Mrs. Françoise Dezainde on corporal punishment in the Saint-Jude Convent (Omerville)

Interview with Françoise Dezainde, former student at a convent in Omerville, by Louis-Charles Cloutier Blain (Magog Historical Society) 11 July 2018:

Françoise Dezainde: “Yes, at school, the nuns wanted us to have very good marks in French. And then, dictation, we had dictation at that time, and if we had more than ten mistakes we got ruler slaps. And if you had twenty mistakes, you got ten slaps of the ruler, and we really had the ruler used on us and it was the nuns who gave us those slaps.”

Louis-Charles Cloutier Blain: «In the classroom was it? In the middle of class?»

Françoise Dezainde: “In the middle of class, in front of all the classroom friends, all the girls in the class. Then there was one little girl there. She was my friend. I won’t say her name but she was a girl who had a lot trouble and who always got ten slaps of the ruler because she got over her ten words. And once there was a girl who was a bit of a Tom Boy, who said: “I am going to take the slaps of the ruler myself, instead of her,” because the little girl was very tiny, petite, and the nun didn’t want that. So, we did get slaps of the ruler at school.”