Coffee heat rising

Education in America

Biggest Mistake of My Life…

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Loafing under gray skies, I find myself gazing back on the major decisions of my life. Ever-entertaining….

It strikes me that the single worst decision I ever made was NOT to have majored, as an undergraduate, in a subject that would have landed me a decent job. Without benefit of a graduate degree.

As it is — stupidly having majored in English and pursued not one but two graduate degrees — I can’t get a “decent job” for love nor money.

Consider the likely possibilities:

An Ed.D. would have gotten me a principal’s position in some high school in a desirable location — like the San Francisco Bay Area, for example.

An MBA almost certainly would have led to a decently paying corporate job. Just about anywhere.

An MS in microbiology (my favorite subject) would have landed a job at a hospital or a university, pursuing interesting challenges.(nevvermind that women were not welcome in the sciences at the time…TOTALLY not welcome!)

Any of those jobs could have led me to a career far, far away from hot, muggy, intellectually backward Arizona.

But ohhhhhh  no!  I had to chase a Ph.D. in English…so that I wouldn’t have to go back and change my undergraduate major to a subject that would have made economic sense.

What? Me? Make sense? 

Surely you jest…

How I Got to Arizona…

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And  now, after yesterday’s astonishing mercury level, it’s only 108° in shade of the back porch. That’s comin’ on to 5:00 p.m.

Brrr! Get out the sweaters!

Can  you imagine? Honestly! I could brain my parents for dragging me to this hellish place. They made me skip my senior year in high school, betook themselves to Sun City, and shipped me off to the University of Arizona in Tucson. This, so that my father could retire to Sun City.

Understand: I planned to attend the University of California at Berkeley…and was well on my way to qualifying for that when they yanked me out of high school.

Did they understand that there was a qualitative difference between the universities?

My mother certainly did. I doubt if my father did — or if he cared. He wasn’t interested in giving me a fancy education. He was interested in retiring. ASAP.

What a mean thing to do to me, after I’d worked my butt off through high school to get into Berkeley!

Did he understand that? Sorta. Kinda. But…I doubt it.

He was a blue-collar boy, through and through. In fact, I’m not sure he even graduated from high school. The minute he qualified to get into the military, he joined the Navy. From there (his health sagging), he went into the Coast Guard. After that, the rest of his work life was dedicated to the Merchant Marine. Well…except for the ten hellish years with Saudi Aramco.

He did pretty well in the Merchant Marine, by the way. Especially for a guy who had exactly zero higher education.

Give him credit: he paid for all four years of my time at the University of Arizona. I graduated Phi Beta Kappa, and, after marrying a lawyer, transitioned into a Ph.D. program at Arizona State University.

But…know that it had been understood that after high school I would go to Berkeley, move into with my great-aunt and great-grandmother in their  bungalow (which had room to accommodate me nicely), and get the bachelor’s degree from the University of California.

Which, we might say (by way of understatement), was a far cry from the U of A. And an even farther cry from ASU.  Did he know that? Well…I kinda doubt it.

He was a workin’-class boy; grew up in Texas chasing the rear ends of cows until he made his escape by running off to the Navy.

And he was not about to diddle away his retirement cache to send his girl child to some fancy college. After all, what was a girl supposed to grow up to do? Be a wife and mother, of course. And ya sure didn’t need a college degree for that!

Today the UofA has a much improved reputation, regarded as one of the top 25 U.S. universities by Times Higher Education. Well…it wasn’t like that then: back in the day it was renowned as a party school. And I got in a year early with a middling-high grade average after three years of taking five solids in high school.

The upshot was that I landed a degree from what was then a mediocre institution but what is now pretty well regarded. Who’s to know, eh?

So…here we are in 2026, still in Arizona.

Do I regret not going to UC Berkeley?  Damn right!

Do I regret taking three degrees from the University of Arizona and Arizona State University?  Not really.

Hey. It’s better than nothin’, eh? 😉

Those degrees did get me a high-test husband and a university faculty job, so I can’t complain too much.

But still…sometimes I do wonder what would have been the outcome if even one of those degrees had come from Berkeley.

Well. We’ll never know. 

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…