Hi and welcome back to Tell Me What Happened, the podcast that features folks from all walks
of life telling us one true childhood story and how that event, that experience, has impacted
who they are today as an adult.
I'm your host Jay Rehack and like everyone who listens, I've had my share of childhood
experiences.
Some of them traumatic, some of them dramatic, some of them actually quite pleasurable.
But as I always tell my audience, I like to think that everything that's ever happened
to me has made me a better person.
And as I also mentioned everybody, I realized that's probably not true.
But anyway, that's the way I like to think.
I'm going to skip my sponsors today and focus on my guest.
My guest today is Melissa Willett.
Melissa is the president of SCU Local 521 in Central California and she's a trustee
on the CalPERS pension board, one of the largest pension funds in the world.
Welcome to the show, Melissa.
Thank you so much, Jay, for having me.
I appreciate you coming on the show.
I know you're a busy woman.
I know that you're trying to help save the world out there in California, help the workers,
et cetera.
So I know you're busy.
I'm going to ask you, are you ready to tell your story?
I'm ready, thank you.
All right, I'm going to get out of the way, Melissa.
And at the end, I'm going to ask you absolutely one question and that one question is this.
How do you think that what you're telling me has impacted who you are today?
But take it away, Melissa Willett.
Thank you so much.
So thinking back on events that have really shaped my life and who I am today, I go back
to one of my earliest memories.
And when I was in third grade, I really strove to be a great student.
So I was about eight years old and I used to walk to elementary school about Jefferson
Elementary and I strove to be the very best.
I wanted to be the superlative student.
And so in that endeavor, I really remember staying after school, staying between recess
to help the teacher with special projects, doing everything I could to be the best student
I could be.
And it was noticed and I thought my hard work was really paying off.
I really dedicated myself to being a hard worker, to being the best student.
And one day I got called into this counselor's office who I'd never met before and they said
that they wanted to do some test with me and asked me to take some tests.
And so I said, sure, of course, I want to be the best.
I want to be a good representative citizen of my elementary school.
And of course, I would love to take some tests and little did I know that, of course, it
was an IQ test to determine what's going on with me.
And that test was one of the hardest things I had done up until my life at that point.
I remember seeing things like long division.
I remember seeing things like geometry.
And at the time, I didn't know what it was, but I did know that I needed to figure out
how to do this.
And I started making up all kinds of theorems of Melissa and other types of work to see
if I could solve these equations.
And a few weeks later, that, well, I'll say that that test sat with me for quite a while.
And I remember looking up in like the encyclopedias on my parents' home to try to figure out what
should I have done and reflect on if I got those answers right, because it really was
about being the best I could be.
And so a few weeks later, I did get called into the principal's office and my parents
were there and they said that Melissa is really, really smart.
And that's how I remember it is that Melissa was really smart and they had asked permission
of my parents to advance me in grades.
So they wanted to have me skip some grades and go up because they knew that I was too
smart to be with my peers at that point.
And my IQ was really high.
And so I was really excited.
I was super excited.
I was like, all of my hard work has definitely paid off, right?
That's what you're supposed to do.
You live, we live in a meritocracy where if you work really hard and you're really smart,
you get rewarded.
And so I was just on cloud nine and at the end of the conversation, my parents said,
thank you very much.
We will not be pursuing that.
Melissa's fine, just where she is.
And I remember being devastated.
I couldn't believe that that was the end of the conversation.
I thought that I was supposed to get rewarded for doing really good on an exam, for doing
really good on a test.
And I remember talking to my parents about it and asking them, why can't I, you know,
I want to go to fifth grade now.
I don't want to stay in third grade.
And I'm ready for it.
And I will work really hard.
And my parents told me I have an older sister and my older sister was in fourth grade.
And so for them, they didn't want me entering fifth grade at the same time as my older sister
and being the same grade as her.
It would have been a hardship on her.
It would have been essentially just not right in their mind for everyone involved.
So it was really devastating.
I became really resentful of my sister.
Just as an FYI, she's my best friend today.
So it's not like this was a long standing, but I became really resentful for a lot of
years of my sister.
And I stayed in that third grade and I did just fine.
And that's my story.
Well, I love it because I could almost feel the end of that story, like your mother or
your father was going to say, no, I just had a bad feeling when you were telling it because
it is a difficult decision.
I'm sure for parents, my parents never had to make that decision.
But I'm just saying it must be very difficult to have the opportunity to advance your child
at the same time, say this probably isn't in the best interest of the sister, but maybe
even not you.
So how long do you think it took to get over it before I ask you how it's impacted your
life?
I would say it took me a very, very long time to get over it.
I kept that chip on my shoulder for many years.
My sister and I began speaking when I was in college.
Wow.
So the question of the show is how do you think that experience has impacted who you
are today?
Yeah, I think that the experience has been really fundamental to who I am today and my
values and what I fight for and where I've kind of ended up.
I just remember thinking this idea of fairness and that it wasn't fair that I couldn't be
valued for my individual contributions and I think that that really formed this idea
of having that we don't live in a meritocracy.
We don't live where someone's best efforts gets them ahead and you can't pull yourself
up by your bootstraps if you don't have the structures and institutions in place to support
to you in success.
So I think it really shapes my concept of what is fair and the concept that outside systems
exist that we have to overcome in order to have a society where things are just.
And I'm not trying to put my parents as a system of villainhood or anything, but it
really was detrimental.
I didn't see it as one person's decision.
I thought of it as an environmental scenario where the environment wasn't okay for me to
do that.
So follow up question, this may be difficult as well, and I don't know you well enough
to know, but if you had a child that was in third grade and was brilliant and the school
system called you and said, we want to advance this child to fifth grade or sixth grade or
whatever, what would your answer be now?
Today I probably would let that person, I would let my kid advance and I would support
them fully.
I do still have that fundamental belief that kids need to be challenged.
I know that growing up, I was really bored in school a lot and ended up struggling with
grades, not because I wasn't bright, but because I just didn't care and I knew I shouldn't
be where I was supposed to be at.
I also, in that vein though, I did pursue other intellectual pursuits, if you will,
that were interesting to me when I was in middle school.
I fought for girls having access to play on the football team.
When I was in high school, I actually held a rally.
I organized a rally against corporal punishment because I was just bored essentially and I
was looking for things to do.
I remember my teachers in high school always just knowing that I was never in class, but
I was just doing things that were bigger than school.
So I want my own kid to have that opportunity to be intellectually challenged and essentially
stay a kid, but at the level that they would want to be at.
All right, I do have to ask one other question, only I probably shouldn't, but anyway, here's
my question to you.
One of the ideas in school systems is that if you advance the child, the problem is,
is they go through puberty at a later date than the other students in the class.
So let's just, for the sake of argument, we re-roll the tape and they say, okay, you
can go to fifth grade, but then you're in seventh grade with a fifth grade physique or a fifth
grade mindset, you know, socially I'm saying.
You think that that might have harmed you?
I think about this because I was a school teacher and parents would ask, they have their
child go ahead and sometimes if the child was doing great, I would say, if that's your choice,
that's fine.
I don't know what the implications are socially.
I'm not talking about educationally, but socially.
So what do you think?
You think that might have been harmful for you to go through middle school as a younger
child than everybody else or you think that would have been okay?
So I think the first thing I would ask is to challenge you on the reverse.
If the reverse was true and we had a student not reading at grade level that needed extra
assistance by going to a lower class to get caught up to grade level.
And even though they were bigger than everybody or more advanced socially, we would still
want them to get caught up and get the resources they wanted, right?
So in the opposite, we would definitely, I think, encourage the students' individual
success by putting them in a grade where they were able to get the resources they need and
achieve the success that they deserved.
So I see it kind of the same way.
I think the problem is that we're talking as one-off individuals.
If we were to reform our school system and put kids where they needed to be based on
their own, what resources they have, their backgrounds, their ability, their strengths,
their weaknesses, I think then it's a different kind of conversation and it wouldn't be a
one-off, right?
But like I said, I think at least for me individually, it ended up also being kind of detrimental
in the sense that staying at grade level, I was bored.
I was definitely and struggled socially anyways because I had this chip on my shoulder.
I knew that I could do something different.
I knew that I could put in the minimum I needed to put in and get into all kinds of trouble
in other ways.
So I think that we are at a kind of place where we don't know what would have happened,
but I think I would be comfortable with saying that, yeah, I would, you know, advancing somebody
a grade or maybe not a full two grades, right?
And someone a grade or getting, if we had the right resources in our public school system,
I would, to a public school, if we had the right resources in our public school system
where you could still acknowledge and give that kind of intellectual, what's the word
I'm looking for, sorry, the rigor, right?
An intellectual rigor for all of our students and meet them where they're all at.
Then I think we would, we would be in a much better place.
All right.
Well said.
It doesn't surprise me that you should have been jumped two years, two years ahead.
You're one of the smartest people I've known through the years.
I only met you a few months ago at Harvard, but I was very impressed and through your
energy, et cetera.
So I'm sorry it happened to you at the same time.
Who knows how it would have played out.
I understand that you have your own perceptions and I, I can't say or whatever.
I guess what I'm saying to you is as a parent, I can feel your parents.
Parents' pain of trying to decide how best to deal with a daughter who is clearly advanced
and yet you have another daughter who you have to be careful, I suppose, of how that
plays.
I don't know.
I'm not here to analyze it.
I'm only here to tell you that I respect the story.
Thank you for the story.
I'm going to have to think about it for a while.
I'm glad as a parent now my children are old enough.
I don't have to worry about those issues.
I never had to deal with those issues, but it is one to think about.
I think with a better school system, of course, things would be different, but we definitely
don't live in that world right now.
So thank you for coming on the show, Melissa.
All right.
Well, that's our show.
Again, I'd like to thank Melissa Willett for coming on the show, telling us that personal
story, one that doesn't, I can't say it fully resonates with me.
I wanted to be pushed ahead when I was young, but nobody offered me the opportunity.
But anyway, if you'd like to come on the show, by the way, you can email me at jaycehack.com.
And let me know why you'd like to be on the show, what particular story you have to tell.
But until next time, this is Jay Rehack asking you all to please stay safe out there and
try not to hurt anybody.