Don't blame the south. We're far smarter than you think.

It offends me when people say, "Oh, of course you had a hard time finding Erin a good school. You've only lived in Georgia and Texas since she's been school age." That is so not cool. I actually had one person tell me I should move anywhere north of the Mason Dixon Line because the schools are bound to be better. It was really about all I could do to maintain some tiny shred of composure at that.

I'll tell you, people still think southerners are bound to be dumb, for some crazy reason. How on earth can people assume that we're idiots when Georgia Tech was rated the #1 engineering school in the nation this year? Yeah, it was not MIT, not Harvard, not Princeton, not NYU, not Carnegie Melon. Although all those were rated very highly, GEORGIA Tech beat them all handily to be #1. While we're on the subject of universities, how about the entire SEC? There's not a bad school in it, and some of them (ahem... UF, I'm looking at you) are real standouts on a national and international level. How can people still say southerners are dumb when we have had so many of our own become President of the United States, and had the majority of high ranking military officers hail from our part of the country? (Yeah, West Point may be up north, but The Citadel, Vanderbilt, Virginia Military Institute, and many other great military colleges are well below the Mason-Dixon!) Why does this stereotype still exist when practically every southern state is home to so many major metropolitan modern cities which are practically trend setters for the world? Hardly any of us wear overalls and camo anymore.

I may be from the country, and like things like grits and collards, and enjoy country music, and think Jeff Foxworthy is the funniest person ever to come down the pike, but even so I received a far superior education in a rural southern school, when compared with what my husband received in a rural northern school. There are things I grew up knowing since I was Erin's age which never even occurred to him even in his 30's. This is nothing against Thak, of course. He couldn't help it that his dad chose to move to the middle of nowhere when he retired from the Air Force. The fact is, though, if southern education was so dumbed down and insufficient, then Thak would run circles around me intellectually, and he doesn't.

In fact, when I was a student at Georgia Tech (yeah, I'm pulling that card out. It applies here.) we had students from all over the nation, and all over the world. In my lab group, Junior year, we had one guy from Georgia, one from Kentucky, another from New Jersey, and then me, from Florida. I'll tell you, we were all about on a par with one another. The New Jersey guy didn't overshadow any of us southerners in the least. Let's be frank, Georgia Tech doesn't accept any idiots, and most of the people who go there, or did at one time, are southerners.

I will tell anyone who acts like Georgia, and the south as a whole, does not have it going on educationally and intellectually, exactly what's wrong with their theory, and in my mind, I may just think they are the insufficiently educated one for believing this stuff. I don't go saying that about their schools. In case I wasn't clear enough when referring to my husband's cut-rate Otter Tail County education, I think there are good and bad schools in any state, and no widespread statements can be made about what state is good or bad concerning education standards as a whole (individual districts, yes. A whole state, no.) If you look at the facts on it, that's absolutely true, too.

As a final thought, yes, I live in Texas now. I love Texas. I served in the Army here. I met Thak here... I love this state. Maybe I don't love the farthest west part of it as much as other parts, but I do love Texas just as much as I love Georgia, and while people will always make Bush jokes and talk about how we're such a red state and everything like that, the ones who take it very seriously irritate me. Yes, this state was run by Bush for a long time, but it was a decade ago! Yes, on the outside, me and Thak may seem like any other gun-toting Texans (if you lived where we live, you'd carry, too), but this again comes with the dumb stereotype. It's not cool. Our daughter goes to a good school, not a regular public school, to be sure, but a good school, right here in Texas. If we were in Dallas or Austin, she might even go to the public school we were zoned for because even Texas, Bush and all, has some good schools in it.

To borrow a quote from a good movie:

"Honey, just because I talk slow doesn't mean I'm stupid."

That's the damned truth of the matter, too. Southerners aren't dumb, but some of these uppity yankees who act like we are, surely make me wonder about them! (Said in jest, of course.)