Native Expectations

When I was going to school growing up, I always assumed that I’d be unprepared. I think we all did; Oklahoma has the kind of stereotype in the wider world such that we all assumed that everyone else was far ahead, and we were starting in a hole. As a consequence, there was enormous pressure to know as much as possible to make up for the deficit and be at least as prepared as average if one ever wanted to be able to leave. My personal assumption in school was that what we were expected to learn was the bare minimum baseline that would be required in the world beyond. So I always tried to master the material, memorize it, know it backward and forward in order to be able just to keep up at the next step. (This did not, of course, translate into making anyone in local authority happy, but what the hell did I care about them?) How could anyone that didn’t have the basic facts of algebra, grammar, literature, science, and finance hope to even keep their head above water in a larger pond? We all seem to have been woefully over-prepared.

I can’t speak for anyone else, but my experience in college, and especially since, has been just the opposite of what I’d expected. Far from being behind, the major problem has been adjusting to a world where everyone else doesn’t know what I always thought of as the baseline. Not a day goes by where someone around me doesn’t make some mistake of language, or reasoning, or math (although: see Romancing below) that would get them summarily laughed out of my senior English class. This, keep in mind, is as a professional in a large and diverse city (and dealing with professionals from San Diego to Saint Louis.) I shudder to think what it must be like in other environments.

I think this comes from people only doing the bare minimum to get by for years, and the attitude being pervasive enough so that’s all that’s expected. There was always an element of hunger that we all had that doesn’t seem to have entered into these people’s lives. When you have no sense of entitlement, and no guarantees of the future, just the fear of being trapped makes you work harder, think more, and expect far more out of yourself and those around you. I worked night and day in college to be able to solve almost any design problem to a level of perfection overnight (literally.) Now I watch as those around me bounce from solution to solution over a period of months just to arrive at the initial solution hiding in the front of my notes. If the vocabulary I developed so diligently isn’t dumbed down before I write a memo, I get nothing but confused looks. It’s kind of a bizarre world.

This has ramifications beyond me as an individual. I just know that at this very moment there are thousands of kids in India so ecstatically happy to get out of their villages that they’ll do an infinite amount of work just to get to the level of affluence where the average anglo kid in the Metroplex starts. Think Sputnik: if you’re trying to compete against an army of people that said “organic chemistry? You mean that’s all I have to do?” with people who can’t be bothered to study anything more difficult than “marketing” (whatever that is,) you may have a problem. According to WNYC’s OTM, the Defense Department is beginning to worry that the country will run out of enough native-born engineers and scientists to staff its weapons labs.

I often lie awake at night wondering if all of the brilliant, hungry kids I grew up with encountered the same low expectations. Not that I haven’t met smart, conscientious people since – it’s just that they’ve been few and far between (more on that later.) Saint-Simon (the younger, not the courtier) probably had the right idea. Perhaps I’m just seeing the downside of the cognitive assortment discussed below. After all, in a kingdom of nothing but the blind . . . .

What to do with this knowledge? I’m not sure.