Score (Prelude, or at least, a Warning)

Almost twenty years ago, I became a trainee teacher. It wasn't my first 'professional gig', and it was my third job (I think).

I'm thinking about the way things went. This will take some time, and no doubt bore my visitors to death over the next few days.

Knowledge Industrialisation

The future is rooted in the past; the present is that infinitesimally thin membrane between them. Thus it is that knowledge, that curious construction of what we think we know, is one of the threads that holds us secure within the tapestry of time.

There are jobs that have risen and fallen in prestige, careers that have teetered and tossed from pillar to post, from architecture to horticulture. There are professions that have split and joined, from barbering to surgery and pharmacy to witchcraft. Some disciplines have updated themselves, some need no updating; the ceramicist and the fashionista are in as high demand these days as they were in the time of Nebuchadnezzar.

But just as there is nothing new under the sun, so too there is nothing new about career guidance. No matter what ebbs and flows human endeavour brings, the man who knows who to hire for what job, and the man who knows what must be known (and who knows it) — these are the ones you want, or failing which, want to be. Only the polymaths will make order from chaos across the burning universe, even though the statistical points which are specialist will give them the bricks to do it with.

And that is why there is a need to teach people about knowledge definition, construction, management and utilisation. That is why people must be taught that data is not information unless it is given significance, and that information is not knowledge unless it has a relevant context. Those who teach these things and those who learn and use these things will never go out of style, will always have a job and a living, will always be able to get a life and keep it.

Public Service

I realised not too far back that I made a big mistake more than a decade ago. It's not easily recognisable as such, which perhaps explains why I made it and never felt I had made a mistake for so many years.

It is said that those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it (or at least, some of its more horrible iterations). I have realised that those who know history might still not learn their lessons in time. (Think Trotsky and Stalin, and how old Stalin was obsessed with Trotsky all his life, even after getting him icepicked to death.)

My grandfather had five sons (four and one adopted). One died young, but the other four flourished. Three became civil servants, in two of the great areas of altruistic service: health and education. One took a more direct approach to service, and went into an area that all would recognize as God's work.

I look at my students, and I look at myself. And I see that if you begin with the premise that the chief end of man is to love God and serve Him forever, then your career must be the movement from one act of service to another. It is not a trajectory to be plotted by men, nor a plan of self-aggrandizement to be plotted by you; although you might not see either of these coming, they are common traps.

My grandfather died in harness, working to the last dregs of his full consciousness as a medical man and a churchman. His career was not one of endless promotions and what others might consider milestones, although his sons, in time, eventually were granted such honours.

It's not wealth or honour, but the life of service that is the key. My mistake was when I left the service of the larger community to become a servant to an institution that kept tempting me with promotions in exchange for integrity. Fortunately, God granted me amelioration through service that could make use of my gifts. I might have served better elsewhere, amongst the less affluent and those who needed more of my time.

But I am free now, and I will try to serve. For those of my students who might chance across this sad little post, I hope that you too will remember that the service comes first and the honours and stuff come later. If you hear your relatives tell you, "Look at Uncle So-and-So, he drives an Aston Martin Lagonda now!" and try to con you into adopting a career that allows for such a lifestyle, remember that you must first choose a career that will allow you to serve and change lives for the better.

The other trap is a more insidious one. It's the one where you label yourself 'Doctor' or 'Teacher' or 'Lawman' and feel good that you are serving God. Remember, you only serve God as much as you are serving others. It isn't given to you to rule over others or to be proud that you have the role you have. It is given to you to work out a life of service, regardless of the label hung around your neck. If people label you, you might reply, "And so I am," but you are also more than that.

We are all more than what labels convey. We are children of the Highest, born for service and for mutual survival against the might of the Enemy, the blandishment of the World, the weakness of the Flesh. And because we are more than what labels convey, words are not enough to say it all — but they will serve, and so must we.

Painful to Read

Over the last few months, I've been reading personal statements of the kind supposedly designed to get students into prestigious institutions of higher learning. I've noticed a disturbing and painful trend.

In the statements emanating from the College of Wyverns (especially the products of the Ghastly Eloquence Process), I've found rambling, disjointed, badly-focussed, slightly-concussed, irrelevant, self-indulgent, and ill-chosen helpings of thrown-together verbiage. If this were a salad, it would be light on content and poor in presentation. Even if not a salad, it would be that as well.

Why are these students, supposedly more eloquent and compelling and creative than those from the other great high schools of Atlantis, producing such dung-heaps of subliteracy? I suspect it is to do with lack of corrective rigour. If they were my students, I'd whack them up the head with a large blunt object (metaphorically) or slice them to pieces with the red pen that is mightier than any sword.

But it looks like NOBODY has ever attempted to teach them how to write a personal statement, NOBODY has sat down with them to discuss their aims and hopes and ambitions in later life. That is just plain sad, and very painful. The founder of the College, Ankh-Morpork himself, once said that the mission of the College was to prepare its students for 'all their after life' — that is, their life after leaving the school, and not their eternal trajectory.

It looks as if this isn't being done. Perhaps people need reminding about what Career Guidance means. 'Career' means a headlong progression over a constrained course, much as a racing or dressage circuit. 'To guide' means 'to show the way (from the perspective of knowledge)'. If the way is not being shown, how is it guidance?

Emergent Cognition

I remember not too long ago that I had a plan for providing young people with career awareness, career guidance and career counselling, in that order. The plan was so good that I was approached by a local education authority for permission to use it, and for me to conduct workshops in it.

Being a decent sort, I told them to consult my employers. I never heard anything more about the matter, until my portfolio was quietly scrapped and replaced by other stuff. The funny thing was that I then got something like fifty or more irate messages about how the institution was failing to provide all these three things in sufficient quantity and quality.

Of course, I tactfully deflected the originators of these messages with the equivalent of a polite 'no comment'. It so happened, however, that a few months later, I left the institution. Somebody dug up my old plan and made a lot of noise about how come it had not been implemented. Haha, what a joke!

Anyway, for those of you who study emergent phenomena, there's a very useful resource which seems to have sprung up. All credit to the jade-green sea-tiger!

Life Changes

Yes, so it does. In The Hero of a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell points out that the changes of life are standard stations in the path to becoming something greater than merely human. This is true in all the great narratives. It is only in the last couple of centuries that life-changes, i.e. events which seriously perturb the course of life, have been given greater psychological weight.

We've all seen these lists of stressors before: moving house, death of spouse, other deaths, violent crime, change of partner, change of job, birth of child – all these things are added up by some sort of tally of points, and the total is supposed to say how stressed you are.

But the fact is that some people rise to the occasion, some are occasionally buried. Some survive and thrive, some arrive and dive. We are all different; some of us are apparently destined to be yet another of the thousand faces of the hero, while some of us are lucky if we feel a thousandth of the hero's face.

I have to say that I've experienced only a few of the major changes on the stressor list. I've been at the deaths of each of my four grandparents; I've moved house a few times; I've changed job several times, and changed workplace five times at least. Recently, I left a place I'd been working at for 12 years; but even then, I'd changed cubicle several times, changed apartment a few times, lost colleagues, gained colleagues... got used to changes, perhaps.

But recently, the question was asked, indirectly and indeterminately: "What if you were never a teacher again?"

I don't know. I feel unsettled. What if?

Being A Teacher

Anybody out there wants to be a teacher? If so, you need to watch this short video first. The United States have 3.2 million public school teachers. Within the next 8 years, 2.8 million more are needed. But who's going to take up a job that, by all accounts, is badly-paid, tiring, and leaves you with an everyday sense of "I could have done more, but I didn't" ?

I was a teacher in the local system for exactly fifteen years, from March 1993 to March this year. It ended with accusations that I was a bad teacher, termination of contract, and severance pay. I'll leave it to my students to decide if that was true. But I can honestly say that I enjoyed teaching, I enjoyed being a teacher, and I felt that I was a good one and was doing a valuable job. Given another time around in some alternate reality, I'd probably want to do everything I did again, but better.

And to those of you out there who still want to be a teacher, I can only tell you what I told a class of graduating teachers in 1995, when the system still thought of me as a good teacher. There are five things you need to think about, as a teacher:

1. Students — the people you serve; at the very least, know them by face, if not by name; read about their backgrounds, absorb information from their behaviour and speech; use whatever you can for the students’ growth.
   
2. Subject — what you teach; you should always know why you teach it, why it should be studied, and what it is all about; keep up with the latest, expand the scope and depth of your knowledge.
   
3. Society — your role; dealing with what society, in the form of parents and the public (and the local educational authority), expects teachers to do.
   
4. Staff — your colleagues; understand the school culture, and what the school expects of you; pay attention to the interactions in the staff-room and how they can help or hinder you; politics is a bummer but it is also a reality.
   
5. Self — who you are; know what you stand for and why; know what real abilities and skills you have; reflect on your performance often.

In various situations, these five things will change in priority, but they are all important. You must never forget your students, you should keep a handle on your subject, you have to continue to be hopeful about society, you need to work with other staff, and you must not lose your sense of self.

Always remain true to your mission statement. If you have to change it, change it only after thinking about it for a long time. It cannot be something you do lightly, either when crafting that statement or re-crafting it. It took me a very intense two days at a retreat to craft mine, and since then I have not changed it. Again, I'll leave it for my students to decide if I lived by it.

Lastly, whatever happens, you will always be a teacher. When you walk out of your last classroom and your last school, the habits of mind you developed will stay. You will catch yourself being didactic, pedagogical, cognitively aware, and liable to provoke cognitive dissonance. Still want to be a teacher?

Professional Impact

Over the last few days I've been mulling over what the girl who likes lying on the grass said. She's been thinking about education, profession, and career choices. She's been wondering about the responsibilities attached to or associated with various professional roles. And I remembered, because of what she said, the process that eventually led me to where I have been.

The obvious thing is that, just as with basic rights and basic skills, the identification of 'basic professions' must come from looking at the basic human condition. This is what I mean. Consider what you're like as a newborn:

1. you need protection from the elements; hence one of the basic human rights is shelter from exposure, one of the basic skills is learning to find shelter, and one of the basic professions is making shelters.
   
2. you need food and drink; hence one of the basic human rights is the right to sustenance, one of the basic skills is feeding oneself, and one of the basic professions is providing sustenance.
   
3. you need to communicate; hence one of the basic human rights is the right to communication, one of the basic skills is communication, and one of the basic professions is helping others to communicate.
   
4. you need to learn; hence one of the basic human rights is education, one of the basic skills is teaching oneself, and one of the basic professions is teaching others.

The list goes on, but these four cover most of the fundamentals. The next level up would be the interactive level which develops once communication is present – social needs, self-actualisation, dominance, combat, movement.

How do we consider various professions in the light of this? Here are some examples.

If you're a builder or an architect, a weaver or an insurance agent, you're obviously one of the first-group providers – you provide the means by which people survive their environmental challenges. If you're a farmer or a cook, a hunter or a fast food chain operator, you're in the second group – you provide the means by which people can be sustained physically. If you're going to be an artist or a politician, a lawyer or an advertising executive, you fall into the third group – you're a person who speaks for others when they cannot communicate. The last group is obvious; educators of all kinds are here.

Three things become obvious to me as I look at such lists. Firstly, parents do all these things for you, especially mothers. Secondly, certain professions – e.g. economists, doctors, car manufacturers – rely a lot on people developing secondary vulnerabilities, things which they are not normally born with. Thirdly, some professions are able to fulfil elements of many needs – those with creative, communicative and catechistic roles being obvious examples.

The last thing, not immediately obvious, is that the role you play after being educated and adopting a profession is yours alone. Each of us develops our own sense of mission and our own scope of deeds. Each of us chooses to provide services or goods or intangibles which fall somewhere in between. But the most important part of this is that we should think about this frequently, adjust our perceptions and perspectives, and aim for the best that we can do.

Career Guidance

It seems like only two years ago that I sat with friends and discussed what to do about career guidance for teenagers. The plan was this:

• two years of career awareness (what is a career, what in one's life prepares one for a career etc)
• two years of career guidance (these are the skills one needs to pick up as one starts working on career fundamentals, this is how to write a proper targeted CV, this is how one prepares for an interview etc)
• two years of career counselling (sessions with a dedicated specialist career counsellor, discussions on picking an appropriate university, planning a trajectory towards one's ideals and aspirations being fulfilled etc)

I must say I was rather surprised to receive no feedback at all when I first submitted this plan.

About three months later, I received a couple of salutory (as in shots fired across one's bow are salutory) pieces of advice. The first came from the Grey Men, who were very happy with The Plan and wanted to appropriate it. The second came from some people who didn't want it, wouldn't use it, and warned me against trying to do things other than what I was told to do. I held off the Grey Men, worried about some people, and in the end decided to put my thoughts down on paper. In the light of subsequent events, I was glad to have documented everything. It was an enlightening experience, one for the books really.

It took more than a year for the chickens to come home to roost. I documented that as well. In fact, by that time, some of the cows had come home, and the foxes had their foxholes too. It was a fantastic time, and I enjoyed every minute of it. I don't know if this enjoyment was universal. In fact, I am quite sure it was not.

So why am I writing about this now? Well, it is time for the books. A new chapter has begun. And as I wander around the Hill, I observe that the pagan tribes have very useful and powerful ideas and practices in this area. Maybe all these explain their success against the Roman legions.