much Information: The Legend of Sister Frances Verna

Sometimes, like last week, I use this space to make absurdly complicated representations or analyses of mundane topics; other times, like here, I use my posts to explore some of the life experiences that have made me so anal and obsessive.  I decided that this week's theme would be particularly conducive to the latter format, as my experience in Catholic school did more than perhaps anything else in my formative years to draw out and nurture the rule-loving side of my personality.  From the 10 Commandments to no meat on Fridays in Lent, Catholicism is (as most religions probably are) an OCD paradise.  My sixth-grade art class was no exception, as the following tale will prove.

To set the scene a little, I should explain that Catholic schools almost always have funding problems, and the one I attended from 1992 to 1997 was no exception.  We were on a pretty tight budget, and when that is the case at any school it is usually the extra electives that suffer.  To save money they are usually taught by a parent with no training or experience who receives a tuition break in return, or a teacher who was forced to give up her free period and is now angry and unmotivated (and rightfully so).

At my school, for example, P.E. was made difficult by the fact that we didn't have a gymnasium, but we solved that problem by playing Capture the Flag outside on nice days, and Win, Lose, or Draw in our classrooms whenever there was inclement weather.  This routine may have lacked variety (and, on rainy or freezing days, an actual physical aspect), but we got to let loose a little and that's what's really important.  Our Music teachers were pretty wacky and did things like make us memorize the words to TV theme songs, but at least we were singing.  And as for computers, the machines were extremely old and the lessons were 80% Oregon Trail time and 20% halfhearted keyboarding instruction, but from what I understand that is actually pretty par for the course.

Art, though, was by far the worst of the already struggling electives.  Art class consisted of one nun, Sister Frances Verna, who would wheel her cart into our classroom once a week and put us through awful, awful hell.  As the only nun who still taught at the school--everything else was taught by lay people--she was of a different era.  Basically, she was a classic Mean Nun, one who would ridicule us individually about our appearances and intelligence and then, when she ran out of direct insults, just rant about how awful children were in general, and how our generation's commitment to religion was a joke. 

Art class with Sister Frances Verna always consisted of two parts: a 40-minute religious lecture/rant and then a 5-minute art project.  I found this format to be particularly excruciating in sixth grade when we had art class during the period right before religion class, because that meant we basically had a 90-minute religious ed doubleheader with a five-minute crayon break in the middle.

You may wonder how we managed to complete entire art projects in five minutes, but the trick here was that Sister Frances Verna had already completed most of them for us in advance. For example, on the week that we were supposed to do Thanksgiving scenes, she had already cut out and colored various little pictures of cornucopias, turkeys, and autumn leaves for us and we were simply responsible for pasting them to a construction paper background.

Sister's projects were not generally the kind to let our creativity run wild.

On the rare occasion that we got to color something ourselves, there were very explicit rules.  Sister would give each of us one of the 50 or so phone books she kept in her cart, and we were instructed to have our paper on top of the phone book at all times while we colored so that our project would have a nice, soft look to it.  Every object we colored in had to be first outlined with the crayon and then filled in with horizontal strokes to achieve the look Sister favored.  If we turned in a project that had vertical or diagonal coloring or the hard, unacceptable strokes of or something that had been colored with nothing but a desktop underneath it, we were failed and required to redo the project.  (Not for credit or anything; that was just so we wouldn't go to hell, I guess.)

The big conclusion to our art curriculum in sixth grade was our month-long unit on block letters.  On Week One, Sister Frances cut her religious rant short at about 25 minutes and showed us a piece of white paper with a bible phrase written on it in colorful block letters.  To create a paper like this one, we were told, was the ultimate goal of the block letters unit--the final product that we would be working towards over the next few weeks.

For our first lesson in block letters we were introduced to Sister Frances Verna's method of drawing the letters.  Each of us received a sheet of graph paper; all letters were to be five squares tall and three squares wide (except W and M, which were four squares wide), with every line drawn against a ruler to make sure it was totally straight.  On letters such as O, whose corners needed rounding, we were to first draw them block-like with our rulers and then carefully erase the blocks containing corners, which we would then replace with a curved line.  If Sister did not see satisfactory evidence of eraser marks indicating we had taken this extra step, we were failed.

We spent the first week practicing this technique, and then the next week's lesson was devoted to carefully producing a page containing the entire alphabet and some of the key punctuation marks.  For the third week, any student whose alphabet she approved was allowed to color those letters in according to the required coloring technique she had taught us earlier in the semester.

Some students fell behind and had to relentlessly practice the letter-shaping even as the rest of us had moved on to coloring.  "Don't you think I know what I'm doing?" she would snipe at anyone who dared complain about being stuck in lettering limbo.  "If you don't get this part nailed down, you'll never be able to form the letters when we do the final project without the graph paper."

We didn't actually go sans-graph paper for the final project, though.  We simply placed it under our white piece of paper so that we could still use it as a guide.  We then had to copy our assigned Bible verses onto the white paper, taking care to follow the 5x3 grid and the prescribed method of corner-rounding.  We also had to count the number of letters and words in our verse (taking special note of any Ws or Ms that would throw the count off) and plan in advance where to put them on the paper so that everything would be completely centered.  Once our verse was approved, we were allowed to move on to coloring the letters in.  Few students actually achieved this milestone, and to reward our diligence we were allowed to select the color scheme we would use.  I was one of these proud few who finished, an achievement I do not think would have been possible without the nascent OCD that actually made the whole block letters process kind of soothing for me.  Straight lines!  Rules!  Yippee!

Back then we always figured Sister Frances Verna just hated children.  Looking back, I wonder now if her insults and her lectures were actually a way she expressed her bitterness at the increasing marginalization of the role of the nun in Catholicism, especially in the schools they used to dominate.  That, and hating children.  The woman definitely hated children.

Lauren McMahon (e-mail, website) writes "Too Much Information" on Mondays at noon.  Find out more here.

Comments

[Tori]

So my memory's a little hazy on this one, but didn't you kill that woman? With a grape or something?

[Lauren]

That's another story altogether, but for now I'll just say that she didn't die and it was a total accident. But yes, a grape was involved.

[Inactive account]

I think I speak for all of us when I say that we MUST hear that story.

[jackie]

as a sister francis verna pupil myself, the detail and accuracy of that post is equal parts hilarious and horrifying.

[Lauren]

Right? Not a single detail has been exaggerated!

And to think when my young children brought home their first art projects, I thought the school was worth every penny I was spending because they had become so artistic in such a short time and made beautiful fall cornucopias, until I learned that they weren't even allowed to use scissors.

[Inactive account]

Where is the grape story‽