Growing Up
We all went to public school. Kind of ironic, given that Flo and I, later in life, taught in Catholic schools. My first (before we bought the house) was PS 151 Queens. Let me decode this. “PS” stood for Public School. There were lots of elementary schools in the five boroughs-so many that they went by numbers, rather than names. “Queens” was the borough (there were public schools in the Bronx, Manhattan, Brooklyn, and, even, Staten Island). Later, I transferred to PS 102, also in Queens.
The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn also operated schools. The nearest to us was Resurrection Ascension in nearby Rego Park. They were staffed mostly by nuns. Not surprisingly, there was much rivalry between kids going to RA, as opposed to PS, whatever. They looked down on us, although compared to today, there was little or no violence-just digs and insults. No biggie. Catholic school boys tended to be Irish, Yankee/Giant fans, while we lowly PS guys would mostly root for the (Brooklyn) Dodgers.
A few decades later, I had retired from civil service and got a job teaching science in a Catholic high school in Northern Virginia. This is before the cellphone was invented. Even then, at the end of the last century, I was being warned that kids had changed since mine grew up, and not for the better. For the most part, yes, they had changed, but if you treated them with respect, they were not that much different. Nonetheless, I’d hate to be teaching in the era of cellphones and AI.
Rogernarc 