Austin’s Early Career Aspirations
While discussing national education trends, Austin recounted his early classroom experiences and his interesting career choice at age 5.
Austin: Just this morning, I was watching a news report that indicated the education officials in Illinois. It was a it was a report about, I believe, student achievement or lack thereof, in Illinois. And there were a couple of districts where they’re elementary school students and they’re like several thousand that were classified under this particular study. Several thousand. Because they were looking at systems. They were able to say it went like a national trend. We’re going to take a small sample and project this. It was the systems. I want to say it was something like 12 or 14 schools. Michelle, did you see this? Did you happen to notice the number of students that they said were proficient in math and reading? Proficient, not….
Michelle: Shocking.
Austin: It was Dean Wormer territory. Yeah, it was Zero point zero.. Now, ladies and gentlemen, I would love to be able to sit here and bitch and moan about the education system in Chicago and other parts of Illinois that stink. But but you know what? That’s a reflection of when you’ve got zero point zero that, that’s thousands of piss-poor parents. P-A-R-E-N-T-S and I bet you dollars to donuts, I can track down the neighborhoods those folks live in. And I can show you about 95% blue voting.
Parents Are The Building Block
When I hit first grade to Miss Sylvester. God bless her. She’s still out there. Listens to the show. I think in Burke County. She was my first grade teacher. And I was put in the advanced reading group. There were three of us, I think, in first grade. And you know what day they put us in the advanced reading group in first grade. It’s like the first week of school. You know why? Because Beverly and Bob taught Austin how to read. That’s my mom and dad and my grandparents and others that helped me along.
My kindergarten teachers, too. No doubt about it. But I was reading street signs and billboards. From my earliest memories. And mom and dad, you know still, when I say my dad-he doesn’t like to talk about stuff like that much, but my mom loved to talk about when I was a little kid to my daughter and to my wife. And she’d say, we had him in the car, two, three years old. He was reading street signs. He was telling us what signs meant he was doing this, that and the other. And, it was all fine and good until he ran across the issue of Playboy that his grandfather had, because there was some country music star in it, and he found it in the bathroom and wanted to know what all the jokes were about.
Reading, Writing, and… Pictorials?
They say I was like, four years old maybe five years old. Something like that. Maybe it’s an interview with somebody. My, my grandfather had two issues of Playboy in his house in his life. One of them was that issue that I found in ’68 or ’69. I was born in ’65. The other one was, I want to say, the ’76. Maybe it was the ’79, ’80 presidential, Dolly Parton’s on the cover. And my grandfather, Daddy Zeb, loved Dolly Parton, and I don’t know whether he thought she was in it pictorially or not, but she was on the cover with with bunny ears and what have you.
For years, those were the only two dirty books that I ever saw in my life. But, yeah, it was all fine and good until Austin gets ahold of a Playboy. And by the way, to this day, Miss Sylvester, my teacher loves to tell people about the day that she asked everybody what they wanted to be when they grow up. And Austin wrote down because I could not spell the word “photographer”… “Playboy picture taker”. Dead serious. Swear on a stack of Bibles. Playboy. Picture taker. First grade.
Michelle: That’s great.
Austin: Yeah, I’ve been a weirdo since day one.
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