On 185 #conventstrong #ConventPride #sjcpos185
I belong to a long generation of SJC girls in my paternal family. Grandmother, great aunts, aunts, cousins, sister, me. In total, there are at least 17 women in my family who passed through SJC POS. Not everyone had a great experience, and that's their story to tell, not mine. But I had a wonderful time.
I was Cluny educated from the age of 4, and passed for SJC POS from St Joseph's Girls' RC. I was one of four girls from my primary school, 14 others went to sister school SJC SJ, and 3 to the other sister school, Providence. I have no idea what it was like for them, but for me, SJCPOS was a culture shock.
Other schools have rules and order marks and pink slips. They tell you how many inches below the knee the skirt should be and how many folds a sock can have. SJC POS did not have this. SJC POS had tradition. You figured out what to do, how to behave, because you saw other people doing it, or because you saw someone being told off for falling short. No one really TOLD you anything. SJCPOS' rules were very vague. They comprised statements like, propriety, without defining what was improprietous. This, for those who are interested, could range from anything as dramatic as talking during assembly, talking on the steps on the way to class after assembly, to spitting in the road, to cavorting on Pembroke Street, to, and this was the worst of all, hooting while applauding. After the first few months, I kind of figured out, and soon I settled into life as a "dirty" convent girl.
I have lots of great memories of school. I think my favourite was in Form 2, when the Phantom Scribbler wrote "blah blahbiddy blah blah I am the Phantom Scribbler" on the bench that faced the car park on the outside of Sr Paul's office and then defaced a stall in the junior school toilets. Mrs Crouch stood in assembly and said "Phantom Scribbler when I find you, I will suspend you. In fact, I will slap you, then I will suspend you." She was having trouble with that though, so eventually she cancelled class for a morning and gave everyone a bit of sandpaper and we had to sandpaper every surface of the school. Every desk, every AV room and lab table. She personally checked, and when she got to my class, my desk neighbour got into trouble because she had been building a straw hole to drink the copious amount of nesquik she consumed. I never found out who the Phantom was, so am making this note public, in the hope that she sees it and knows how happy she made me.
I have some less pleasant memories too. But nothing too dramatic. Nothing more than the average teenager. I had a lovely group of friends. They were really smart and so after a rocky start academically their work ethic rubbed off and I started really shining academically. We weren't very cool and didn't rebel or anything, so we liked looking on when other girls opened nail salons offering French manicures with liquid paper or did Geography homework in Chemistry class. We talked during Bio and French in Form 3, but somehow we were never enough of a distraction to warrant teachers separating us, so the 9 of us formed a band in the back. I'm still close friends with 3 of them, and in contact with 3, and have lost contact with 1.
I enjoyed the Co-curricular experience at SJC a lot. I loved October with lip sync and food fair, and was sad when that ended. I loved Divali, Prefects Concert and Captains Concert (why did they have 2 different concerts?). I loved anything inter-house, except inter-house Carnival. In Form 1 I lied and said my religion was against Carnival so I would not have to dress up and jump in the courtyard. I liked singing Calypso though, and entered Calypso in Form 3 and 5, which I won and got a CD voucher which I used to buy a Best of Queen CD, having being introduced to Bohemian Rhadsody via lipsync. I loved sports day, and the two years we had inter-house singing and we sang Somebody Bigger than You and I and St Joseph's house sang Somebotty bigger. Hilarious. I loved swim meet. People always accuse SJC POS of being all academic, but this wasn't true of my time there, though of course academics were important.
I tried lots of different extracurricular activities, too, but the ones I remained most committed to for my 7 years were Literary and Debate Society (what some people called Debate, but that is not the name of the club) and choir. I loved Debate because there were never any teachers there, just students debating and discussing ideas. We had so much freedom to explore. Nowadays I guess the supervising teacher would have to be present for the meetings, but from 1995-2002, we did our own thing. I loved participating in inter-class debates, and I still remember in Form 4 when I got naked debater of the match in the Modern versus Earth Sci debate. I was really dedicated to the choir. In my time in SJC, there was only one choir show I didn't perform in, the Christmas concert in Form 5, because it was the only time I had a main role in a Love Movement production (Stella in the Christmas musical about stars) and it was too much. I still find the experience of singing with other people extremely enriching and think that chroal singing might be the key to world peace.
But yes, SJC was very academic. I don't see anything wrong with this, to be honest. Every year it receives some of the most academically gifted girls in the SEA. It would actually be a sin, a waste of their talent, to not push them to try to achieve their academic potential. I don't think it was too much pressure and, while I do think more could have been done to encourage other subject areas and interests, I think that's a shortcoming of the system rather than the school. In lower 6, I made the decision to drop History after a few weeks of class and change to Spanish. It meant that I was no longer competing with my classmate for the Modern Studies open scholarship, but was now going up for Languages. This was not my motivation for changing, but it's perhaps the single most important academic decision I have ever made. Both my classmate Krista Beuzelin and I won open scholarships. Winning a scholarship shaped my life in ways I cannot explain in this post.
My wish for SJC is honesty. Maybe you have noticed that I never shared the school history video. There's a reason for that. Part of the 185 message is that the school was opened for members of all races, classes and backgrounds. If this is in some original mission statement, it must be read with 1836 eyes. In 1836, apprenticeship was still going on. Opening a secondary school for *girls* who had formerly been enslaved would have made no sense. A primary school, maybe (and this explains the fact that all SJCs have a Cluny Primary school nearby or on the same compound). Whoever all included, it was definitely not the children of the formerly enslaved. All the early photographic evidence shows that. The school was opened for the daughters of the planters and the island elite . It's something that former Provincial Superior Sister Gabrielle Mason as addressed many times. The sisters were invited by the planters. It's not the philanthropic start one might wish for. But part of celebrating your history is interrogating it and facing it. The school has a history of racism, and this is also part of the story. But if you read on, you will see that the school does expand. It does include girls from all backgrounds now. It's learning, growing and evolving. And this growth is also worth celebrating. But first you have to acknowledge it.
I learned a lot of things at SJCPOS, but most important was "to whom much is given, much is expected". SJC gave me and so many others so much. I hope we continue looking for ways to use it to the service of our God, our school, our country and our world.
