It was our only date and...
Last edited Wed Aug 24, 2016, 04:39 PM - Edit history (2)
... I never really determined how she didn't know anything about Nazi Germany.
She worked as a greeter at a nearby K-Mart (when that store hired greeters) and saw me talking to my mother who was working as a cashier. She asked Mom about me in an interested manner after I left, so I later asked the greeter on a date.
She mentioned where she graduated from high school during the date. It was a school district in this area with a somewhat poor reputation -- lower graduation rates, lower SAT/ACT average test scores, etc. She didn't strike me as inherently dumb, but it could've been made worse if she was taking less advanced coursework at her school too. Oh! She also mentioned that her parents were very religious, but I never met them. I asked her on another date despite her incredible ignorance about the Nazis, but she declined.
If you think that's bad, I later married another woman who worked as a beautician. She had a high IQ according to a sample test that I gave her, but she'd spent the last couple years of high school at a local vocational school. She and her mother (who was in her 60's) looked for a house for me and my wife to rent while I was at work. They later showed me the one that they liked which was also cheap. It had a small swastika etched into the lawn! (I later discovered that the teenage son of the religious couple who'd previously rented the house was a "problem child" and a skinhead.) I screamed, "There's a damn swastika in the grass!" and neither of them knew what that meant! I was especially outraged that my mother-in-law didn't know about it! She was born in the 30's!! I was sort of half-yelling at her as I demanded to know how she couldn't know such a thing. She eventually replied, after I mentioned Germany during WW2 and other clues, that she had vague memories about the Nazis and what they did now that I mentioned it. That mother-in-law grew up with 12 siblings in a coal-mining town of Kentucky. Although that amazing ignorance wasn't the reason, the marriage didn't last long and I'm so pleased that my ex-wife didn't get pregnant by me.
I'm not done! In later years I worked at a factory where a recent immigrant was preparing for her citizenship test. I asked to look at the study guide and I chuckled over the easy questions. A Vietnamese-American co-worker overheard me and said, "Ask those two women over there if they know any! I guarantee with you they not know!" (His English wasn't the best.) At break time I did just that. Indeed, the women didn't know any of the answers, not even the number of stars on the USA flag. I eventually asked the two women if they could name the first President of the United States (which wasn't a question on the test) and they didn't know that either! I said, "He's on the $1 bill with his name under the portrait! Do you know now?" One of them replied, "I never paid attention. I'm not in school anymore, ya know!" Those two women were both children of former coal-miners from Kentucky too.
I live near Dayton, OH. There's many bright and educated people in this area, but there's also a fair number of unbelievably ignorant ones.
EDIT: I was fortunate to attend one of the better public schools in Ohio. At least it was rated very high when I attended. However, if all of my instructors had been like my elementary school teachers, I would've been in trouble. I had a first grade teacher confiscate a coin from New Zealand that I was showing another student at recess. She said it was punishment for me "lying" about it being real money! It's not like I was trying to pass it off as USA currency, and I knew even at that age that different countries had different money. A third grade teacher confidently told the class that the sky was blue because it reflected the color of the oceans! (It's blue because those wavelengths of light from the Sun get scattered in all directions by our atmosphere.)
I personally think teachers should be more respected in this country. However, that also means that they should be mostly composed of some of the best students from our universities. My former sister-in-law (who attended the same high school as me) earned a degree in education, and she said that she didn't need to study because it was so easy. She treated college as a place to party and have fun. Meanwhile, countries like Finland and Singapore try to direct many of their best students into teaching and the job is highly regarded, like medical doctors here.