Post-Apocalyptic Career Counseling, Part I

I. Demise of the Standard-Issue Career Advice

What are you telling the rising generation about how to succeed in the post-apocalyptic economy? Is it something like this?

Pay attention to your teachers, do your homework, and study for your tests. Work hard and do your best in school and in your extra-curricular activities. If you earn high grades and standardized test scores, you’ll get into a good college, major in what interests you, and find a decent job that will pay your bills.  You’ll be able to marry, buy a house and give your children the same opportunities you had, if not better ones. Someday, you’ll be able to retire.

Are you able to give this counsel without bursting into tears? 

Grand Unified Theory

I’ve been thinking a lot over the past year about emotions.

Well, that’s only half the truth.

I’ve been feeling a lot of emotions. In 2011, I weathered a midlife crisis, made a new commitment to my writing,  and confronted several serious challenges in my marriage. In the lulls between storms, I’ve tried to think about what the hell had happened to me and what it all meant. All I have to show for it is a theory about the emotional lives of human beings that makes sense to me, at least at the moment. 

I Don’t Have Time to Believe in Writer’s Block

Neil Fein and I on a hayride in 1975. I am the diva in ponytails, Neil, the serious young gentleman in profile.

Today’s bonus essay, “I Don’t Have Time to Believe in Writer’s Block,” can be read on Neil Fein’s blog, Magnificent Nose.  My conviction that writer’s block does not exist is matched in fervor by Neil’s belief that cross-posting is bad form, so please click over to read it there, and while you’re there, enjoy posts by Neil Fein, Ceil Kessler, Sara Greco Goas, and other Nosy Authors. Here’s a taste of the essay:

Last night, I finished writing a draft of a chapter that had tormented me for weeks. It’s one of only a handful of chapters I have left to write for which I had no rough drafts, or even scribbled notes. I needed certain things to happen…in the relationship between the two main characters, so I sent them on a hike to a waterfall. They fought me every step of the way, up the trail and back down again. By the end, though, sorry to have put me through so much trouble, they presented me with three peace offerings: a baptism, a sandwich, and a lie, all of which I can certainly use.

Read the rest.

Elegy for a Thousand Stolen Books

After the seven-year project of weeding my high school library, one task remained: inventory. I had avoided it for several years, reasoning that there wasn’t much point in carefully accounting for books I would probably discard anyway. If someone had saved me the trouble of weeding Your Future as an Airline Stewardess  by stealing it years ago, well, so much the better.

Scanning every item and uploading long lists of barcodes onto the main library computer took me, with the help of two assistants, three days. The last step commanded the computer to compare the barcodes on the shelf to those in the catalog, minus the ones for checked-out books, and generate a list of what was gone.

The report horrified and shocked us: 1,566 missing items in a collection of about 12,000. 

God Bless You. Or Not.

Safe home!

Life is dangerous. Our travels can be hazardous in bad weather. We get sick and injured. We get our hearts broken. We get tides of bad luck when everything goes wrong. We do not have a nice weekend. We suffer and die.

Get well soon!

The language of blessing gives voice to our need to comfort others, to marshal the forces of goodness and healing in the universe to stand between those we love and the harm which must, sooner or later, befall them. We weave a shelter of words and intentions for health, safety, protection, and luck around them, hoping it will be enough, knowing it won’t.

I’m thinking of you.

Religious believers have ready-made blessings. Some friendly evangelical Christians I knew when I was a teenager used “God bless you” both as a parting greeting and as an all-purpose blessing for any need. Jews have different blessings for hundreds of purposes: for eating particular kinds of foods, for seeing a rainbow, for the healing of the sick, for the safety of travellers, for putting on new clothes, and yes, even for the czar. Quakers use the beautiful, poetic expression, “I hold you in the Light” to friends in need or distress. 

Questions About Digital Natives

(Note: these questions are just a footnote to the essay “Funeral for a Digital Immigrant.”)

If students are digital natives, why do I keep having to show them how to add a printer?

But more to the point, what is the nature of a digital birthright if so many of the students purported to possess it are such naïve, ineffectual, and passive users of technology?

If the students are all, as Alan November said in New Jersey a few years ago, content creators now, why do I see so many of them playing games and consuming videos and other online content, and so few creating them?

And how is it possible that they are all using technology the same way, with the same effect on their brains?

Just a few years ago, we were told that learners are so individual, with their multiple intelligences and diverse learning styles, that perhaps every student should have an IEP. Are they now so monolithic that their brains, skipping a few steps in the customary evolutionary process, are all rewired alike to Apple’s specifications?

And given what we know about neuroplasticity across the lifespan, how is possible that my brain, although I was born before the official break-up of the Beatles, is not?

We cannot begin with the assumption that this (or any other) interesting model of one way to think about the effect of changing technology on all of us, teachers and students alike, is factual in all its particulars.  Unfortunately, its veracity was never up for debate. Questioning  underlying truth-claims is so…so…digital immigrant. Very pre-1980.

Funeral for a Digital Immigrant

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together in the presence of God and in the company of the education profession to lay to rest our dear brother, the Digital Immigrant.

To most, the Digital Immigrant was a hapless but earnest educator, who, though born before 1980, struggled mightily to assimilate into the culture of his students, the Digital Natives, while never losing his heavy digital accent or his exotic, pre-digital customs, such as linear thought, critical reasoning, and printing out a document in order to edit it.