Brrrr! It’s a brisk 103º out there in the shade of the back patio.
A cold day in (un)lovely Arizona.
What a place! WHY do people choose to live here?
I’m here because my parents dragged me here when I got into the University of Arizona a year before my planned high-school graduation. My father wanted to retire, and he didn’t give one thin damn about the effect it would have on my education, my career choices, or my life. Yeah. No: he did NOT care what yanking me out of school would do to my future.
How would I rather be in California, where I belong? Let me count the ways….
Oh, wait! I can’t count that high! 😀
This is a horrible place to live — particularly if you don’t have pocketloads of money. The weather stinks. Politics are grim at best. The education system leaves a lot to be desired…like, for example, education.
No kidding: I had students in my junior- and senior-level college courses at Arizona State University who did not know what the Declaration of Independence was about.
Arizona: the Land of the Ignorant and the Home of the Dumb. Maybe not so much now as then…but then, that was what we ran into. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of Arizona without lifting a finger, because I hardly needed to crack a book open to get an “A” in an undergraduate course. Just show up in class and look kinda like you were listening to the instructor, and voilà. Semester grade: A.
Google “has quality of education improved in Arizona”; skim the results; and you’ll get a real good idea of how well we educate our kids here. HOOOlee maquerel.
When my parents dragged me to Arizona so my father could take early retirement, I was a National Honor Society student in an upper-middle-class Southern California high school. Not surprisingly, I graduated from the University of Arizona with a Phi Beta Kappa key in hand…without having to lift a finger on either hand.
No kidding. I just sat through my college courses staring at the instructors as I daydreamed, faking them out so they would think I was paying attention to them. Any student who seemed to be listening to what the “professor” was saying most certainly would get an “A” — or at worst, a “B” — in the course. Phi Beta Kappa: What a joke!
Is this place any better than it was back then?
To a degree (heh!). Today, if I had to move a family here for a job, I surely would put my kids in private schools for K-12. On the college level, carefully investigate the quality of the majors. Some of them are pretty good. Some are pretty bad. If your kid won’t enroll in a decent program at the University of Arizona or Arizona State University, then send him or her to an out-of-state college with credible standards.
Couldn’t pay me to come here now, if I were under retirement age and could get a decent job in a state that respects educational attainment. RUN AWAY!