Day: August 22, 2019

Indulge me in some math.

There are, approximately, 400 million native English speakers in the world. About 231 million of those reside in the United States. A further 60 million may be found on the shores of the United Kingdom, and 5 million more in the neighboring Republic of Ireland. Australia furnishes 25 million, Canada 37 (million. I know, I was surprised, too!), and New Zealand another 5 million. South Africa fields 56 million, making it actually the third-largest English speaking country in the world, but not 56 million of those are native speakers.

So, call it 400 million (to make the math easier – you’ll see in a second). Of those 400 million, approximately 400 are at this EPIK orientation. Thus, we should expect roughly 1 EPIK teacher out of every 1 million English speakers in the world. To put it another way – there should be about 60 Brits of varying stripes, 5 Irish, 25 Aussies, 37 Canucks, etc.

Within the States, we can break it down further. 40(ish) of the 231 US representatives should be from California.* 20 should be from Florida. 6 should be from Missouri, but I’m having a devil of a time finding the others.

Now, the average age of EPIK teachers seems to range from 22 at the low end to 30 (me) at the high end. There’s a handful of us graybeards around, but let’s leave the age gap at 8 years, we’re going for a Fermi estimate here. Now, each year, the undergraduate class of Truman State University is about 6,000 students. So, in 8 years, Truman graduated approximately 48,000 students, including yours truly and many of my friends and coworkers.

So! We can expect about 6 EPIK teachers to be selected from Missouri’s population of about 6 million souls. Let us suppose that all 48,000 Truman grads are Missouri natives, and eligible to be EPIK teachers. That means that any EPIK teacher selected from Missouri has a 48,000/6,000,000 chance of being a Truman grad, which works out to about .8%. The odds of there being two such is .8% x .8%**, or .68%. You could run EPIK for a hundred years and never have two Truman grads in the same orientation.

So imagine my surprise today.

I am always on the lookout for likely neighbors, and thus far I had been having to make do with Nebraskans and Oklahomans as being from sort-of the same area as me. But, what joy, at dinner today I spotted a fellow considerate enough to wear a KC shirt!

Playing it cool, I casually sat down at the same table. I would be crafty and evasive with my questions, so he wouldn’t know how eager I was to find a hometown friend.

“So, are you from KC?”

Oops.

“Yeah, Olathe,” he responded. “Are you?”

“Grew up in Lee’s Summit.”

He nods, then asks where I went to high school (West), then college. His eyebrows shoot up when I say Truman.

“Wait here!” he says. He turns around. “Hey, Lexi!”

A girl eating at the table behind us pauses with a chopstick-full of kimchi halfway to her mouth. “Yes?”

“I found you another Truman grad!”

Her face brightens, she exclaims in surprise, and a moment later we are next to each other, exchanging reminisces of Ryle Hall and the PHRE department.

What a weird and wonderful world we live in.

*I don’t know how much of California’s population is a native English speaker, so this math is somewhat off. It’s not essential, just go with me, I’m on a roll.

**TECHNICALLY .8% x (47,999/5,999,999), or .8% x .79999%, since after all I can’t be two EPIK teachers.