Divine Savior Catholic Grade School (Norridge, IL):

One of the only places on the face of the earth that valued dumbing of students by repeated lessons that were under standards over teaching students what they needed to know for future education. Government funded textbooks were twenty years old, and the desks were from the stone age. Most of the school was a big joke, because the music room was attached to the library...common sense tells you not to place a music room next to a library, but common sense was beyond anyone's thought capacity at Divine Savior.

Extra-ciricular activities were strongly diminished as enrollment took a nose-dive in the early to mid-1990's. In a move to increase athletic programs, the school adopted an eagle as it's mascot, and pretty soon the "Eagles" became the laughing stock of the Catholic grade school basketball conferences. The basketball teams were limited to one practice a week at the local public grade school gym, simply because Divine Savior never built a gym. Most of it's income came from renting out it's soccer field to numerous high schools and community sporting events. The softball diamond is still standing, but covered in grass, due to years of neglect and under-staffing of the grounds/janitorial crew. With little money, staff were either nuns or those stupid enough to take a minimum salary.

Due to this fact, many teachers/instructors left after only a few years. Speculation surrounds many who left after such a short tenure, but the most common beliefs were that they had their fill of the students who were at times, very disrespectful, or they just couldn't support their families on such little income. There were a few teachers who defied this notion, and stayed long past their times was up. S.T.M. (8th Grade Homeroom Teacher) was totally oblivious to anything her students were doing, and valued a computerized-reading program (Accelerated Reader) over any other subjects taught in class. The only thing students were amazing at doing was diagraming sentences, due to the over-repetition of practice. Stick a common, grade-school math problem in front of them, and they'd be unable to complete it. But stick a complex sentence in front of them, and tell them to diagram the sentence and list all parts of speech, and you'd be surprised what they could do...I think the school took pride only having it's students know how to diagram sentences. Another teacher that comes to mind is S.P. (5th Grade Homeroom Teacher) who led the often-criticized student organization known as "Spirit Club". This organization was highly and extremely sexist, due to the lack of males as members. It was also visible in her class, because males were often put down and graded lower than the females in the class. She would always rant and rave about personally knowing the members of the band "Chicago" and go on and on about her three or four dogs (I can't remember how many).

There were exceptions to these also. There was one great teacher that comes to mind, and she was S.M.J. (6th Grade Homeroom Teacher) who was great with the students. Her call cards, un-orthodox teaching style, and witty humor kept the class lively. Students always tested her senses, such as M. Dec, who used to stand on his desk during class and made hand signals/gestures aimed at S.M.J. was courageous enough to fold a paper clip into a nose ring and go up to Sr. and look her right in the eye and ask to use the computers. This was just another form of the primitive stipulations put on the students, who needed to ask permission to do ANYTHING.

Recess and lunch was probably the most anticipated event of the day, although the school did not have lunch room. Recess was often patrolled by the principal, S.M., and a few mothers who had nothing better to do with their day. Basic rules included: no foul language, no tackling others, no going on the grass on "black-top only days", and the biggest yet most un-enforced rule was to keep the boys and girls seperate during recess.

Sadly (or happily, depending on how you look at the situation) the school closed it's doors for good following the 2005 school year.