Sabotage

At the risk of sounding like a snob, I left my class last night shaking my head in disbelief. Let me first say, that my instructor is amazing. I love her & am looking through the course catalog to see if she is teaching any other classes that apply to my major. She is smart, funny, tough, insightful, forward-thinking, engaging & the list goes on and on. She is so wonderful to talk to, that when she dismisses us for break, no one wants to leave the room for fear of missing something. I digress. Last night we were discussing on early development (conception, DNA, etc.....in a two words: basic biology). It is amazing to me that I am in a room full of women in a college class that know little or nothing about basic, human biology. I mean to the point that they didn't know how long sperm live inside of the body, they didn't know what kegels are, they didn't know that you can tell, if you pay attention to your body, when they are ovulating. How can this be??? How can you be a woman in 2006 and not know some of these things? I mean, they've got to, at least, read Cosmo. I guess I'm assuming that all other women are like me & the ones I seem to travel with, and are enlightened women. And when I say enlightened women, I'm not trying to sound elitist, I'm saying women that revel in, well being women. And knowing a little bit more than which lip gloss matches with which handbag.
I remember being in 7th grade and learning about recessive and Dominant recessive genes. Many of these women didn't understand the XX & XY chromosome deal. WTF?!?! And as we were talking about XX and XY, the instructor was talking about how, in some cases with genetic 'defects', the women are the carriers, but only the male children are affected. And that is because we 'give' them one of our X's, so by nature men can be considered the weaker sex. I raised my hand and added my .02 and said how there have been studies done, for instance, on premature babies & that it has been noted that many premie deaths are boys as opposed to girls and they feel that the X factor is the reason why. The teacher ellaborated for a bit & my neighbor to my left leaned in to me and said in a whisper, "You're really smart." I smiled and turned red. I thanked her. I was thinking to myself, "Well, I'm not dumb. There are plenty smarter out there. But this class....is scary." I'm just amazed at, really, how simple we are. We have all of this technology, so many free resources to read from. We are a 'rich' nation, with many, many resources. And yet, we produce people who can barely think, barely read. What is happening here? It is disturbing. And how scary it must be for these instructors, who see this, semester in and semester out. The other thing I would like to add here is that the class is mixed from women in their late teens, early twenties...all the way up to mid to late 40's. So, I'm not using my 'base' as 20 year olds with a muffin top and year-round tan.