Okay, Ladies, I realize this site is new and there aren't a whole bunch of us participating just yet, but some of the "memories" people are posting in their profiles are hilarious.  I hadn't thought about Mrs. Irving and her "pelvic tilt" in years.  Nor had I remembered Mrs. Memering's choice of footwear. . . . pink Candies, indeed!  I thought it might be fun if we had a "User Forum" devoted specifically to the topic of teachers so that we could share memories about some of them.  I know that Jacquie and I once witnessed Sister Joan doing a re-enactment of a rapist chopping arms off . . . I still don't know how, exactly, that came up in Theology class.   And Mrs. Jarrett once pretty much called me a a hussy in Biology class because she thought my blond hair looked "cheap."  In this day in age, that kind of behavior would be lawsuit material.  As it was, I suffered an immediate lack of self-confidence and had my hair "reverse frosted" just so she wouldn't criticize me, but it turned out a God-awful greenish grayish color and I bleached it right back and was even blonder than I was before she made the comment.

Okay, I've got some good stories -- at least they're good in my opinion.  God, I'm feeling insecure all over again.  Thank God we all mellowed after going through our teenage years as we should have -- spiteful, rebellious, catty sometimes, clique assigned, insecure, desperate (as I think all high school seniors are getting ready to face the world), competitive, cute, energetic and either mad that we were treated differently than "the boys at Jesuit" were (that was me) or mad for boys, at least for awhile, at least some of us, but then pretty accepting and glad even that we didn't have boys at our school by the time we became seniors. 

And we were also studious, high achievers, talented musically, theatrically, athletically, academically, knowledgable about chemistry (that would be Mary Churchill, "Mary, what did you get for your answer?  Yeah?  Really?  How about that.  We did too!), funny, nice, forgiving and happy - and very lucky to be at that school.

Okay.  Stories:  I found a pig's ear by my locker, right on the floor below it.  It was from a biology lab.  I thought it was a folded up, used bandaid.

I think it was during my, I don't know, junior or senior year, and I was in Mrs. Mastagni's (sp?) class if I am remembering correctly.  Over the loud speaker came Sister Bridget, going over a couple of things, and then, "reminding ALL GIRLS TO WEAR BRAZZIERS!"  What I remember so vividly about that incident was that the class was howling, and I'm sure the rest of the school was laughing too.  I was not.  I was incensed.  I just KNEW the boys at Jesuit did not have to go through something so degrading and embarrassing.  I had a hard time with the "old fasioned", you know, patriarchy that the nuns were influenced by.  Why couldn't we maurade, rape and pillage - just like the Jesuit boys?  They were encouraged to be bad and rebel and we were encouraged to be perfect because that's what girls were - good.  I wanted to be bad.

Another story:  I was coming out of biology or chemistry lab around the lunch hour in my junior or senior year and Sister Jane came running around the corner, toward me, and said in this very parental and unhappy tone, "Where did you come from!!!"  I said, "the laaaaab," all indignant - like I would do something wrong.  I mean, I'm a Loignon, I got straight A's (with one B) my first semester my freshman year.  My sister was Valedictorian.  I know my grades are now in the dumpster, but still...  It turns out some boys, possibly from Jesuit, had thrown water balloons over the great walls of Mercy High School into the courtyard, and ran into me and thought maybe I had been involved.  Now all I can think about is how someone could have been killed or brain damaged.

Another story regarding my bruised ego:  I was in Mrs. Pyle's Algebra II class.  (Let me stop right here and say that Mrs. Pyle is the best teacher I have ever had in my life.  She taught me how to compete and win.)  Anyway, as I mentioned above, my grades had plummeted, and it was pretty shameful for me because that was not really me at all and my sister had done well, etc., but I was signing a year book for someone or having someone sign mine and Mrs. Pyle had the audacity to come around and say, outloud for everyone to hear, "YOU ARE THE LAST PERSON WHO SHOULD BE SIGNING A YEAR BOOK!!"  I wasn't embarrassed.  I was furious.  How DARE she tarnish my reputation!!  (Believe me, by that point, it had already done gone bad.)  So, in my head, I thought, "I'll show her!!!"  I went home and took out the practice exam for the final.  I did all of the problems and aced the final exam.  Thank goodness for Mrs. Pyle and other great agitators like her.  She kicked my butt and woke me up from my slump, at least for that night :)  I was depressed and the teachers knew it, and to their credit, they allowed us to have our personal problems to some extent instead of trying to fix everything.

Another Mrs. Pyle story:  French class.  Can't remember which level.  Evidently Mrs. Pyle was mixed up and thought she had a free period when she was supposed to be teaching us.  Of course, it was much too complex of a task to go find Mrs. Pyle and tell her.  So we all sat on the floor in the hallway because I think they locked the classrooms when they were not there.  Well Sister Bridget was doing her rounds and she came upon us and was mad, of course.  I think she went and got Mrs. Pyle from the teacher's lounge.  All of a sudden, we see Mrs. Pyle turning the corner, walking super duper fast, being scolded by Sister Bridget.  And then Sister Bridget got mad at us some, too, but we had had our fun.

One last story, for now:  For my physics term paper, I wrote, "The Physics of Dance" and got an "F" on the paper.  It was a bunch of B.S. and Mr. Myers saw right through it. 
 

Brenda, I don't remember being all that good at Chemistry.  Then again, Joan Keltgen thought I would have a new element named after me--Churchillium!  I just hoped that Sr. Anne didn't get her veil too close to the Bunsen burner or up it would go!

Hey Brenda, I remember that French class. I don't think I had ever seen anyone's face so red from the constant agitation of Sr. Bridget. I'm sure that wasn't the end of it either. I also remember sitting in Mrs. Pyle's class (you're right --she was a great teacher) but she was so thin and had the longest feet I had ever seen. They must've been at least 9's or 10's. I also remember French III with Sr. Bridget and thinking it was the hardest class I had ever had because her Irish accent took over and it didn't sound much like French at all.

I think we had some really great teachers in high school.  I have ot take issue with Tammy's statement about Mrs. Pyle's feet.  They just looked long because she was so thin (La Femma de Stick is what we used to call her).  A size 10 is not huge if proportioned to height...

I remember Mrs. Jarrett giving us a birth control lecture as part of the curriculum in Anatomy and Physiology.  It was very frank.  I will not name the person who inquired toward the end of the lecture about the effectiveness of coitus interruptus, but I do remember Mrs. Jarrett's face going a little white and her suggestion that they have an after class discussion.  One tries to imagine as frank a lecture in any public high school today, let alone in a Catholic Girls School.  I wonder if they felt our parents wouldn't give us information and they really had to....Learned a great deal about anatomy and physiology in general.  Always appreciated the comprehensiveness of most of our teachers.

I remember Mr. Gaul coming to lecture Mrs. Cotton's Civics class on the prison system (he was a guard at Folsom with the face of a bulldog).  We were all seated in a circle and one girl (part of a pair who must have gotten stoned every morning at the Auburn bus stop) was eating a bag of chips noisily throughout the lecture about law and order, crime and punishment.  Mr. Gaul glared at her twice but it was Mrs. Cotton who grabbed the metal trash receptable and slammed it down on her desk top, tossing not only the bag of chips but a package of what looked like cookies as well...

Mrs. McKenzie (Sweet Polly Purebred) was delightful and loved history but if you ever asked her a difficult question she had a pat answer 'that sounds like a lovely idea to pursue in an outside of class project'.  I wrote my paper sophomore year on the anniversary of the Chicago 7 trials and included sketches of each of the defendants in 1968 and now as well as updates about where they were and what they were doing.  Mrs. McKenzie gave me an A+ for the extensive research I had done and was particularly struck by the changes my paper noted in the approach of Tom Hayden to government in the intervening ten years.  (My 'research' all came from an article in People Magazine!  Reading trash pays off...)  Ironically, years later I worked with Tom Hayden (one of the Chicago 7 and the ex-husband of Jane Fonda) on the initial piece of state legislation trying to make it illegal to drive while using a cell phone, when I was still with a regulatory agency.  He was in his final year as a state senator and the opposition to his bill lined the committee room and went down the hallway of the capitol - all bought and paid for by the cell phone industry.  A gentleman, he advised the chairman he would not waste the committee's time on a bill that would surely fail and he expressed dismay that the opposition hadn't coem to him to try to work something out.  He was not at all the anarchistic rebel I had always thought him to be.  He was ahead of his time with the bill though - six years later Joe Simitian got the law passed with the full support of the cell phone industry.  Always wanted to tell Mrs. McKenzie about how well Mr. Hayden turned out and how he became a part of the system rather than an antagonist against it.

Sr. Mary Loyola - hard to pick a favorite, but she definitely drove my lifelong love of literature.  Witty, ironic sense of humor.  That darn lecturn she was always leaning against in class (which we stole at one point, but quickly returned without even earning a detention)!  Loved her!

Back to Mrs. Pyle, who I did not think was such a great math teacher because as a linear thinker I suffered through her Algebra II class sophomore year.  She was all about showing your work and did not visualize the physics of equations in a continuum.  She always wanted me to show my work.  Frustrated by being downgraded on a test yet again even though all of my answers were correct I vowed to her I would never use math in real life!  I then embarked on a career mixing math and law as an economist/attorney.  For years I lived in fear of ever running into her and having to explain myself...

And I don't care what anyone else says, I loved Mrs. Engh as a teacher.  She was entertaining.  She also put up with an AP class that all too often showed up after off campus lunch have just stolen all of the dishes at our lunch destination (which we sometimes gifted to her), or just plain stoned if we'd stopped off at the park.  I'm sure we thought she couldn't smell the pot, didn't think sleepiness was out of the ordinary at 1:00 p.m., and was mesmerized by our vivid Lewis Carrollesque stoner descriptions of the imagery in T.S. Eliot's "The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock"...   Kelly 

Does anyone remember when Nancy Reitz came to Biology class as Gregor Mendel?  Or when that other science teacher (I never had her) kissed a baby pig?

I remember Nancy Reitz well.  I went, along with a handful of classmates, with her to Yosemite.  She is the Dean of Mathematics at American River and will be having dinner with us at the reunion!  I believe the biology teacher who allegedly kissed a pig was Mrs. Jarrott.  She is still teaching biology in West Sac and will also be joining us!

It was Mrs. Jarrett who kissed the pig.  Some sort of contest, right?