Nancy Roman Finance Litchfield, Connecticut

I had a rotten fifth grade. Although I made good grades, worked hard, was quiet and mostly obedient, Sister Saint Therese du Divine Coeur hated messy. And I was so messy.

Sister Saint Therese made us fasten our winter boots together with clothespins, line up our book bags neatly in a row under the windows, and cover our textbooks with brown paper. Plain, blank brown paper. Months into the school year, we still weren't supposed to have a single doodle on any cover. I was ten. I don't think I need to elaborate.

I also never remembered to bring a head scarf to wear on confession day. So once a month, I confessed with a Kleenex bobby-pinned to my head.

But in Sister Saint Therese's eyes, my penmanship was her purgatory. Her handwriting was like the Declaration of Independence. Mine was the way desperate people scrawl on bathroom mirrors when they've been kidnapped.

At Saint Anne's School, composition was the most important subject. That was fine with me. I was a wonderful storyteller, and I knew it. But in fifth grade, our monthly essays became ordeals. Because our stories didn't only need to be beautifully written, they had to be beautifully written.

Each student would write a first draft on "practice paper" -- cheap grayish sheets from the communal tablet. We would bring our essays one at a time to Sister. She'd look them over, correcting our spelling and grammar as she clicked her teeth. Then from her desk drawer, she would hand us our black-and-white-speckled composition book. The paper in the book was stapled to the center, so unlike spiral notebooks, if you tore out a sheet, the composition book tattled on you. Talk about leaving a paper trail.

Once we were handed our books, we were supposed to turn to the next blank page and copy our finished essay. With a fountain pen.

Giving me a fountain pen was like giving a toddler a bowl of spaghetti. No matter how careful I was -- how deliberately I formed every letter -- something would always go wrong. An a looked more like a d, an m always had one too many humps, the line that crossed through the t in "the" always crossed through the h, too. And don't get me started on the ink blots and the smears. (I challenge each of you with a ten-year-old to look at your child right now and picture him with an old-fashioned fountain pen in his hand.)

So I'd turn in my story riddled with smears, blobs, shaky letters, and mistakes, all of which I had tried to fix. Sister Saint Therese would be furious.

"Mother Mary would weep!" she'd cry, holding up my open book for all the class to see. Sister Saint Therese du Divine Coeur was a serious humiliator.

That's when I'd get a Black Ticket. These were small pieces of paper about the size of a Band-Aid, black felt on one side and white on the other. You wrote your name on the white side and deposited the ticket in the Black Box, which sat directly in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin. I think we were supposed to be offering up our sins, but for the life of me I never understood why Mary would want our sins in the first place.

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