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So the Pope died and I had no idea now, being born and raised a Catholic, I really should have been notified by someone, but no one bothered to call me. I'm Jim pulling. This is my view from the middle. On August twenty sixth, nineteen seventy eight, white smoke billowed out the stack of the Sistine Chapel in Rome, signifying that a new Pope had been elected by the College of Cardinals to replace the deceased Pope Paul the sixth. But it didn't last long because the new Pope, John Paul the First, was head of the Vatican State for only thirty three days before he died, and then they had to start the whole process all over again. That whole process fascinates me. One of my favorite old movies is Shoes of the Fishermen, where they go through the process of electing a new pope. Now they had to do the whole thing twice. Since I to two months, my mother was a devout Catholic and what to church every Sunday. My dad stayed home. Mom took it personally. When Vatican two came in in the mid sixties, Vatican two ushered in the era of Mass said in other languages, dialogue with other churches, hymns and praise music being sung during Mass, and sometimes accompanied by guitars and drums. Oh, the horror an overall modernization of the church in general. We all remembered her coming home from church the first Sunday the new rules of the Second Vatican Council went into effect. Grinding her teeth, she said, they've got us singing like a bunch of Methodists. But she eventually got used to it, and her dedication to Catholicism continued unwavered. I was twenty one years old and living on my own in Bradenton, Florida. My mother was living in Saint Petersburg. I was young, in cocky, and I no longer felt the need to go to Mass every Sunday. But I certainly didn't want to tell my mother that Pope John Paul the First died on September twenty eighth of nineteen seventy eight, a Thursday. On Sunday, October first, my mother calls and makes a comment about what a horrible thing it is about the Pope. Now, I was pretty much a dope. I wasn't in the media yet and I was working a million hours a week at a grocery store and paid absolutely no attention to the news of the world. And as I said, I hadn't been going to church on Sunday, so I had no idea what in the wide wide world of sports. My mom was talking about, what horrible thing happened to the pope? Well, didn't they say prayers for the pope this morning in your church? My mother asked, Oh, busted. In my defense, I had a good reason for not going to Mass in those days. I didn't want to. I attended Catholic school through the third grade at Saint Francis to Sales Church and School in Detroit, Michigan. This was in the early sixties. My teachers all nuns. Now, I need to explain something here. Modern day nuns and the nuns of nineteen sixty three were similar, only in title. Nuns of today wore black dresses or skirts and a habit. But at least now you can see that they actually have hair and skin. But back in the sixties, nuns weren't fooling around. They were mysterious beings that wore habits that covered every square inch of skin and hair in their bodies except for the mask area of their face. The cloaks they wore were made of heavy black wool and covered everything from their shoulders to their ankles. The ensemble was completed with black, opaque stockings and granny shoes. More than one nun that taught a class in which I was a part would claim that she had eyes in the back of her head, usually when she would turn her back to a class of rowdy second graders who'd like to shoot spit wads and throw paper airplanes. When the teacher's back was turned, I have two baby blues right back here, one nun would say, while pointing to the back of the all covering head piece she was wearing. I see everything. Well, that just creeped me out. I had no idea what was underneath those nuns habits, and as a result, imagined all sorts of creepy things, including but not limited to, two baby blue eyes that had the ability to glare right through the heavy black fabric of the nun's habit. The late comedian George Carland did a whole bit on one of his albums that summed up Catholic school disciplined perfectly. Nuns in those days would tend to crack you across the knuckles with a ruler as a form of punishment. Steel ruler discipline. Carland called it. He's falling behind in penmanship. Missus Carland, we don't know why. Oh, he's crippled. He's trying to learn to write with his left hand. Although Carlin was relating his experience in the Bronx, he could just as easily been talking about nuns at Saint Francis to Sales church and school in Detroit, including Sister Maxine. Now Sister Maxine was the assistant principal of Saint Francis to Sales and as such in charge of discipline. She was about four foot nothing in a little roly pulley. Her garments were as heavy as army blankets, and, like her fellow sisters, the only visible skin on her face. She even wore gloves. So it was seven am thereabouts on a typical weekday. I'm not really sure, since I was in the second grade and I didn't own a wristwatch yet. The place was the parking lot of Saint Francis to Sales. It was an asphalt courtyard and all the second, third and fourth grade classes were required to line up and await the arrival of their teacher, usually a nun. I knew the drill, and so did my best friend Charlie. We were supposed to stand in a straight line, remain still and quiet. When the nun arrived, she would lead the gaggle of youngsters to the classroom and start the day's lessons. The concept was flawed from start, since I don't know a second grader anywhere who can stand still in a straight line for more than thirty seven seconds. Well, this crisp autumn morning, Charlie and I decided we weren't going to do it that way. We decided it would be fun to run around like a couple of maniacs, screaming our heads off and harassing all the other students who were trying to do the right thing. Charlie and I were taking a victory lap around the courtyard when all of a sudden, a hush came over the crowd, A cold wind blew through the yard, a look of fear and dread came across the faces of the other children, and out of nowhere, out of a cloud of smoke and ash appeared You guessed it, Sister Maxine, I could have sworn. I heard a lightning boat clap and a team of horses winny as she materialized in front of us, kind of like Frau Blucher in the movie Young Frankenstein. Take my bag, she ordered in a deep guttural voice. I picked up the black book bag she was carrying. It was made of leather and had a lock on it and weighed about four thousand pounds. Well maybe not, but it might just as well have. It took both hands to lift the stupid thing probably weighed as much as I did, and it was almost as big as I lifted the bag with both arms. Sister Maxine grabbed Charlie and I by the ear lobes and ushered us up three flights of stairs to her office. Well, okay, maybe she didn't have a hold of our ear lobes all the way up, but she might as well have. I swear I have disproportionately sized ear lobes to this day because of that. What happened after that was a blur involved calling our parents, for sure. Well that was the worst. My mother, being a devout Catholic, would never argue with a nun. Not that arguing with sister Maxine would do any good anyway. After our collective pants were scared off of us, we were eventually sent class with the knowledge that when we got home that day we would get it from our parents. So here I am in the middle. On one side, I had a religion that does nothing but scare the bajiebis out of you. On the other side my mother who thinks religion is the be all and end all of well everything. So, yeah, twenty one years old, I wasn't going to go to Catholic Mass anymore. So I'll say it again, if the Pope died, someone really should have called me. After the Sister Maxine incident, I moved on from the second grade. We moved out of Detroit to the suburbs and into the public school system, where I remain through my high school graduation. Now let me say that I appreciate teachers. I've done some teaching myself in recent years, so I've had a small taste of what they go through, and it isn't easy. But there are good teachers and bad In my formative years, I had both. I can remember the names of both the good teachers and the bad ones, the ones that were kind of so so fade into the background of my memory. Most of the worst teachers I had were in junior high school, what we now refer to aso ironically enough, and high school. Junior high was a difficult time for me. I was not one of the popular kids by any means. I was skinny, pimply faced, under achiever that could have really used a good teacher to take me under his or her wing. Instead, I seem to have the teachers who exploited my shortcomings, and as a result I did work academically than I should have. Later on in high school, I blossomed when the drama teacher took me under his wing and made me a very popular student. But there were still the bad ones. I had a junior high school social studies teacher who made fun of my last name it's pronounced just like it's spelled p l i ng polling Okay. Instead he constantly referred to me as mister Puling. Oh he knew how to pronounce it properly. He was just an angry man who, on reflection through adult eyes, was obviously compensating for something. I had a junior high math teacher who, instead of making the adolescent brat stop making in front of me actually participated in the mocking. As a result, I was reluctant to participate and did poorly in the class to say the least. I had a high school French teacher who, when I later got the lead role in one of the high school drama productions and knocked it out of the park by the way, acted shocked when I was getting accolades for the performance and actually said, well, he was never good at French, so how could he possibly be good at anything else? Want an ass I had a high school chemistry teacher who never taught us anything. Instead, you were to read the textbook. She would do problems on the chalkboard, but if you didn't understand them, too bad. You weren't reading the textbook properly. In college, I had an instructor tell me once I have no respect for students who work full time and then try to go to school. Yeah. I was working forty hours a week at a grocery store, trying to earn enough money to pay this idiot's salary. But there were the good ones too. Now I mentioned the drama teacher a graduate, he got up in front of the entire graduating class and talked about how quote, this kid auditioned for a play and could barely speak, couldn't act, and was afraid of his own shadow. After a few rehearsals, he dramatically no pun intended, improved, became one of the best actors and public speakers in the school, and won lead role after lead role, won awards, and eventually was elected president of the drama department. Yeah, he was talking about me, but without his confidence and discipline, I never would have done any of that. I owe a great deal of who I am today to that drama teacher. Thank you, Howard Palmer. There was a science teacher in high school that took an interest in me as well. He allowed me free access to his lab during my quote study haul hours, and he had me help with organizing his class. He recognized that I excelled at that sort of stuff organizing not necessarily science, and would have struggled in the class had he not gone that extra mile. I got married at age twenty nine to a wonderful woman who already had two children, a boy age three and a girl age four, So I guess you would say it was an insta family. I was thrust into fatherhood whether I was ready or not, I'm not complaining since I'm not the first to go through it. Face it, Who was ever really ready? My stepdaughter was pretty perfect in school. She made good grades. We never heard a complaint from any ever teachers or school administrators. She tormented her brother and he returned the favor on a daily basis typical siblings. The boy was a different issue. If we went more than forty eight hours without hearing from the principal or a teacher with a discipline complaint and we considered it a good week. He was constantly in trouble. He was highly intelligent, which usually meant he was bored most of the time, so he had to make his own entertainment, which usually involved mouthing off to the teacher. Sister Maxine when you need her. At the time, both kids were attending a private Christian school. Now, despite what you may think, these types of schools are not set up to deal with kids with discipline problems. Their solution to every little problem is to call the parents and then after a few of those calls, just kick the kid out of the school permanently. Most of the time it was my wife that they called. She would annoy her bosses by having to leave in the middle of a work day and go deal with the situation. I got called at work a couple of times. At the time, I was running a retail store, and the school administrator on the other end of the phone was adamant that I should leave work and come get the kid. I kept telling her that that was impossible. I made them wait until I could get off work, which only infuriated them more. Eventually, they had had enough of the problems and we were asked to remove him from the school. We wound up putting him in the public school system, which actually turned out to be a blessing. The calls didn't stop, but they dwindled only occasional incidents. Most of the time, they just dealt with the problem without having to call either of us. So here's what I don't understand. Schools need to have highly intelligent students. It's how they build reputation and attract new students. Yet those types of students are often like my stepson a handful. So why do those places lean toward kicking the offending kid out instead of cultivating his intelligence and talent and dealing with the problem. Bill Gates the co founder of Microsoft Corporation, was another one of those problem children who was bored out of his mind and became a discipline problem during his formative school years. Luckily for him and us, the prep school his parents wound up sending him to at a Vision for Young Bill. That was where he learned and cultivated the skills he needed for a lifetime of success. At last check, Gates was one of the richest men in the world and one of the great philanthropists of our time. I've never been a public or parochial school teacher. The closest I've come was teaching classes in newswriting at a broadcast school. I really enjoyed the experience, but I can tell you the mixture of good and bad teachers in my life gave me a good platform from which to base my attitude toward my students. I gained an appreciation for what the students go through, what the teachers go through, and what the administrators go through. I never dragged a student by his or her ear lobes. I never mispronounced someone's name on purpose. I never called anyone's parents. Although I was teaching post secondary students, calling their parents would have been a bit weird, to say the least. I never joined in the mocking of someone's shortcomings and never kicked anyone out of the school. What I did is trying to encourage the student's positive talents and offer constructive instruction on the areas in which they needed help. From the days of Sister Maxine tugging at my ear lobes, to sitting in class as mister puling, to being praised by a drama teacher, to standing in front of a class have soon to be broadcasters, to dealing with my own problem child, I've seen most sides of the equation. Sometimes we just need to step back and ask ourselves what the purpose of school really is. Is it a place to make our kids stand in line in a chili parking lot at seven am? Is it a place where teachers should mock students instead of building them up. Is it a place for intolerance of kids who are just bored and in need of a little extra attention. Hey, maybe school is a place to learn life lessons as well as academics. Maybe it's a place for kids to learn how to be adults and how to treat their kids when the time comes. Maybe it's a place where life events both good and tragic are explained. Maybe a little tolerance will be gat tolerance for someone else down the road, But when you get down to it, there's no clear cut set of rules for being a student, a teacher, administrator, or even a parent. It appears we all have a lot to learn to function well in these areas. At least that's the way it looks to me. I'm Jim Pulling, and that's my view from the middle. In the next episode, ever hear of anyone named dot Well, The name is real, and so is the man. Uncle doight next on my view from the Middle,