I lived in a rich suburb in a rich county, and the public school system reflected this. It was your typical big suburban school system. When I got to Towson High it was about 2,200 kids in the top three grades. My graduating class was about 650. You could study almost anything. It was really first rate. It was a massive change when Marilyn and I lived north of the Catskills and raised children. When Alison and Parker graduated together, their class was 29 kids.
Because the school was so big, every seventh grader at Towsontown took a standardized test, a sort of junior SAT test. On the basis of this single test, the remainder of your academic life was laid out in precision detail. The next five years were organized, and attempting to vary your destiny was considered both futile and somewhat subversive.
The top ten percent of all students were the elite, the college prep group. These would become the future masters of the universe. They were destined to go to four year colleges, private colleges, becoming doctors and lawyers and scientists and engineers. They would become the future leaders of America. They were in accelerated classes. While others were taking 8th grade math, they were taking algebra. They were at least one year ahead of the others in taking biology, chemistry, and physics. They took AP advanced classes for college credit. Ten percent of 650 students worked out to roughly two classes of about 30+ students each, and for five years we moved in lockstep together, marching towards the future. I, of course, was a member of this exalted group, on the basis of my phenomenal ability at taking standardized tests, and in no way on the basis of my horrendously average grades.
Along the way, we were encouraged to mate and breed with other members of the top ten percent, to produce the next generation of elites. If necessary, because of the excess of teenage hormones, it was deemed acceptable to mate with members of a lower class, but breeding was certainly to be avoided, lest we waste our precious seed and eggs with subhumans. The overall theory was to allow the elites to sow their wild seeds with the lesser breeds, but to make sure they married within their class.
The next lower class was the normal kids, who made up about eighty percent of the school. These children had been tested and found wanting in the lottery of life. They would generally go to college, but it would be a public school, or even a community college. These unfortunates were often graced by the elites with being allowed to date and mate, but it was well known that these could only be temporary and physical affairs. After all, we, the elites, were all going to very expensive colleges on scholarships, and the lesser types would not be able to follow.
At the lowest level was the bottom ten percent, those assigned to Vo-Tech, or vocational technical training. They were considered almost a different species, and only spent a few hours every day at school before being shipped off campus to some form of job training. Such shipments were rumored to be made in off duty County Police transport buses, which was considered a good idea, since it would acclimate these knuckle-draggers to a frequent mode of future transportation after graduation. If they didn't end up going to jail and not passing Go, most would end up in the Army. This group invariably smoked, sported tattoos, grew mustaches (women, too!), and rode motorcycles. They would have frightened Marlon Brando in The Wild One. Nobody had anything to do with these examples of pond scum unless they needed drugs. Since there was a lot of drug activity in the Sixties and Seventies, a lot of people actually knew these guys.
On the basis of my amazing standardized test scores, I was assigned to the college prep crew, and my mother never let me forget it. As I mentioned, her duty was to make sure I fulfilled my academic destiny and my grades were never good enough. She was the sort who could complain 'Carling, you only got straight A's. You have the potential for so much more!' and mean every word. If I had graduated as valedictorian, it would probably not have been sufficient. My rebellion was to not give two shits, and I was a B- student at best. B- among the college prep kids, at least. This would have still been considered an A student among the normal kids. Worse, I often dated the normal kids, and even had friends among the dregs of humanity, the Vo-Tech crowd. I was smart enough, at least, to hide the last fact from my parents.
I picked up my algebra book and glanced at my homework sheet to see where in the book we were. I found my place easily enough and reviewed the chapter, but decided I needed to catch up, so I started at the beginning of the book. After a couple of hours, I had finished the book. This brought up a new dilemma. I had already gone through this shit the first time around - would I be able to survive doing it a second time without going batty? I glanced through the rest of my books and confirmed my fears.
I stood up and stretched and went to the kitchen and made myself a ham and cheese sandwich. I was hemmed in by the fact that in the here and now, I needed to graduate high school, graduate college, and get at least one graduate degree to make something of myself. It didn't matter that I had already gotten an associates, two bachelors, and a masters degree the first time around. That didn't count.
When I got out of high school in '73 I had gone to Rensselaer, RPI, for a bachelors in chemistry. Immediately after graduating in '77, I had gone to night school and gotten an MBA. Then, ten years later, in a new job, I had gone back to school for an associates and then a bachelors in computer science. If I was to repeat the sequence, I would go nuts.
But I could make some changes. As I thought about it, I started to get a wacky kind of idea. Way back when, in '78 the first time around, I had toyed with the idea of switching majors to become a chemical engineer. I have always been comfortable in an industrial setting and working in engineering related fields, probably thanks to my dad being an engineer. When I mentioned this to him, he just nodded and had a chemical engineer he knew talk to me. We all had a very pleasant dinner and discussion, and at the end I realized that I was actually a much better chemist than I was an engineer. I stayed a chemist and compensated by specializing in industrial chemistry. Any chemist can make drugs in the lab - I could make them by the ton in a factory! I spent the better part of ten years doing this.
But it was only after several years that I realized that I was actually a much better mathematician than I was a chemist! By the time I got through with my degrees I had certainly had enough math classes. Quantum mechanics is nothing but another semester of calculus. I picked up operations research and linear algebra getting the MBA, and so forth. By the time I got the degrees in computer science, I had the equivalent of at least a bachelors or a masters.
There used to be a television show called Numbers, about a math professor who had a brother who was an FBI agent. Every week he would come up with some strange aspect of set theory or number theory or information science to figure out who the killers were. In a hundred people, I would have been the only one who could not only understand what he was talking about, but could also figure out the shortcuts and discrepancies the show had to take.
My first foray into this had been at RPI. Everybody in the school had to take three semesters of calculus (the place is nerd heaven) plus either a semester of differential equations or a semester of computer programming. I had suffered enough with calculus so I took computer programming. Even though I was stoned and drunk about ninety percent of the semester, I still managed a solid B in the class. I even considered getting into programming, but no, I was a chemist; I put that silly thought out of my mind. The funniest part was that when I was a senior and needed an elective, I actually took differential equations on a lark and got another solid B, again half-baked the entire semester. A math degree, especially considering that I remembered most of my math, would be a breeze. I was going to have to give this some serious thought.