Do What You Love

One of the joys of being a teacher at the same school for a few years is that former students reach out from time to time to say hello, to update you on their journey and occasionally to ask for advice.

I got a note a few days ago from a former student I'll call Grant. He's about to be a senior, he's rocking the classroom, he's working an internship this summer ... and he's torn.

On the one hand, he loves teaching and tutoring: helping friends with economics and math is "without exception the resounding highlight of my day," he wrote in his note to me. "I feel I'm actually making an impact in people's lives." 

He's also done a ton of analysis and coding, in internships and for professors. While "on paper this looks great," he wrote, "to no avail I've tried convincing myself I actually enjoy it."

He's considered a PhD in economics ... but the focus at the PhD level is coding and analytics, the very things that have been the least meaningful in his academic career. He's looked into Teach for America or the New York City Teaching Fellows program ... but he fears he'll get bored after a few years of teaching the same thing over and over again.

So ... he asked for my advice. Here's what I shared with him:

Hi Grant,

Sorry for the slow reply ... summer and all. :) Great to hear from you, and great to hear you're doing so well.

So here's my take ... 

Do what you love. 

If the coding/analytics stuff doesn't fire you up now, it certainly won't in 10 years when you have a mortgage and other obligations to contend with. And if you go a route you're unhappy with, if you wait 10 years to pull the plug, that's a 10-year investment of time and energy that's much more onerous and more difficult to justify walking away from than if you pull the plug now.

That said, there are lots of ways to teach even if you end up still doing some of the coding/analytics stuff for now. There's not one path to the classroom, and there are lots of classrooms. 

I have a former student, for example, who has been teaching math at Folsom Lake College for 15 or so years now (she was at American River before that). She went to UC Davis, loved math, loved teaching/tutoring, but like you she wasn't sure that made sense and feared it might shut off all kinds of other interesting possibilities.

She ended up sticking around at UCD long enough to get her MA in math, and that was her ticket into the community college teaching ranks, initially as an adjunct/freeway flyer, but she quickly landed a real gig with benefits and the salary schedule and the whole shooting match. Early in her career she considered leaving the community college scene to pursue a PhD, but she ended up enjoying the experience so much that she put the PhD idea on the shelf. 

Does she ever have any regrets, any nagging thoughts that she shoulda/coulda done it differently? I'm sure. (Me too, on my somewhat different path.) But she enjoys what she does, she makes a decent living and it all works for her.

Perhaps the toughest thing for bright, talented students to deal with, in my opinion, is the incredible set of choices you have in front of you. You've worked your ass off, and the entire world is wide open and right in front of you. But that comes with a downside ... because choosing one path means you aren't choosing another.

However, I think that's a false dichotomy. 

Because you can always make a new choice. What it will look like will be different (pursuing a PhD after teaching for 5 years in a K-12 or community college setting is different than pursuing a PhD immediately after you get your BA), but you will always have fresh, new opportunities in your life.

In my case, I did a teaching credential program right after my BA, but I never thought I'd be a career teacher. I figured I'd do 5 years, then go to law school or pursue a PhD in history or journalism or political science. I started the law school application process, but I realized that if you go to law school, you'll probably end up being ... a lawyer. And I figured out that wasn't something I wanted to do.

I did take two years to go to grad school at the U. of Missouri, where I was a low-level faculty member (asst. instructor) while I pursued an MA in journalism. I had two or three faculty members pestering me to go for a PhD, and I was considering it, but my wife got pregnant with our first child, and a vow of poverty for another 3-5 years just wasn't something I wanted to endure. 

So I moved back to California, and back into a K-12 classroom. Middle school for a couple of years, Oak Ridge High for five years, then Granite Bay High for nearly two decades now.

Since coming back to the west coast, I've had a job offer from a newspaper in Connecticut to be the sports editor, and an offer from the Bee to be a full-time copy editor. But I like teaching very much (who knew I'd do it for 30-plus years!), and I liked Oak Ridge and especially GBHS ... and so I turned those offers down.

Along the way, I've also been able to do some part-time and freelance work that I've enjoyed – on-call copy editing at the Bee, writing supplementary materials for a college textbook publisher, freelancing for a couple of magazines, doing some work as a teacher trainer, editor and writer for a couple of educational publishers ... all stuff I've enjoyed doing, stuff that's kept me fresh and engaged, and stuff that my teaching schedule allows me to pursue without giving up my full-time gig in the classroom.

All to say ... you will never run out of opportunities. Say yes to the ones you'll love, not just the ones that will burnish your reputation or fatten your wallet. ... 

Because in my experience, pursuing your passions will ALSO burnish your reputation and fatten (to some degree) your wallet. But doing things that make you miserable BECAUSE they'll burnish your reputation or fatten your wallet will leave you perhaps well-regarded and possibly rich ... but you'll be one miserable SOB.

Hope this at least sparks some thoughts for you.

Warmly,

Grubaugh

Learning by failure

So I failed pretty badly Saturday. But I'll come back to that in a minute.

I just finished reading a friend's post on a journalism teacher/adviser listserve about how we're all expected to be experts at EVERYTHING, and that the impossible nature of that expectation is chasing talented folks from journalism classrooms, and in some cases from teaching altogether.

This is something I'm guilty of over the years. I have a graduate degree in journalism, and I know what good journalism needs to look and feel like. And yet I let myself, earlier in my advising career, get pulled into more hours in the lab, later deadline nights, more issues of the paper, more special coverage, more ... of everything. And it was taking a toll on me, and on my family. Not to the point of total dysfunction, but I had a nagging sense that I was putting my job and other people's children before my wife and my own children.

And so I finally decided, a few years ago, to start saying no. Nope, deadline isn't midnight anymore. Nope, we're not making an exception for pages that "only need a little more time." Sorry, a special edition isn't in the annual budget, and it's too late now to try to add it into the mix. 

And what I've learned (which took me a while, because I can be a little slow about some things), is that students will go over the bars we set for them. And the whining lasts about a year at the very most, because the generational cycle of the mostly juniors and seniors on my staff is ... duh ... two years. A change inevitably meets resistance from some seniors ("we've never done it that way!"), shoulder shrugs the next year ("I guess we did it that way last year") and acceptance after that ("we've always done it this way!"). 

The online and print news program I advise still manages to do mostly good journalism. We win some awards. I take kids to conventions from time to time. My students write me lovely notes at the end of the year, reflecting on their journalism experience.

Much more importantly, I'm still married (to the same woman!) and my own kids seem to think I'm worth their time and attention now and then. (Even Garrett, my 18-year-old high school senior, doesn't mind hanging with the old man from time to time, even though he's swamped this year with all the college application and financial aid stuff that seniors have to deal with. But I get it – that's what high school seniors have to do. I've been teaching them for almost 30 years, so I kind of know the drill.)

Oh, my Saturday failure? 

I'm a word guy. I've never learned all that much about photography, and I've never taken the time to really learn the mechanics of shooting a digital camera that's not set on "automatic." I can tell you when I'm staring at a good picture, and I can run down the list of some of the basics (rule of thirds, framing the shot, leading lines, get closer, change your angle, etc.) ... but I'm not really a photo teacher. I try to find a couple of kids who are already good photographers, and then I share a couple of my basic nuggets with them and let them run with the process. We get some pretty good results that way.

On Saturday, however, I was the designated photographer for my son Garrett's high school baseball team. I was shooting for myself and for the team, but also for Garrett's school yearbook. (It was the only game the team was playing before the page deadline, it was an away game an hour from home, and I was going to be there anyway. Hey, the dad who's the big-dog journalism teacher/adviser at the school across town can shoot a few pics. How hard can it be?)

But I was using my son's camera (he's also a yearbook staffer at his school and shoots with a pretty nice Canon), and I didn't know how to change his settings. Turns out his manual settings were for indoor baskeball in a dim gymnasium, and I was shooting in fog and then sunshine. I probably took 400 shots, and the ISO setting was at 1600 ... which means the photos were wildly overexposed and were essentially worthless. I was a little ticked at myself for making some of the same mistakes I try to tell my newspaper students to avoid. But then I remembered it's OK to not be an expert at everything. 

So the photo shoot was a failure. But I learned a few things, and next time will be better. 

It was an important reminder that we can only do what we can do today, and that needs to be good enough until tomorrow, when we'll be able to be a little better than we were yesterday.