Category Archives: personal history

viva las incultas

I have a post in the pipeline about what it’s like to grow up in Las Vegas. I have been distracted by a more pressing topic: what it’s like to grow up in a public education system recently deemed the worst in the nation, so bad that parents are considering moving out of state to avoid the horrors of watching their child be instructed in algebra by a homicidal maniac. (In my Algebra II Honors teacher’s defense, he didn’t become a homicidal maniac until well after he left his position at LVA. That said, I did once witness him throw a roll of toilet paper at a student.)

I’m pretty forthright about the fact that the Clark County School District is a facsimile of a sham and that I learned next to nothing during the thirteen years I spent in school there. (Except how to build a bridge out of toothpicks, but I think I’ve mentioned the bridge-building song before.) I graduated first in my class at the second-best public high school in the district at the time and I couldn’t tell you the first thing about any of the scientific disciplines… also, I drew pictures of the word problems on the A.P. Calculus exam instead of solving them because I lost hope after integrals came on the scene. I shouldn’t be the valedictorian of ANYTHING except the Class of Crossword Puzzle Solving and Making Up Legitimate-Sounding Words. Yet there I was, at the graduation of the class of 2007, speechifying like I had learned how to balance chemical equations or read Julius Caesar in its entirety. I guess I got an early start in learning how to bullshit.

I think it’s most effective for me to enumerate a few hard facts about what it’s like to grow up in the state with the worst public education in the country. And keep in mind while you read this that I went to schools in affluent areas from kindergarten through eighth grade and attended a selective performing arts magnet high school with a GPA requirement (not to mention an audition). I was a LOT better off than most kids in Las Vegas. Nevertheless…

I’ve never done a chemistry experiment. When I started my freshman year at Vassar, I had never written a “paper” or anything of note that was longer than a five-paragraph essay. I didn’t know what a direct object was until my French teacher taught me during sophomore year. We didn’t learn that in freshman French because our teacher couldn’t control the class long enough to teach us anything beyond “bonjour” and “je m’appelle.” There were 34 students in my A.P. English class senior year. We were allotted a single year to learn all of world history. It never occurred to me that people my age might study philosophy or economics or computer science; those were subjects reserved for Ph.D. candidates who had, in my mind, magicked their way into the upper echelons of academia. Meanwhile, I was taught every year until the eighth grade what the parts of speech were because invariably, half the class didn’t know what a noun was.

I remember, distinctly, reading A Separate Peace during summer vacation and wondering what it would be like to go to an elite high school in the same way that I wondered what it was like to ride in a rocketship.

To write this down makes me angry. It makes me furious! I have a sharp and agile mind and I feel like, despite my parents’ best efforts and their success in turning me into at least an avid reader and critical thinker, what could have been the cognitive equivalent of a cheese grater is instead the cognitive equivalent of… cottage cheese. No Child Left Behind, my ass. Nevada is too poor to pay for chemistry experiments and instead we’re left with hapless chemistry teachers trying desperately to ignite some spark of interest in their students by mass-printing black and white diagrams that explain Avogadro’s number through a convoluted geographic metaphor. And as a result, I’m 23 and last month I did a puzzle hunt with my coworkers at the software company where I work and I couldn’t contribute anything useful to the puzzle about gamma decay because guess what? I don’t fucking know anything about gamma decay. NOTHING.

Often, it’s a matter of funding. Many of my teachers were brilliant, kind, and interesting, but you can only do so much with 30 to 40 children or teenagers in a classroom and outdated textbooks and no money for science experiments and broken air conditioning in May and so few classrooms that every five weeks, you have to spend the day herding your 30 fifth-graders across the school instead of teaching. My high school library looked like a sad, picked-over used bookstore.

Just as often, it’s a matter of heinously poor teachers. Every student in Clark County, at least, has a war chest of horror stories about their terrible teachers. How about my junior year English teacher, who taught us a grammatically incorrect, bastardized form of MLA citation?* For that matter, how about my eighth grade English teacher, who taught us Animal Farm without mentioning that it was allegorical? I am dead serious. If I hadn’t been such a raging geek, I might still wonder why George Orwell wrote that bizarre little story about murderous pigs. How about my friends’ history teacher, who taught her students that dinosaurs roamed the earth until a few hundred years ago? (Actually, this might have been the anatomy teacher. Either way… rough. Rough times in public education.)

I had a handful of absolutely stellar teachers during my childhood and I would be remiss to leave them out of this diatribe. The venerable English teacher, whose A.P. classes were the stuff of legend at LVA, taught a writing philosophy that has become the backbone of my career. The passionate and slightly mad A.P. U.S. History teacher, who brought to life the connections between history and the current age. (Also, his motto was “Normal People Suck.” It’s valuable when you’re sixteen.) Together with his great compatriots in te social studies hallway, they kindled in me a deep interest in history, literature, and culture and a passion for social justice. There were others, but those four stand out because I continue to consider their lessons on a regular basis.

But seriously, guys, I’m 23 and I’ve never done a chemistry experiment. SOMETHING IS NOT RIGHT.

I have no concrete suggestions to improve the state of education in Nevada. Read more. Make your kids read more. Discover money growing on trees. Fire all the teachers who aren’t the ones I mentioned in the previous paragraph (by which I mean “fire all the teachers who aren’t Mr. D_____,” since the other three are retired, retired, and dead, respectively). Hire more teachers who don’t suck. Pay them decent wages. Enact a state income tax to fund our new, competent teachers. Reinvent the wheel. Discover an alternate universe. Prove Fermat’s last theorem. Cry. Do something, because I have so much faith in my beloved hometown and it will not succeed if we let all of our children’s brains turn to cottage cheese. Not everyone can be a stripper! Someone’s gotta be a software engineer!

*She told us that quotations ending with a non-period punctuation mark should be cited as follows:

“My English teacher was an idiot” (Cass 36)!

instead of the accurate:

“My English teacher was an idiot!” (Cass 36).

cleaning out my closet

Mark my words — if I don’t stop myself while I’m ahead, I will end up on Hoarders in 30 years’ time. The contents of my closet include the following:

  • a tap costume wrapped in three plastic bags to prevent it from vomiting glitter all over my closet (all of Nevada Ballet was covered in glitter for weeks after three of us wore this costume for recital one year. I hate to think what would have happened if they had dressed the entire Youth Company in glittery tutus for Giselle… we would have had to convert the building into a new branch of the Liberace Museum)
  • every note I ever received between the ages of 12-15, a period during which we passed a veritable crapton of notes. I can probably toss the vast majority of these because I don’t think there’s any reason to remember the kinds of horrible fights we used to carry out and resolve through notes when we were 13… but my sentiment won’t let me throw out all the notes the boy from freshman year Geometry wrote me. Hello, I need proof that I once seduced someone ENTIRELY THROUGH THE POWER OF MY HANDWRITING.
  • all of the plastic flowers I got backstage during four years of dance concerts at my high school. Which was a lot, because obviously I was really popular. Actually, no, my parents just always got them for me and there were three shows a year.
  • the kicker: the movie ticket from my first date. In an envelope marked “This is the movie ticket from my first date.”

I’ll save a lot of what I found in my closet. Most importantly, I’ll save the years and years’ worth of diaries and journals that I’ve kept somewhat consistently since seventh or eighth grade. Looking back through my older journals is a TRIP. First off, I have long suspected that I was a certifiable nutball when I was younger and to read what I wrote back then… yes. I was cray. I feel really bad for all those poor preteen boys I had TERRIFYINGLY INTENSE CRUSHES on because they probably had to shell out for some serious protection after all the fear-for-their-lives I instilled in them. Really, in retrospect, my drunk-texting habit doesn’t seem so bad. Judging by the path I was on in those days, I’m kind of surprised I haven’t turned into that lady who wore diapers so she could drive to her stalk her ex without having to stop to pee.

All that aside, I’ve always loved diving back into my old journals to see what psychological meltdowns I’ve gotten over since any given day. It’s one of my favorite activities, and I unearthed some long-lost GEMS in my older journals. (Most notable: the list of “Reasons Why I Should Not Like T_____,” circa 2002. Best reason: “He called me ‘spawn of evil.’”) Before I box up my journals, I want to make a list of the best journal entries of the past 15 or so years, because there are some doozies in there.

But after that? I’m boxing them up. I’m packing them away, sending them to Spokane to the new house, and not looking at them until I get older. They lose their magic when you’ve read them too many times, which is what’s happened with my college journals. I know them cover to cover and I want to forget them again so I can continue to live my life with the clueless, unjaded abandon that has led me on so many adventures. I don’t need to remind myself what it was like to be 18 and miserable, 19 and crazy, 20 and floundering, 21 and sick. I’m 22 and happy and healthy (well, getting there) and fabulous and going confidently in the direction of my dreams. I lived through all that shit already and I don’t need to do it again.

But before then… stay tuned, for you, too, may learn the reasons why I should not like T_____, circa 2002.

only nerds like assigned seating

Today is the first day of classes at Vassar. I do feel a little strange and sentimental about it, but if we’re being honest, has the first day of school ever really been fun? Personally, I spent my first days of school every year in a constant state of anxiety and, um, having absolutely no idea where anything was even at schools I had attended for three years. (Fact: my senior year of high school, I had to ask the counselor where the lockers were. She asked if I was a freshman. When I told her no, I was a senior, she looked at me like she was confused that I hadn’t just gotten off the short bus.)

When I was in middle school, the big anxiety was What Team You Were On (I can’t remember if we said “on” or “in.” Hmm). No, we weren’t debating the finer points of tops and bottoms just yet; each grade at my middle school was divided into four “teams” with whom you shared all of your “core classes.” So woe betide you if you weren’t on the cool team, or the team with all of your friends, or if you just ended up on a team with all the weirdos who still wore jean jackets and light-up shoes. You were on 7-3? Oooh, all the bitchy dance team girls are on that team. Have fun! Or worse — you’re on 7-2? Umm, NOBODY is on 7-2. You’re gonna be so bored. You’re on 8-1 and your best friend is on 8-3, but your crush is on 8-3 and if you get in a fight with your best friend, she can totally talk smack about you to your crush during science and you can’t do anything about it because you’re stuck in the 8-1 hall with that weird guy with frosted tips poking you in the back for the entire 50 minutes of algebra.

Middle school: shit was rough, and never rougher than the days when you learned who you were doomed to spend your year with.

High school was a little better, at least in the rainbow unicorn puppy bubble that was my performing arts high school where we all loved each other and only got bitchy when casting for shows went up or dance class placements for the next year were assigned. But the first day of school was invariably a sweaty, awful day where you tramped around our ginormous campus in the 110-degree Las Vegas heat from one class to another, cursing the gods who put seemingly the entire sophomore theatre class in sixth period chem with you because you were surely going to have to spend the entire freakin’ year listening to a bunch of idiots singing showtunes. I breathed a sigh of relief when the first day passed, block scheduling happened and we only had to go to four classes a day and the teachers all realized that they had to separate the theatre majors before all hell broke loose, never to be contained again.

Then came college. Not just one but TWO first-days-of-classes every year, and so many buildings whose abbreviations on your course schedule make no sense, and you’re STILL sweaty and running around and discovering your third year in that “OB” does not, in fact, stand for “Olmsted Building” (if only I had taken that as a sign NOT to take the Faulkner seminar).

So once you’ve located the classroom in question, you now have the unenviable pleasure of finding out Who Is In Your Class. And the further you get into college, the more fraught with disaster a class list can be. Will you be forced into a ten-person seminar in a dimly lit room with hipsters whose reluctance to speak in class will force you into a semester-long talking binge because you can’t handle silence in an academic setting? Or will that guy who had an academically-induced crush on last semester join you for another four months to learn even more about Walt Whitman’s weird sexual metaphors? And… wait… if he’s there, can you sit next to him? Is that socially acceptable? Should you even sit directly next to someone in a class that isn’t full, anyway? Should you leave a space? Is this like the urinal? What if you don’t leave a space and then EVERYONE ELSE DOES? Do you move? GODDAMMIT, PROFESSORS, WHY CAN’T YOU JUST ASSIGN US SEATS?!

I don’t miss the first day of school, kids. I don’t miss the aimless wandering around campuses that I should have long known by heart, burdened by my tragically poor sense of direction. I don’t miss worrying that my best friend is going to use her yearlong position on team 8-3 with my supercrush to steal him away from me. I don’t miss waiting anxiously to find out whether the professor will sign me into an overfull class or angsting about the fact that I’m sitting across from someone whose roommate I totally hooked up with last year and he absolutely thinks I’m a crazy skank. (That actually never happened, believe it or not, but it totally could have.)

All this said, be it known that I did have to wander the UNLV campus tonight trying to find the building where we were learning music for Sweeney. I guess I’m not out of the lost-on-campus woods just yet.

smart is a social construct

Welcome to Vassar! This is just like the scene at the beginning of Center Stage when Sandy Cohen tells the new ballerinas and Sergei that though they may have been the best dancers in Podunk, Nofreakingwhere, they aren’t fit to bring Cooper Nielsen cookies for next time here in New York. It’s like this: I know. You were one of the smart kids at your high school. People bowed down to your grammar, your sass, your calculus skills; you might have known more about the U.S. Constitution than your high school dean.

Alas, your superiority complex is about to be sledgehammered. You are one of 2500 here in Vassar’s hallowed halls. The guy down the hall who plays acoustic guitar in his single and stares at his abs in the mirror? The girl who wandered down the hall naked last Friday and then spent an hour puking near (not in) the toilet? That entire table of lax bros who feel the need to bring their sticks to the DC (aside: why can’t they leave them at the gym? Don’t they have lockers? MUST YOU ALWAYS BE ACCOMPANIED BY A PHALLIC SYMBOL)? Every last one of them got into the same school as you. Except for a couple questionable legacies, every damn person at Vassar is as smart as you are.

You, like I, probably kept yourself sane in high school by reminding yourself that everyone around you was kind of an idiot. (Unless you went to fancypants boarding school, in which case, go put on a cable-knit sweater and comfort yourself with the knowledge that Dan Brown was a “fac brat.” Michaela, that was for you, even though I’m pretty sure you don’t read this.) That douchey guy who dated the girl with cankles instead of you? NOT AS SMART AS YOU. The dingbats from your dance class who always got the solos? NOT AS SMART AS YOU.

My first few months at Vassar destroyed my superiority complex. Not only was I painfully single and NOT a member of VRDT, but I WASN’T EVEN SMARTER THAN ANYONE ELSE. Naturally, that was probably a good thing for me to realize, since I was kind of an asshole during high school because I thought I was the queen of everything, and it meant that I had goals to work toward for the rest of college. I graduated secure, once again, in the knowledge that I was the queen of everything (please note that I held a prize ceremony for my friends and me because I was sad that I didn’t get any school-sponsored awards. Guys, I solve my own confidence problems).

What helped me on that path? Well, for one, working hard so that I stopped sucking at all the things I enjoyed doing. But for another… realizing that among the painfully smart student body of Vassar College, there is still a hierarchy.

This is how it goes.

1. Top of the food chain: the academics. They might have a useful major. They might be paying $200,000 for a degree in Medieval and Renaissance studies. But they will be listed ALL OVER your graduation program, causing you to stalk them on Facebook because you’re sure that they never hooked up with anyone you know within the past four years and that’s simply unthinkable to a social butterfly like you. Though it’s not universally true that the smartest of the smartest spend their weekend nights reading Butler and doing their prelabs (which is a bitch, because it sucks when that skanky girl from D Block got Phi Beta Kappa and you didn’t and HOW IS SHE SMARTER THAN YOU SHE WEARS CORSETS IN PUBLIC), there were a LOT of people in my graduating class who were winning prizes who I SWEAR didn’t actually exist.

2. The science kids. I’m going to confess here that I am completely inept when it comes to the sciences. The only reason I got A’s in my high school science classes is because I don’t think my teachers knew how to give other grades. Among the science majors at Vassar, the premeds and the research-bound, there are a number of articulate, well-rounded people who are apparently just good at every facet of academia (bitches). There are also a whole passel of bimbos and bros. I don’t really mean bimbos — I just liked the alliteration — but I swear that of all the girls who looked like they belonged in a sorority at ASU, the vast majority of them were science majors. It blew my mind that the girls who, judging by their Facebooks, spend their weekends taking pictures of themselves making sexy faces at each other in Forever 21 tops (I clearly don’t belong to this category because I am incapable of making sexy faces), were capable of achieving honors in science majors and being accepted to prestigious research programs. Same for the dude bros who play Frisbee yet are apparently chemistry whiz kids: it’s like, wait. You thought it was a good idea to throw a party in an academic building… but you’re going to MED SCHOOL? You’re going to be my DOCTOR someday? (Sorry to use an example from real life, but it’s just too good to pass up.)

3. The verbose humanities majors. A lot of the philosophy kids fall under this umbrella. They are the proverbial acoustic guitar-playing, long-haired, sleepy-eyed potheads who, when asked to extrapolate on the meaning of life, will go off for the next twenty minutes using words with a lot of prefixes and suffixes that aren’t anywhere in your mental dictionary. They’re the kids who decorate their rooms with On the Road or Fear and Loathing posters, but can whip out a 10-page paper on the existential crises of Kerouac and Thompson in relation to intersubjectivity and the apathy of the 20th century. Like… they know big words and they might actually use them correctly on occasion, although usually, they’re just vomiting shit up on a paper and that’s why they aren’t up there with the academic rock stars, because they haven’t actually bothered to learn what intersubjectivity means.

4. The music majors and the drama majors. Aww… your senior project was really good!

Just kidding, guys. You know I love you.

Also, I feel like this is probably kind of offensive, but it’s not like I’m going to see any of you again anytime soon, so whatever.