I went to St Pats at Strathfield, also run by the Christian Brothers though these days there's not that many brothers in the teaching profession and the school is on its third lay headmaster. My 4th form results weren't crowd pleasers but I made a better effort once I hit vocational training and managed to get through my apprenticeship without too much drama.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

QUOTE: Unfortunately I was treated as a "slow" child by the system. That relegated me to the back of the class with the other "slow" children.

Me too. I suspect that I just got bored. My mind would wander. Or say, in reading class, the teacher would have each kid read a sentence or paragraph from a story in the reader textbook. A kid would be tripping over words, taking forever to get through it. I'd start reading ahead in the story, maybe even finish it. Problem was that I didn't keep an ear out to know where in the story we'd be when it was my turn. Teacher decided I was a dummy, and I ended up in the "poor reader" group.

There was a summer school session at the public school (I was in the Catholic school in the regular year) for remedial reading. I found a letter from the teacher to my parents saying that I dramatically improved, and "whatever issues your kid has, it's not reading". What probably helped was the very small class size, and a teacher more interested in teaching than punishing the kids. The teachers in the Catholic grammar school were barely competent. Probably just like the ones you had, Brad... Some of the "male nuns" I had loved to hit kids with rulers.

Though I never saw the standardised test results except maybe once, those tests I didn't dread. Don't remember what the other kids thought of it. One time in class, I was tripping over some word reading aloud from a textbook. A classmate started making fun of me, and the teacher told him "You shut up, he scored a lot higher on that standardised test than you did!"

Something I really hated was that a teacher in my Catholic grammar school would punish the entire class even if only a few of the kids were guilty. I thought that was grossly unfair. When I got to high school, the teachers there did not do this. And these teachers were competent. I had to take an entrance test to get into this high school, heard only 1 of 6 applicants got in. No more idiot classmates!

Most of grammar school was us being taught to the standardised test. And the evils of communism and bad grammar!

Things were very different in the fifties & sixties. We had a few teachers that brought their war issues (like alcohol dependence) with them & a few had retrained as teachers after the War & were absolutely useless.

If a kid had something like Autism Spectrum Disorder, that would never be picked up & this would be treated as behavioural issues.

One did get feedback on the Marist Brothers locally: Bit of a worry that lot. However, they would not tolerate fools in education or those that held the others back and shunted them off into the state school system.

I went to St Pauls a christian college in Altona (a suburb of Melbourne).
They had a hateful bloke with the title of "Dean of Discipline"
His job was to walk the corridors and find any poor victim who had been kicked out of the classroom and made to stand just outside the classroom in the corridor.
He would then introduce them to the cane.
Got that more than once.
We also had homework diaries which had to be signed off by our parents once the relevant homework had been done.
Of course mine was never up to date and the "Dean of Discipline" would do a lightning raid of a classroom and cane anyone whose diary was not up to date.
I copped that one too.
It's hard these days to imagine that going on back then (70's) but it was common practice and if you did cop the cane the last thing you would do was tell your parents!

QUOTE: would be treated as behavioural issues.

In 2nd grade there was this kid who wouldn't obey the teacher, not pay attention and so on. Probably AHDD or something like that today. One day he disappeared and we never saw him again. I figured that the principal must have spanked him to death, and they kept it quiet... The nuns said that the principal had a spanking machine, never saw it. I envisioned it a major appliance the size of a washer or dryer....

Here is a Victorian era, Australian designed steam powered spanking machine.

http://i88.photobucket.com/albums/k173/corpuncom/machines/18976z.jpg

An autospank

St Pats had two Assistants to the Headmaster. These days such people are probably called Deputy Principals. Anyway, one was in charge of the curriculum and knew how control his classes and to attract the attention of students without resorting to anything fiendish. The other was in charge of the college's discipline code and likewise, wore a cool head and knew how to escalate discipline in line with the nature of the offence committed. I never saw either of them lift a strap in my whole time there, although it may well have been meted out at times. To be honest, I could say the same of the Headmaster, as at St Pats, the teachers were permitted to dole out any of the available punishments unilaterally, whereas as a lot of schools, only the Headmaster was allowed to use the strap or cane.

It was like anything else though. Some teachers could control a class and others couldn't. I know that some teachers at schools that gave the cane had a rack with several canes on it. The teacher would select a specific cane depending on the heat, humidity and how much of a PITA the soon-to-be-chastised student was being at the time. Similarly, at St Pats, some teachers had straps that were made of sewn layers of leather and other straps were made of solid rubber - all were between 18 inches and 24 inches long and usually around an inch wide and half an inch thick.

I distinctly remember my first day of 6th class - we all got the teacher that the whole junior school universally feared. As most will remember, the first day back at school usually included a pep-talk from the home room teacher and on this occasion it included the teacher putting an imprint from the strap on a sheet of plain paper as a demonstration of what it may feel like when the same is done to our hands. To his credit, he only used it twice that year - I copped it both times and probably deserved it on each occasion. But for some reason, this teacher was able to instill fear in the whole form but looking back he was actually one of the better teachers that I had.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

I went to state schools and there were no straps there, just the cane. Only male teachers used it.

Of course, today caning is viewed for what it is - child abuse. Still, I only got caned twice that I recall, once in primary school, and once in high school. I don't recall what wrong thing I did.

In my grammar school they didn't have stuff specifically designed to hit kids with. They repurposed things like blackboard pointers and rulers. Once a male nun teacher was going to hit me in the hand with the blackboard pointer. He swung it as I was holding my hand out, but I reflexively pulled my hand back (like anyone would to avoid a falling object) and so he missed and broke the pointer on the floor. I think the teacher decided he went too far and just sent me back to my seat and didn't do anything further.

:"""Once a male nun teacher""""" My she or he sounds interesting ?? was it George Pell ?

In 1968 film 'If... ' English school boys get 'the cane'...

QUOTE: """Once a male nun teacher""""" My she or he sounds interesting ?? was it George Pell ?

No, they were just the male version of nuns, called "brothers". I only said "male nuns" as people outside the Catholic Church might not know what the brothers were. Not suggesting that any were gay. They were not priests or deacons, and I don't think that they were on a track to become such. Female nuns! definitely were not on that track.

That is the thing I've always wondered about. Brothers were called brothers and Sisters were called nuns but addressed as "Sister". In Commonwealth countries, registered nurses are also addressed formally as "Sister", maybe because the first nurses were nuns and volunteered their time to assist the infirm.

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A valve a day keeps the transistor away...

There wouldn't be anybody on this site who did not know the term Brother, It would only be a very young person who did not know the term
.A young teen Perhaps. I was taught by the Nuns in Primary for a while, They wore the Habit back then though, I can't remember if it was good or bad experience for me. , too long ago.

Pete