Punting

[godream]

So I'm taking a brief break from panicking about 6.002 and doing egocentric Google searches. I have a fairly unusual last name, as names go: Google gets 15300 hits for it in all languages and 1850 in english, which seems like a ton till you realize that most of them (in English, at least) are for this photographer named Gery.

And I'm flipping through looking at page summaries for this guy's galleries, and Polish genealogy websites, someone named Wally commenting on nuclear reactors, lots of pages where my dad's posted something or been mentioned, a few with my siblings, and yet somehow the weirdest thing so far is seeing quotes from Dr. C---------, Ph. D. Now that I think of it, nobody on my dad's side of the family that I know of has anything near that type of a degree; my dad (who is awesome and brilliant) has his s.b. but his dad only went so far as eighth grade -- not that there's anything wrong with that especially given the time and situation. So I see this and I sorta double-take... it's a really weird feeling that there's someone of that description out there.

The other, more interesting thing is this: my mother's family is definitely more educated, and God I don't think I ever realized this, but higher-class, so to speak. They're back-in-the-day Americans; moved around a bit but the quiet New England town my mom lives in definitely has a street with her mom's maiden name, and she can trace back to exactly who the road's namesake is. There are a few very pretty houses among her side of the family, including this awesome huge-windowed Jersey shore beach house we love to visit over the summer. Her people are or were professors and accountants and lawyers. I had a great-uncle (I think? I'm bad at naming relations) whose retirement was partly funded by the royalties from the chemistry textbook he wrote.

My dad's father spent time as a soldier, was at Pearl Harbor when it was bombed, was a postman at home and worked up to three jobs to support his family. I think his parents immigrated to the US, I'm not sure. My grandma has been clipping coupons and saving pennies her whole life, writing essays to enter contests. My dad had a part-time job teaching other kids music for a few years before he went into college, which becomes more startling when you realize he left for college (MIT, actually) at age 15.

And me: there isn't a time in my memory when four years of college *wasn't* what I'd do right after high school. 92% of my graduating class went into 4-year colleges, an addition percent into 2-year... and somewhere deep inside I boggle when I hear about numbers for the former any lower than, say, 80%. What, you mean everyone doesn't go to college? Which maybe tells a lot about which side of the family my upbringing has favored, and maybe doesn't.

Sometimes I'm startled to discover just how much the spoiled suburban WASP kid I reallly am.

ETA: total lack of transitions between paragraphs, ideas, sentences, whatever should be blamed on sleep dep; it all followed naturally at the time.

Comments

just to shock you!

[blue-everglades.livejournal.com]

...and somewhere deep inside I boggle when I hear about numbers for the former any lower than, say, 80%. What, you mean everyone doesn't go to college?

Haha, fyi: only 30% or so of my graduating class in high school went on to college. Something like 10%-20% went on to 2 year programs. (And this applies to the the roughly 400 people in my high school class who actually made it to graduation. There were almost 600 of us freshman year.) Final statistic: I think only 3 or 4 of us even left the state. I am the only one who did so without a sports scholarship.

Re: just to shock you!

[blue-everglades.livejournal.com]

(Really, I think one of the big reasons I got into MIT was because of my high school's pretty low statistics, so I'm not complaining.)

[jessiehl.livejournal.com]

I thought everyone went to college until I was about 9, when I left my 95% white, wealthy elementary school for one in a poor, almost-all-black neighborhood surrounded by three housing projects, which happened to have a small math/science magnet program. Since then it takes a lot more to surprise me.

[godream.livejournal.com]

And I always read your posts about this stuff with interest, semi-shock, and appreciation. (And get distracted in the middle of commenting in response.) It's weird -- I wonder how people can let religion or racism or homophobia or whatever blind them so much, feel almost skeptical (no... people can't really be THAT bad), until finally I put it next to all the stuff I just get the gut-level WTF about, assumptions that I've carried since day 1, and sorta start to understand how helpless we can be against our upbringings. Not that that makes it OK, of course...

Re: just to shock you!

[godream.livejournal.com]

You've told me this before and I think somewhere secretly deep down inside I just don't actually believe you. You mean there are people who didn't take the SATs, who didn't spend senior year doing paperwork, whose discussions with their guidance counselor and/or parents didn't involve college? Who are nineteen years old and done with education? Whoa. If you don't go to college, what do you *do*?

I'm only half-serious, but still at some level I *am* half-serious.