Coffee heat rising

Education in America

Brrr! A Brisk Day in Dumb-Ass Arizona!

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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!

notes

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In retrospect, I resent people — esp my parents and teachers — for maneuvering me into positions that I wouldn’t have selected if I’d understood them better and that now I can’t get out of. Positions that affected my entire adult life.

If I had understood that as a National Honor Society student I could almost surely have landed a scholarship or fellowship to Berkeley or Stanford, you can be sure I wouldn’t have skipped my senior year in HS to go straight to the dowdy University of Arizona…so that my father could retire a year early. I would surely have gone to the University of California at Berkeley or, if my parents insisted on staying in So Cal, to UCLA.

Even if I’d stayed in secondary school one more year, he could have retired. He could have dragged me to Arizona and enrolled me in an AZ high school…allowing himself to quit his job that year early. To get me and them into Sun City (where young people were officially unwelcome), all they had to do was say I was living on a college campus, not with them!

Now, the truth is, he could hardly have been expected to understand the mediocrity of a degree from the UofA: to him a college degree was a college degree was a college degree. My mother probably understood that I would have been about 100% better served with a bachelor’s from UC…but she did have enough sense to keep her mouth shut around him.

What other things would I have done differently if I’d had a fukkin’ clue??

  • Majored in a subject that would get me  decently paying job, not a receptionist’s position + a high-earning husband
    • Such as????
      • Business
      • Accountancy
      • Justice Studies
      • Politics? Government?
  • Gone to UC Berkeley or even Stanford
  • Refrained from marrying the first decent man that came along
  • Continued directly from the B.A. to graduate school…but didn’t I actually do that?????
  • Gone straight into a Ph.D. program. Even though my undergrad degrees didn’t qualify me for graduate programs in anything other than English or French, a Ph.D. in either of those would have landed an academic job.

It feels incredibly stupid to me today.

But I wasn’t stupid. I was ignorant. I didn’t fully understand how the U.S. educational system worked. I didn’t understand how one university differed from another, and why. I didn’t understand why I needed to major in a salable subject, not in Mickey-Mouse woo-woo like English and French.

Soooo glad not to be there…

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Back at the ranch: This charming episode occurred in a classroom on the suburban campus where I taught for lo! those not-very-many years. Thank goodness I managed to get an editorial job at the university’s main campus, and then to retire.

Actually, back in the Day, we didn’t feel too much concern about potential violence in the classroom. It’s kinda grown like fungus over the years, though. Today, I wouldn’t go into a classroom without a pistol stashed in my briefcase.

Interestingly, one day when I was teaching I discovered a woman student in one of my upper-division courses was doing exactly that. She openly admitted — in the classroom, in front of 30 classmates — that she was carrying a gun and that she wouldn’t come onto the campus without one. Even more interestingly, not a student in the room so much as blinked.

At any rate: that assertion above is to say, in truth, “I wouldn’t go into a classroom.” Period. I should risk my life to remind a bunch of students, for the 177th time, that a complete sentence contains a subject and a verb?

You do have to figure it’s not surprising that students don’t know the basics of their own language, if that’s what they have to contend with whenever they go onto a campus. Which came first? The ignoramus or the lunatic?

Stylishly Stupid

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Thinking about the teachers we had in Ras Tanura’s grade school, not with much pleasure where most of them were concerned.

The first-grade teacher, Miss Woods, was excellent — by the grace of God. We had no kindergarten, so at least this woman started me out on the right foot.

The second-grade teacher was a witch. Stupid as a post…if only posts could be not mean.

The third-grade teacher, Miss Gaskill, also was excellent. Between Woods and Gaskill, I learned to read exceptionally well and sorta kinda figured out arithmetic (which I dearly hated).

The fourth-grade teacher was so stupid as to make a post look smart. Ignorant? She defined ignorance. And was proud of it.

Fifth grade brought me to a “world traveler”: one of those women who out of boredom and curiosity convert their teaching credentials into a ticket to jobs overseas. Stupid, she probably wasn’t; but she was mean, at least to weird little girls who didn’t conform to her definition of American girlhood. I loathed the woman. Managed to get out of her class (thanks to the machinations of my mother and her best friend, a nurse in the camp clinic, who contrived to persuade my father I was so sickly I needed to be sent home to the States).

So, mercifully, I escaped the Ras Tanura Senior Staff School and arrived in the U.S. halfway through the sixth grade, having been out of classes for the better part of a year — supposedly too “sick” to attend.

In San Francisco, where we came to light, I was so far ahead of grade that the teacher hardly knew what to do with me. I quickly moved on to junior high school, also well ahead of grade (I had been tutored at home for the better part of a year). And oh, my! I was so, sooooo happy to get on the other side of the globe from Saudi Arabia!

And out of the Saudified Americans’ lock-step schools.

Just because your kid isn’t doing well in grade school may not mean something’s wrong with the kid. The problem may be with the school itself, or with the kid’s charming little classmates. Don’t assume anything…

Coviding to Pretoria…

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Yes…the covid bug keeps marching along here. Actually, the little fella seems to be slowly marching toward the door.

Maybe we shouldn’t even say “slowly,” come to think of it.  Truth to tell, I’m pretty amazed at how fast this thing seems to be clearing up. Not that I’m ready to rise from my deathbed yet…

Today the thermometer (such as it is) is registering in the normal range. Just took a reading: 98 degrees.

Since I’m quite the cold fish (you’re surprised?), that’s smack in the middle of normal for me: 97.6± to 98.2± . And strangely, I also seem to be feeling better.

“Seem” because that proposition strikes me as mighty bizarre. I was splendidly sick just the other day — felt like a heavy case of the flu coming on. But instead of “coming on,” it seems to have just struck a glancing blow.

Still have a resonant cough…but it’s better than it was yesterday, and has never reached the inglorious heights of the kind of cough I normally get with the flu.

Hmmm…  If this is not atypical, it would explain the rapid spread of the disease. People think they’re getting over it, so naturally get up and go about their business: off to the office, the gas station, the grocery store, the school room…. We’re probably moving  back into the current of daily life too soon. If you feel better but the virus is quietly lurking, no doubt you would spread it around by getting  back to daily business before the infection is fully cleared up.

It’s difficult if not impossible to NOT spread your germs or pick up other folks’ germs, if you live in American society. Virtually anything you need to acquire for your daily living needs — food, meds, pet gear, gasoline, propane, you-name-it — is to be had from retail stores. And a fair number of those things can’t be selected by an Instacart runner.

That’s especially true if you eat real food — fresh vegetables, meats, and fruits. Instacart runners are like most people. And most people tend to eat mostly processed foods. They don’t have the faintest idea how to select fresh produce. So they bring you limp, brown, under-ripe, over-ripe junk. You need to be there in the store to pick out those kinds of goodies. Same is true, to a lesser extent, of meat. Want a steak? They grab the first cling-wrapped cut they spot in the butcher cabinet.

Sooo…that means that if you favor whole foods, Instacart (alas!) is not for you.

No grocery shopping today…but nevertheless I found myself running unhappily from pillar to post. I lost my mercury thermometer — the one that registers an accurate reading, every time you use it. Searches in every place I might possibly have put it “away” failed. And those digital thermometers…what a joke!

I have two of them (because I’ve found they tend to be inaccurate). They’ve been all over the map every time I’ve used them. One will say 98; the other will say 98.7. One will say 97.7; the other will say 98 or even 99. So…I think they’re pretty much useless. They might tell you — or not — if your fever was through the roof. But the range is so wide they’re not very useful or credible.

So I ventured forth to buy a new mercury thermometer. A-n-n-n-d…guess what? NO ONE sells them. I went to SIX stores, from pharmacies to supermarkets, and could not find a one of them! Look up “mercury thermometer” at Amazon, and you get “mercury-free” thermometers. Gee, thanks, Amazon, for reading my mind! /eyeroll/

Evidently, then, this another amenity Big Brother has taken out of our sticky little hands.

At any rate, if indeed the present cold/cough is covid (how do I doubt it? let me count the ways!), IF that is so, then evidently the course of three anti-covid vaccinations was genius.

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What a world we live in! Covid is the least of it. Today’s news is festooned with reports of shooting incidents. Locally: at a so-called “alternative” high school for less-than-perfectly-accomplished high-school kids. Dayum!

Well. If I were a kid, I would be less than pleased if my parents or the authorities shunted me off to an “alternative” school for problem children.  I personally hated school, starting in the 2nd grade. The idiot teacher who took over our class that year remains a searing memory, and after that…what? One outstandingly excellent teacher. The next: a mean witch who taught us little to nothing. Next: really quite a nice lady and a good teacher, but by that time the little monsters in the class had crawled out of their shells, noticed me, and begun to make it their business to make me miserable. They were good at it, too!  Fourth-grade teacher: not qualified to teach earthworms — truly, one of the stupidest human beings I have ever met. Fifth- and sixth-grade: HOLY mackerel what a witch!

If that’s comparable to what you find in stateside public schools, no one with a measurable IQ should be required to attend. 😀

Fortunately, it’s not. My mother finally figured out what was going on, along about the time I hit the sixth grade. At that point she demanded to take me home. Dunno if she threatened to divorce my father over it or whether the threat was implicit…but whatEVER. He did let us go back to the States, where my mother managed to get me into an excellent public school in San Francisco.

You know…we had gang-bangers in those schools — at least, we did in high school. We had kids in grade school who were as crazy and as alienated as I was (not many, but still…I never took my father’s Ruger to school and shot up the place) (maybe only because I never thought of it…). I wonder what conditions have changed so radically as to lead young Americans to plan and execute mass shootings?

Something HAS changed, apparently something fundamental.

If it’s not mass media — TV and music and movies in particular, and social media — then what is it?

The State of the…Whatever-We’ve-Got-Here…

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Today’s Quora post:

What are your thoughts on Dr. Fauci telling reporters that America might still be battling smallpox and polio if today’s kind of misinformation existed back then?

Profile photo for Victoria Hay

Right on! But possibly he doesn’t go quite far enough. Not only were we not subjected to misinformation at the time the polio vaccine came available, neither did we have a President who deliberately and maliciously spread error and lies to advance his personal cause.

I grew up in the Middle East during the 1950s, in a Saudi-American oil camp. Polio was a terrifying scourge there, as it was in Europe and the Americas. If you didn’t die from it, you were likely to be crippled for the rest of your life. But polio was only one of the threats. We also had smallpox, typhus, tetanus, diphtheria, pertussis, cholera, typhoid…on and on. Where I lived, Americans had to take shots for each of these horrors once a year. Some of the shots were pretty darned painful — cholera and typhoid in particular.

Have you ever seen a person who has, by the grace of God, managed to survive smallpox? I have. He was a young man, possibly even still in his late teens. His face was so horrible it turned your stomach to look at him. Ravaged, like the skin had been burned off in a fire, but the scars were even worse than burn scars. He might have been better off to have died from the disease.

How about a person who has survived polio? Some of those folks were in the iron lung for the rest of their permanently limited lives, never able to breathe on their own again. Some escaped paralysis of the muscles that operate the lungs but never could walk normally again, or use their hands and arms normally. And polio, you know, comes back on you, even if you do recover from the initial onset. One of the best doctors I ever knew had to quit his practice and retire when a case of childhood polio flared up in middle age, after years of remission. The rest of his life was ruined.

A thousand curses upon a “president” and party who would deliberately spread the kind of lies, stupidity, and error that Mr. Trump and his worshipers have done. Their behavior has been nothing short of treasonous and murderous, exploiting the suffering, fear, and death of their fellow citizens in order to keep themselves in power.

And may we lay a thousand curses, too, upon those who have brought us an educational system that has failed to teach our citizens the most basic science. How can a grown man or woman have graduated from high school without any grasp of the simplest concepts of elementary biology? The uproar we’ve seen in this country is as much the result of pi$$-poor public education as it is of fear, of fundamentalist nuttiness, and political malfeasance. We have had a good fifty years of educational theory that puts social goals ahead of learning. Result: a citizenry that will believe any da*n-fool lie a demagogue tells them and who haven’t the simplest clue to the facts of history, science, or common sense.

Frankly, folks…as the leader of the Free World, we have dropped the ball.