The Mason-Dixon line

 I've been a "Yankee Transplant" to the South since the mid-1980s and am still having unexpected epiphanies about the sociological differences.

The latest one has to do with the anxiety that Yankee-born parents feel when their kids don't seem to be excelling in the Southern schools they attend. Maybe we should call it YEAS -- Yankee Educational Anxiety Syndrome.

My grandson (not quite age 6) is a bundle of neuroses. So is his father, my son. I don't get to spend that much time with them, so my occasional visits offer lots of revelations. What I witnessed this weekend was very concerning, and reminded me of some preceding generations (his, mine, and my parents').

I think Southerners are insecure about their educations, and so are Yankees, for entirely different reasons. Somewhere along the way, Yankees had it drilled into them that THEY are the standard-bearers for educational excellence, and most Southerners are pathetic, dimwitted, knuckle-dragging, barefoot, meth-addicted Republicans. 

I know my parents felt this way. When my dad and his cohort came back from World War II, they were also coming back from the Great Depression. Before the war, you could be "from" a small town, a farm, or a tenement in a large city. Or rarely, an ivory tower on a hillside somewhere. After the war, suburbs began being built. All these GIs who grew up some flavor of poor wanted something a lot better for their children. Suburbs represented the ideal. It didn't matter where you came from. You were there to create something better. There were churches, but it was understood that work and school were one thing, church and home were another, and you kept them separate. That's why my trailing-edge Boomer generation didn't get taught to address teachers as "Sir" or "Ma'am." The suburbs, at least in the 1940s into the 1970s, were something of a melting pot (except when it came to race). Education was viewed as the gateway out of poverty, into success. That mindset lasted until the mid-1960s, when the GIs' kids began to get other ideas. 

For those of us in the North, there was a clear line of demarcation between "us" and those in the South, who were viewed as hopelessly regressive. Our parents and teachers were relentless in correcting our grammar and pronunciation. If I had ever uttered the word "ain't" in my father's presence, I wouldn't be here blogging. I'd be in the brain-damage ward of a nursing home after my father "whomped me upside the head," a phrase that he and my mother would have cringed at and launched into one of their many lectures. If the phone rang and I yelled out "I'll get it," my mother would have chastised me for pronouncing it something like "Ah'll get it" when the correct pronunciation is like "EYE'll get it." Any word or phrase that even suggested the South was taboo. Our parents seemed to see proper speech as the armor that would save us from a mediocre life. 

So, are all the schools in the south hopelessly inferior to those in the north? I honestly don't know. But Northerners are firmly convinced that they are, and Southerners stopped caring about what the North thinks a long time ago. 

When my son's dad and I were preparing for his entrance into kindergarten, my ex nearly had a nervous breakdown. He was convinced that:

• Every child had to enter kindergarten being able to read fluently and
• It was the PARENTS' job to teach the academic subjects and the teachers' job to socialize them.

So when we were a few months away from kindergarten and the boy was still struggling to pick out words while we hovered over him, we ended up calling someone from the school system, asking how we could get him to start reading before kindergarten. The person we spoke to laughed out loud and probably wondered what was wrong with us. Her view was directly opposite that of my ex. Leave the math, reading and science to the teachers and try to socialize the child at home - that would make the teachers' job easier. I have since come to believe that this makes a decent amount of sense. But at the time, my son's dad (and I, to a lesser extent) saw this as a clear warning that he was going to miss out on the superior level of intellect that our own teachers in New York had imparted to us. 

Spoiler alert: Our son is fine. Whether that's because he spent his last few years of high school in New Jersey, I can't say. But I see no educational deficits in him.

Emotionally, it's a different story. He married a lady from middle Tennessee, and yes, many of the stereotypes seem to be true when it comes to drug use and underachievement. She's one of the few in her extended family to break out of that pattern and I cannot think of a better partner for my son. 

Both of them are relentlessly instructive. My daughter-in-law focuses on behavior and carefully explains each correction. My son teaches, teaches, teaches at every waking moment. Sometimes he attempts to teach my grandson something new, and what I hear beneath the words is something like "OMG, we have to get the Ukrainian refugees out of here right now because the Russian army is headed this way!!!!!"  Life or death that little M can't change the batteries in the TV remote to match the diagram. I don't understand the impatience they demonstrate. What are they worried about? We now have three generations of post-war parents giving themselves ulcers over academic achievement. The Southerners we know seem to take a more relaxed approach -- which seems to embody all the Northern transplants' worst fears. 

It's a Yankee thing, for sure. Since my ex and I both come from at least half-Jewish backgrounds, and Jews are stereotypically obsessed with education, I thought it had something to do with that. But my best friend, a very Irish New England transplant, relates that she does the same thing with her son. She apologizes to the teachers for what she perceives as unacceptable underachievement, while the teachers down here in Georgia shake their heads and tell her to relax - he's doing fine. 

I happen to agree. The kids are all right, despite all our best efforts. We will not need to whomp them upside the head - unless they start using meth or vote Republican.