Ignorance can be corrected. Stupidity is an attitude – a decision to not notice the things around you and learn from them. Ignorance says “I don’t know.” Stupidity says “What? New information makes me uncomfortable, so I’m going to go back to watching cat videos on YouTube. No, I do not think interracial marriage is OK and only white, land-owning men should be able to run for office!”

My grandma on my dad’s side has always had this thirst for knowledge that’s almost disturbing. Back when she was healthy, she would sit at the computer all day and learn about everything from the best way to fertilize her roses to the valves in the human heart. I know she graduated from high school, but that was back in the day where women were expected to get married and make babies, so their education got coated with Home Ec classes and child development studies. She’s a sweet woman with such a high pitched voice she refuses to answer the phone for fear of a telemarketer asking to “speak to your mommy or daddy please?” And even though she had been stricken with polio as a teenager, married young, had children, raised them and then began to grow old under the dominating shadow of my grandpa (who I love dearly) – she refused to stop learning.

Granted, she would call me frequently with questions like “I lost the AOL internet. Where do I find it?” and “How to I email a picture?” she caught on fairly quickly and retained most of it.

It always frustrated her that I wasn’t ever as excited about my education as she was, but I wasn’t going to lie. Things came easy to me at a young age – reading, writing, basic math, memorization – it all left me thinking “Yeah, I can do that. Now what?” I never valued sitting in a classroom and listening to teachers drone on and on about the context clues in ‘White Fang’ because I had already picked up on the context clues and I already understood that the whole book was a metaphor for the struggles of everyday life (i.e. “the wild”). I already knew to be suspicious of our textbook writers becasue there’s always two (and sometimes more) sides to every story. I already understood that the oppression of women in the early 1900s (and for like…ever…before that) could be compared to the oppression of women that was (and is still) happening in the Middle East. What I didn’t understand was why we had to sit there and re-discuss it over and over.

I take that back – I understood we had to re-discuss it because most of the kids in class still hadn’t gotten it. That was fine, and I didn’t love them any less because of it. But why did I have to sit there?

I hoped things would change as I got older, but they never did. We still sat there and overanalyzed every little thing (and I always already understood it). Even the literature class I took during my freshman year of college consisted of re-hashing Kurt Vonnegut while I sat there thinking ‘This is his brilliance! He’s laughing at us in his grave right now while we make futile attempts to grasp something he never wanted us to grasp in the first place!’

Except for math – which got progressively difficult once they threw letters in there. When it comes to math, I know that to this day I still have the mental capacity to grasp it all, I just don’t have the desire. Seriously – I picked my college major partially based on the fact that I would only have to take one math class (I passed it! Woohoo!).

I was always told that this would be the year it got hard, this would be the year I really had to buckle down. But it never happens. I’m not overly-intelligent and I’m not a genius – I still need spell-check, I do addition and multiplication with my fingers, and for about a year I thought euthanasia was some phenomenon to do with “youth in Asia.” I’m just really good at playing real-life-connect-the-mental-dots. Most of the time. It sounds like I’m complaining about being intelligent, but really, I’m unintelligent with a desire to become intelligent, and that’s really all it takes.

Which takes me back to my grandma. She refuses to be stupid and she refuses to stop cramming as much information into her brain as possible. Even now, with her health worse than before and her ability to use a computer almost nonexistent, she loves for me to explain to her what it is I do at the newspaper office at school and how exactly I do it. Even if I explain it seven times.

I’ll never value traditional education like my grandma does, but I’ll always value learning things. Heck, I think that’s why I’ve loved my internships so much. I’ve learned more on the job that I ever will in a classroom, and I think that’s something our political leaders need to look at. Teachers serve their purpose, but it’s really hard and really ineffective to put a blanket ‘fix-all’ over every child in America who has the desire to learn. I feel like if I had had the opportunity to shadow a writer or spend a year living with a music video producer I would be 100 times better in my field than I am right now, but I would have had to sacrifice my friends and my childhood. You win some, you lose some.

So is there a fix for stupidity? No, but there will always be those who want to learn and those who don’t, and maybe it’s just better that way.