On "Self-sufficiency" and trade skills

Looking for second jobs today (I want to get my foot in the door with the nonprofit world and entry level's usually part time, so I'm not quitting my day job), I found one that seemed promising. It's a counselor position at a private school for troubled teens. Their website boasts of their success stories, their ability to instill work ethic and self-confidence in their students, and the fact that they treat these "problem kids" as real gentlemen and ladies. It's a tempting environment for kids who otherwise would be left 2-3 grades behind and struggling with the public school system. I thought to myself: Wow, this place looks good! I'd love to be a part of it!

And then I looked a little closer at what they do, which includes boosting confidence and offering job training through the following courses:

• Carpentry
• Cosmetology
• Custodial Maintenance
• Electrical Wiring
• Food Service
• Optical Lab Training
• Screen-Printing
• Structural Repair (Painting, Dry-Walling, Flooring, etc.)
• Woodworking

They say this about the programs:
"This component of our students’ rehabilitation teaches them basic trade skills, instills a solid and positive work ethic, and paves the way to a means of self-sufficiency and independence."

And I realized: something bothers me about the school's emphasis on trade skills. They are not going to provide self-sufficiency and independence. Anyone who had done a trade-skills kind of job will vouch for the utter lack of self-sufficiency one feels when one is living paycheck-to-paycheck because the minimum wage doesn't cover such necessities as real food and gas for the broken-down car that's all you can afford to drive.

We don't have a good place for people with hands-on skills any more. Carpentry is seasonal, not a steady job in most places. Food service is minimum-wage, often part time work. Don't get me started on cosmetology. They are great things to tackle as hobbies or just to be "well-rounded". They are good for teaching self-confidence and a positive attitude and instilling work ethic in kids. They are not good careers. They are useful skills and I would mourn a society without them but they do not pay. There are exceptions to this rule, of course. We all know someone who built up a trade-based business through hard work and is putting his kids through college with said hard work... but those people are fewer and farther between these days, and there's certainly no guarantee of success.

This academy is a feel-good place but do kids really get the tools they need to be successful in the ways that our nation currently defines success? If we want our kids to succeed, shouldn't we be teaching them how to manage on Wall Street or campaign for a political position? Health care would be a more impressive field for student achievement; health care jobs are draining and entry level positions have a high turnover rate, but there's never a shortage of work especially as our baby boomers age. And most nurses can afford to eat even if they don't have the time. Teaching, too, could use some more accolades. Teachers may struggle with loan repayment but they rarely starve, at least not as badly as food service workers!

Our economy is no longer designed to support blue-collar workers. They aren't getting paid what they used to; the job security that our grandfathers had at the mill or the factory isn't there. We are a society of intellectuals now. We produce services rather than goods, and if we want to prepare our young kids for the future we need to train them to take advantage of any opportunity with a general skill set that includes the ability to self-teach and make good decisions rather than weighing them down with under-appreciated trade skills. As much as it pains me to admit that good physical labor isn't appreciated any more... it's true. So why are "troubled" youth still engaged in that kind of training, unless it's designed to keep them in the same socioeconomic slot? They deserve better.

It would be different if they were also learning other self-sufficiency skills: picking up information on gardening and preserving food as well as prepping it in a commercial kitchen, learning to budget and organize, maybe even sewing. Being able to cook for yourself, to grow part of your own meals and fix a fallen hemline in your only pair of work pants and budget your minimum wage income so that you manage to save a little bit toward a better life... that's real self-sufficiency. Knowing how to build a bookcase is not enough on its own.

I guess I'm going to keep looking for jobs... and be thankful I have skills that allow me to seek out a wide variety of career options.

Oh, and Happy New Year

Hope all is well with everyone who reads this. While I am still rather shaky in the belief that every day is a new day and the first day new year doesn't necessarily mean the rest of the year will follow suit, I did have a bad first day, and it didn't make me hopeful for the rest of the month.

I'm trying to start school again this semester, and we'll see how that goes. I'm also trying to keep my sanity in the face of the student loan companies... my forbearance is up in February, and if I don't get into 6 credits of classes by then, I'll have to start paying them back, something I'm not a in financial position to do.

I'm also stuck in the mid-December mindset of finishing presents and waiting for Christmas. We haven't had Christmas with my family yet due to work, weather and my little sister's inconvenient bout with the flu. My mom's presents are sitting in a bag next to the computer, wrapped and neatly labeled. The year hasn't had closure not only in the sense that I haven't done Christmas the way I expected to, but in a lot of other unfinished projects and goals yet unreached. Maybe this year will be better than the last...

More thoughts on Education.

Someone on Facebook posted a link to yet another news article detailing the excruciating battle between Christian Values and Scientific Learning that is taking place in school science classrooms. Expressing frustration with the fact that yet another class of children is going to be put through Creationism as a theory while ignoring all the other possible creation myths out there. She claims that she's going to put her kids in private school and supplement their education at home to work around this. I said "Homeschool, duh!".

Someone else claims that public school will be just fine for their kid, with parental involvement tacked on the side after the public school day to make sure they actually learn something. That got me thinking, because that's what my father tried to do with us for years.

The problem with putting very bright, home-educated children into an environment like most public schools is that they are incredibly likely to suffer for it at the hands of both teachers (who are statistically the underachievers of their own past high school classes - what does it say that your kid's teacher probably has a lower SAT score than he will?) and kids (who are either jealous or distrustful of a child who knows so much more than they do and prefers learning over making fart jokes). In some ways, having a parent who is active in your academic life either in or out of the classroom is a dividing factor, especially in days when many children are raised by the TV. Even if they claim happiness with this method, there can be no doubt that many of them desire more attention from the two most important people in their life, and realize that in some way when they react poorly to students who show signs of a strong parental bond.

I know - I was one of those kids. By high school, the system had crushed my love of education pretty badly, and I consider myself one of the lucky ones. The educational system is not only failing our underachieving youth; it's failing the overachievers.

With the exception of a few star pupils who are reading so far above grade level that their parents enroll them in college successfully at 10 years old (and make the national news doing it), most "gifted" kids never find the recognition and challenges they desire in public school. I know I was reading at an 8th grade level (coincidentally, the level that most newspapers write at, and the level at which most kids stop learning) when I was in 3rd or 4th grade. I only know this because my parents bothered telling me. No one at the school, that I am aware of(although this could be due to a fuzzy memory - in those years I was reading so much that I lived half my day in a fantasy world of one sort or another), ever told me that I was smarter than the rest of the class. I wasn't placed in any advanced classes, given harder material, differentiated at all from the others. One of my clearest memories of fourth grade is reading Hatchet in reading circle and being so frustrated with the pace that others were reading at that I wanted to blurt out every word they stumbled on, which was most of them. The teacher told us to follow along, but I couldn't make myself read that slowly, so I half-listened to parts I had read 10 minutes ago being sounded out by the slow readers while I flipped ahead. Inevitably I'd be caught and chastised for reading ahead, as the teacher would skip around the circle instead of following an order, presumably to 'catch' poor students who would otherwise attempt to predict their reading passage and pre-read it several times instead of listening to the story. She never did seem to catch the poor readers (they were right in front of her, stumbling over words like 'assumption' and 'porcupine').

It got worse from there, but after my parents split and I stopped getting so many impromptu engineering lessons from dad, my head start faltered and I ended up in the top percentile of my class instead of high above it. I have no doubt that with the right combination of teacher support, parental challenges and financial aid I could have gone to college a few years early, but no one in the educational system wanted to realize that, and my bet is that they didn't like the thought of pulling their student funding until I had been thoroughly wrung dry by the system and they could graduate me "on time". Consider this: The school districts spent an average of $7000 per pupil to educate us in the '99-00 school year ^[1]. Considering that lovely sum, why would a school remove a student (and therefore, the student's $7k or more in funding) for early placement in a higher grade when they can continue sucking money out of taxpayers and government?

Teachers really don't help; students seem to despise peers who achieve better than they do. I had friends, but mostly I had competition. By fourth grade it was clear that some of use were "smarter" than the others, and our small group competed within itself for the honor of highest grades and most teacher praise. I remember being especially envious of one boy whose father had helped him with a civil war project. Mine was a clay figure of Abraham Lincoln holding a tiny, painstakingly copied Gettysburg Address in his little clay hands. Mom couldn't find modeling clay so it was the cheap Crayola clay, and it fell apart quickly. The boy (who I also had a crush on) had a plywood board painted as a battlefield, complete with plastic hills and two opposing armies of blue and grey toy soldiers. It was a masterpiece of elementary school projects and I hated him for it. But back to the point - the other kids hated all of us "smart" kids. So we tried our best to stay quiet and not achieve too much, lest we be tormented mercilessly (I bet those kids didn't even know how to SAY merciless at that point!) by the peers who were either jealous of our success or hurt by it.

In a school situation like that it's not hard to see why I'd prefer my children, if I have them, to be homeschooled. I know that even if I adopt, my kids are not going to fit in with the educational system by the time I'm done with them, and I don't want them to. The schools have failed us, and I want them to know this. I don't blame parents who want to send their kids to a better school because they don't think they can homeschool a child. Not everyone is a teacher, and not everyone has the time and energy to play teacher to a bright and curious child. However, I don't think we should be giving bad schools any more support than is legally necessary (keep payin' your taxes, folks), and in fact I think we should protest every board meeting that goes by without improving the situation in our schools... if more of our children were getting a proper education, and not just shoved into boxlike rooms and told to behave for 6 hours a day, I think a lot of our other "problems" would start to fix themselves... but that's another post

1. Gross, Martin L. Conspiracy of Ignorance, The. New York: HarperCollins, 1999. Back to post

News From 2nd Grade: Frustration and Failure

Well, today was bad. Just not good. As the start of my experience week it's really not looking positive, and all I can think is that if the rest of the week goes this badly I'll quit. For one thing, I didn't have my center activities done (something I intend to remedy as soon as I can tonight) and that made the kids less than agreeable during private reading time (which despite its name is really "get up and socialize" time, unless they're kept busy with work instead of being left to read -_-). For another thing, I was supervised today.

My supervisor never tells me when he's going to show up, which means that preparing for him being in the classroom never happens. I never have extra materials to give him and my desk (which he happily seats himself at, to my annoyance whenever I have to reach under his briefcase for papers) is always messier than I'd like it to be. Today was classically bad and since he's never seen me on a sparkling, shiny, happy, good day, he has come to the conclusion that I'm not doing so well as a teacher. My coop doesn't think I'm doing so great either. Currently, my grade is maybe a high C - pretty unacceptable for a student who is supposed to be leaving the classroom for an environmental science center in 10 days. And my supervisor told me today that he doesn't think I'll make it.

In other words, I'll probably be "asked" (read: forced under penalty of failing) to stay at the school all semester while I improve, because I'm not making improvements fast enough, however steady said improvements are, to keep up with, let alone surpass the other students in the building. And since they'll be here all semester and I won't, I'm supposed to be doing twice as well as they are.

I feel like a failure. I admit I think I'm over my head because I have had to move so fast through this but the science center was what was keeping me from losing it the last few weeks, because I don't think I can stand to spend another 8 weeks in a classroom. I'm not planning on being a teacher; I don't expect to get a teaching job fresh out of IUP especially not if my grade in student teaching is a B or worse. I won't be able to compete. I don't want to compete. I just want a decent sub position until I can get my masters' and move on to a quiet little library somewhere. They're treating this as if I was going to spend the next 30 years of my life in a classroom and need to do all my improving right now... and I want to tell them that no, actually, I'm only in this until I graduate, but thanks for the advice anyway and I'll try to do my best till I leave.

Except that at my best I'm still a disorganized, under confident, quiet little nothing who's too nice to the kids some days and too bitchy on others and I can't seem to keep them quiet (although the coop can't keep them quiet either, it's not always me). I'm frustrated and I'm worried that I'm going to be told that I can't go to McKeever, even if I try my hardest the next two weeks. My supervisor has already pretty much made up his mind, so I'm working against that as well - he's just not optimistic about my future. And right now, neither am I. I'm lost and I'm horrified that no matter how hard I try I will never be good enough to get to where I really need to be.

Well, I can't sleep despite getting up at 7:30am yesterday morning and having another early morning in 6 hours, and I'm pissed off, so here's a late-night rant.

As some of you have probably heard, Act 114 was put into place in PA this year - a mandate which as of April 1, 2007 requires all prospective employees of a school district, including student teachers, to have a full set of fingerprints submitted to the FBI for a Federal Criminal History check before being allowed to set foot in a school building, bus or other related area. This is complete and utter BULLSHIT. I'm gonna say that word again, 'cause I like it. BULL. SHIT.

The law already requires me as a student teacher to keep two clearances updated yearly - the state Child Abuse History clearance (Act 151) and the state police Criminal Record Clearance. Both cost $10 per check no matter how many times you've submitted and come back clean before, and the fingerprinting, although supposedly one-time only, costs $40. I had to pay over a week's worth in food and gas money this year toward getting clearances which I personally find annoyances at best and unnecessary at worst. I'm unaware of any other state's codes regarding this, unfortunately, or I'd rant about everywhere else, too... but the fact is that in PA, they seem to think that "Think of the children!" means "Inconvenience the teachers!".

I've already submitted myself to the fingerprinting station once. The operator of the scanning equipment on site (it's optical, and it'll pick up all the dirt and grease you put on it, but it won't take a fingerprint scan worth beans, apparently) had to re-scan ALL of my fingers 4 times each just to get the program to take the "best ones" from each scan. The "entire fingerprint capture process should take no more than three to five minutes." BULLSHIT! 15-20 minutes is too long to be rolling my fingers around on a glass plate. Especially -and this is the part I'm really pissed about- because the FBI returned my fingerprints as UNREADABLE less than 2 weeks after their submission. Now, I'm glad they took their heads out of their asses long enough to give me a prompt (if soggy, because the mailman left the letterbox open in the rain again) reply, but I don't have the time to go in for a re-try, and if the scanning process hasn't changed my fingerprints aren't going to come out any better this time. They only give you one free re-scan, too. If they reject your prints a second time, you pay for the third and all subsequent re-scans. Personally I don't care about that kind of situation if it doesn't happen regularly but from what the scanner told me, this has happened to several people and it's the start of the school year already. If I were student teaching this semester and didn't actually have a few weeks (maybe) to finish the process, I'd be ripping my hair out.

So, rescans have to be done. I have a workshop this week, Thursday through Saturday, 9-4. With my sleep patterns as sporadic as they've been this summer it's hard enough getting up and going at 7:30 without having to go elsewhere but I want the re-fingerprinting over with fast, so I went in this morning (yesterday morning by now) at 8:30 to re-scan. The computer operator types like crap and the re-scan number is really long... and the scanning program won't take my SSN. The error it threw back completely baffled the operator, who (no offense) doesn't seem to know the second thing about computers (she knows the first - if it doesn't work, turn it off and turn it back on again!). She tried logging out and back in. No change (well, DUH!). She tried rebooting the computer. Same error. She tried looking up my info to make sure my SSN was right the first time (it was). After half an hour (I'm now running slightly late to my be-there-on-time-or-make-a-bad-impression workshop) I told her flat-out that I HAD to go. Then she told me that despite the fact that the error (something to the effect of "Unused ssn not located") indicated that the computer was trying to submit me a new, individual record instead of re-scanning over the old matching one, which seems like a program issue to me, the real issue was that my ID number issued by Cogent for the re-scan didn't match my SSN, as if this were so obvious, and that I had to call them myself to get that figured out.

...when, exactly, will I find time for this, and how are they supposed to help me without the actual goddamn error message being read to them so they know what's going wrong? I have never worked in tech support but I know very well that calling and saying "Hi, your program told me something about my SSN and won't let me rescan" won't get me very far unless they're familiar with the error already. Plus, I'm not an employee or anyone who has access to the system to fix it, so any instructions they give me won't help, unless the problem really is what the operator says (doubtful, but with my luck their system actually didn't update or something happened to my record, and won't get fixed for weeks, and nothing I do will help anyway).

As for the fingerprinting process itself- there's a little ink-box type container on the desk in the fingerprinting room which is labeled something like "Fingerprinting prep solution" but no one has even -looked- at it when I've been there. I thought about asking whether they should be using it but I get the impression they'd tell me they didn't know how. On top of that the scanner's glass is covered in other people's fingerprints and grease, and when they clean it, it usually leaves fine smears on the glass which make my fingerprints even harder to read. Then of course it's very touchy about where on the huge surface you're allowed to put your finger to get it within a tiny box, and how hard you press, and if you shift your finger even a millimeter when you're not supposed to it beeps at you and you have to re-start the scan.

I'm sorely tempted to find some ink and a sheet of clean paper and do my prints myself. I'll mail them in to Cogent with a note saying that if they want me to be fingerprinted again with an optical scanner it damn well better be so precise it can pick up my pores, and it better do it right the first time. I'll also tell them that their fingerprint station operators are numbskulls and that $40 is an absurd price to pay for a poorly set up computer system in a back office and this much stress. I'll also write a letter to my local representatives asking them who the fuck passed this piece of crap legislation.

"Think of the children" is a bullshit excuse to impose legislation on media and behaviors that people should be able to handle on their own, like video game ratings of "Mature" (parents should be reading about the games their kids play!) or radio programming (if you know what's on, and you don't like it, CHANGE THE CHANNEL). I don't care how many more child predators they think they're going to catch by submitting prints to a federal database as well as the state one. If an offender isn't registered they're not likely to be caught by a set of fingerprints and if they are you probably already knew since they have to register! As far as other crimes go, I'm not convinced that it's in the best interest of the children to piss off or drive away prospective teachers, counselors, administrators and bus drivers. If I have to pay for a third re-scan I can tell you right now I'm not going to student teach. I'll change my major and find something else to do that does not require fingerprinting but god damnit I don't see the necessity of it in the first place and after the thigh-deep bureaucratic bullshit I've been wading through since elementary school I've had just about enough. This is an incredibly upsetting move coming on the heels of NCLB and the other crap teachers have to deal with, and it makes me very, very worried about the health of the public educational system when parents have to use legislators as middle-men to keep teachers "in line" and "safe" instead of actually getting to know the teachers and the schools themselves.

..but parents are too busy lobbying for protection of the safety and "innocence" of their kids.