A Place at the Table

I have a younger man in my life. He’s 21—handsome, funny, sunny and bright. But last week, as we chatted, he was worried and trying hard to hang onto his positive outlook on life. Bryan just graduated from college with a degree in business, and he can’t find a job. Another young friend is 26. She completed her masters in public administration. She did internships and volunteer work and community organizing and more, but she may be moving home to job hunt.

They are not alone. Yesterday I read about Michael Volpe.

After relentlessly pounding the industrial carpet at scores of job fairs, firing off hundreds of cover letters and knocking on dozens of doors since November, Michael Volpe was desperate. The 25-year-old college graduate with a degree in physics and a couple of years with the Peace Corps is learning that the nation's capital is also the networking capital. And if you don't know the right people, landing a job can be daunting. This week, he took his job search in a new direction, standing outside downtown D.C. Metro stops during morning rush hour with a sign around his neck reading, "ENTRY LEVEL JOB SEEKER."

We tell them from the time they are in kindergarten that a good education with a university degree is the key to a good job and a fulfilled life. This Volpe kid worked hard. He played by the rules. He went the extra mile. He signed the student loan papers. He did everything he was supposed to do. So did my two young friends. And now, after years of hard work, they proudly step forward to claim their prize---financial security and meaningful work. But they find themselves standing at the edge of a personal abyss instead.

My local newspaper reported that here, at University of Mary Washington,

Gary Johnson said the job market for newly minted college grads is leaner than he's ever seen it in his 20 years as a career counselor.

But in the same article,

Marie Hawley, career counselor at Germanna Community College's Fredericksburg campus, said that the college's nursing students have "excellent prospects right now." She also said a number of older students who have lost their jobs or want to hang onto them are taking courses at Germanna to enhance their skills--and resumes--in such things as computerized accounting. "These are people who have four-year university degrees who are saying, 'I need something new and fresh to make myself attractive in the job market right now,'" Hawley said.

I’m a family and consumer economist—a specialist in nano-economics, if you will. Unlike the macro or micro enconomists, I see economics not in theory, but in the everyday lives of individuals. And at the personal economic level, supply and demand are everything. So I keep wondering: Who promoted the false assumption that the demand for college educated job seekers would continually expand to meet the supply of college graduates?

It flies in the face of reality and experience. We’ve been hearing about boomerang kids who return with degrees to live in the basement and wait tables for years now. As parents, educators, and policymakers, how did we deceive ourselves into believing that if we tell kids to go to college, prosperity and happiness would be their guaranteed outcomes?

While the job market for recent college graduates may be weak, the unemployment rate for those who lack a high school diploma is abysmal. Even for the high school graduate, employment options are limited. Job growth and job opportunities are best in skilled and technical jobs that do require post secondary training, but do not require a four year degree.

"I naively thought I'd have my choice of jobs..."

I wish you luck, Mike Volpe. With a degree in physics and minor in math, plus your experience, your work ethic, and your determination, you're bound to find a job and I’m sure you’ll be successful. But I wonder how many of those young hopefuls with degrees in business may have to settle for retail rather than corporate level? What about those newly minted art historians, sociologists, literary analysts and psychologists who may be waiting tables in order to pay off student loans? When we told them to go to college, did we remember to tell them that it might be easier to earn a degree in communication and public relations or international affairs than to land a job in those fields?

We told them to follow their dreams, but did we mention that all dreams don’t come true and that they should be prepared to deal with that reality? Did we think to tell them to look at job prospects before committing $100,000 and four years to job preparation? Did we mislead them? Should we have told them that there are Other Ways to Win?

Posted by Susan Graham at 2:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The lyrics of the old Guess Who song are morphing in my head:

We've come undone
We didn't know what he was headed for
And once we knew what he was headed for
It was too late

He's come undone
He found a mountain
that was far too high
And when he found out
he couldn't fly
It was too late

It's too late
He's gone too far
He's lost the sun
He's come undone

Another school shooting and the question that haunts us all is “Why?”

Here are some things that I noted:

"He was a year or two older than most of his classmates who described him as a quiet boy who never talked about guns or violence."

"The young man had no disciplinary problems at school and hadn't been in trouble with the law."

"The boy's mother said he seemed nervous before leaving for school, but when she asked him about it, he attributed it to getting the results of the "LEAP" tests that eighth-graders must pass to be promoted."

The profile is not unusual. He’s fifteen or so. He lives with his mom and sees his dad on weekends. He has been retained. He sits quietly in the back of the room, not making trouble, but not making progress either. He’s the passive kid who drops through the cracks.

There are a lot of kids like Justin. They are marking time, too old for middle school, too young to drop out. With good intentions, adults have told them that success in school is a necessity for success in life. In other words, we tell them that they are losers before they really get into the game of life. Justin got fed up with marking time; he made up his own rules to the game and became a time bomb.

The hot book on our middle school campus is Neal Shusterman’s Unwind. In a futuristic world, the fate of a person hangs in the balance during the years between 13 and 18. During these years, it is decided if a teenager has exhibited sufficient promise to justify the additional investment in care and education necessary to bring them to maturity. If not, they can be signed over by their parents or the authorities to be “unwound” at a harvest farm. Those young people who have demonstrated limited potential can still serve society by being disassembled for spare parts that are recycled for use by more deserving individuals.

While we may not harvest the organs of our underachievers, we do not cultivate these children. We attempt to take unique individuals and turn them into standardized products. If they do not meet our quality control standards of college-ready, we pass them off as factory seconds, allowing their productivity to turn to frustration and their potential to go unrealized.

"Ultimately he only hurt himself."

But the repercussions of the child who comes undone impact us all. An education system that invests in students who struggle is expensive. The price of not making the investment is exorbitant and ultimately society must pay.

Posted by Susan Graham at 11:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today was the deadline for encumbering budget money. This week there are two after school meetings to be attended at the far end of the county. I am working on guest blogs for Public School Insights and the Center for Teacher Leadership . Over at Teacher Leaders Network we have a couple of group projects that I want to be part of. In the meantime, the last mid-quarter interim reports go out Wednesday. Our kids are prepping for the state assessment tests so I’m working around remediation pull outs and field trips. A colleague cried in my office today and two of my students had issues that involved family members and jail. Since I’m pretty stressed out myself this week, I could relate when I saw the headline Stress of Term Time is Putting Teachers' Mental Health at Risk, says NUT.

Great! Now some reporter is calling educators a bunch of nut cases? But wait, the NUT was in England. The article went on to say

Half of all teachers have considered leaving the profession due to stress, citing the long hours, excessive workload, lack of support and poor pupil behaviour, according to the National Union of Teachers (NUT). In addition, a large-scale HSE survey found teaching to be the most stressful occupation in the UK, it said.

Sounds familiar, doesn't it? Seems it’s not all Eton, Harrow, and Hogwarts over the pond after all. But the Brits are not alone, there are stressed teachers Australia,Taiwan,Latvia, Africaand the Pacific Islands. In fact, my search for teacher stress produced 36,800,000 links.

Are tea sipping teachers in England symptomatic? Are educators a bunch of whiners who can’t cope? I keep searching and stumble on to the Teachers.tv site and discover their How Stressed is Your School? series. This isn’t just about teacher perception or soft psychobabble. It’s hard quantitative medical evidence and multidisciplinary research. Teachers wear biometric vests which provide a live feed of blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, and body temperatures as they go through their instructional day. Psychological surveys probe into what teachers perceive as stress and what they believe helps them cope with stress. Even genetic factors that predisposed one to high stress, due to cortisol, the stress hormone, is investigated. I really need to go to bed, but this is fascinating! I’m hooked and I can’t stop eavesdropping on what’s going on with the teachers at Kings Langley—a formerly failing school that has been reorganized. I’m staying up too late again and slugging down Diet Coke for a caffeine fix. More stress! But I keep clicking to find that

Teacher stress is a much talked of phenomenon, however, there is little consensus between different professional groups regarding its aetiology, or how to tackle it. Based on a review of international research, it is concluded that teacher stress is a real phenomenon and that high levels are reliably associated with a range of causal factors, including those intrinsic to teaching, individual vulnerability and systemic influences.

Surely there's a silver bullet among all of these sites, but instead I find "

So how can educators handle all of this stress? Unfortunately there is not one answer. Oh dear, that was stressful! So I go back to TeacherTV for some help from their Stress Relief for Schools series. One of the more interesting aspects of all of this is that there really isn’t one answer--managing stress is a complicated combination of biology, life experience, and reflection. However, it would appear that a person’s ability to manage stress may be one of the more critical factors in teacher success.

This takes me back a recent conversation here at TM with my teacher colleaguesNancy Flanagan and Anthony Cody. When TM editor Anthony Rebora queried,

The recent MetLife Survey of the American Teacher , based on a comparison to past surveys, found that teacher satisfaction has increased markedly over the past 25 years. Has this been your impression? What do you think accounts for the change?

I said, "It does surprise me that teachers feel better [about their work]. Could it be that while we are expected to have high expectations for student performance we might have lower expectations for our own work place satisfaction?"

More stress, but greater satisfaction: What has changed? Our circumstances? Our performance efficacy? Our coping strategies? Our expectations?

I keep turning the question over and over in my head. I don't know. But I do know that I need to do my yoga, take a nice soaky bath, and get a good night’s sleep because tomorrow’s another day in middle school, so I’m scheduled for full day of stress beginning at 8:20 in the morning. We're in the end stretch of the year and there’s too much to be done to schedule a mental health day!

Posted by Susan Graham at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)