"Improvement Needed"

“Education is what remains after one forgets everything he learned in school.”
(-Albert Einstein)

As a young girl growing up, I was smart in school, and I always got good grades. I went to a competitive Catholic school and enjoyed learning. Well,... I always got good grades, excepting in one area, where I was given an “I,” which stood for “Improvement Needed.” That area was “Social Conduct.” Basically, what that meant was that I talked in school. The nuns gave me a black and white composition notebook all for myself, and called it my Punish Assignment Notebook. Every single night I wrote, in cursive, 500 times, “I must not talk in school.”

I honestly did try not to talk, but I just couldn’t help it. The nuns were hoping that instead of talking so much, I'd be praying rosaries. Sadly, to this day, I have awful penmanship, and I still talk a lot.

The only other subject where I got a poor grade was in Art, and I once again got an “I.” In the first grade, Sr. Marietta handed out sheets of graph paper to each of us. We were instructed by Sister to count over 12 spaces and place a dot there. Then, down several spaces and place another dot. This went on until we had a page full of dots, and then, we were asked to connect them all and color in the image. The result was a rigid Christmas tree with little round ornaments at the end of every row of dots. Everyone’s drawing looked exactly the same except for mine: I didn’t like the fact that there were only ornaments on each side of the tree, but none in the middle, and I’d made mine cover the whole tree. That was evidently not desirable in Art.

No wonder I was afraid to ever take Art classes again…

“School’s a weird thing. I’m not sure it works.”
(-Johnny Depp)