"'... and he couldn’t not talk about it the way you talk about somebody you have a crush on'... I was like, ‘Maybe this is fine, but it isn’t fun.'"
Said Liz Glazer, from "A Law Professor Switches to Stand-Up Comedy/Taking an improv class on a whim led to a career in comedy for this onetime law professor" (Wall Street Journal).
The skipping-to-work guy was a partner in the law firm where she worked before she took up a job as a law professor, but the concept — wanting to really love your job — carried over to law professing, which she left for stand-up comedy. She'd received tenure, but then her school was making buy-out offers, and she snapped it up. She had been doing stand-up performances for a year at that point, and I guess she knew that was her real love.
Do you love your work and if so, does that mean you are in love with your work? There's a difference! Have you ever let go of a successful line of work because you weren't in love with it? Would you? Would you trust that this other thing that you feel you're in love with would really turn out all right? To put it that way makes the problem sound analogous to being married, without any serious problems, but falling in love with someone else. When that happens, do you think well, hell, I want the magic?
No, no... despite the "in love" business, work isn't like marriage. You don't swear lifetime faithfulness to your job, and your job doesn't have a consciousness capable of suffering. You can be untrue to your job. You're just being true to yourself. There's no moral question, only a question of how much to risk your own happiness. The thing you did for love might fail. It might turn out not to feel like so much fun after you've made yourself dependent on it. And you had tenure!!
Maybe this is fine, but it isn’t fun.
पोस्ट्स
५३ टिप्पण्या:
I was in the Navy, and I lived to work. It was a calling, and a career, and it was a whole lot of fun. After retiring, I (finally) found a job I like - still related to the Navy - but I now work to *live*. It it now a means to earn the resources to do the other things I want to do.
I think a buy-out offer for a professor with tenure might be enough security that she can afford to dabble.
At one point painting was the thing I loved most in this world, and maybe it still is. For a few years I had a successful career as a painter. I had a couple good galleries who represented me and I was selling work. But I had to walk away from it. There was an aspect of it that wasn’t fun, and that part seemed to start to dominate the whole affair. I also started radically changing my approach to painting, when I was expected to keep doing the thing that sold.
Well around this time I fell into a career where I started making a lot more many than I ever did in my life. In my new career I write, but I’m not a writer, I’m a painter. I still paint and still enjoy it, but I don’t paint the same way I used to, I hardly sell them or even show them to people. Even still I find painting fulfilling.
Meanwhile, what I do for my career, I’m good at it, but it doesn’t define me the way painting does. And if they didn’t pay me for it, I’d never do it for pleasure.
Can't get through the pay wall, but I used the internet & fleshed out Ms. Glazers bio a bit . . . seems utterly typical for a person of her social class. She was an academic and never actually practiced law, she had several friends in the entertainment business & leveraged those relationships.
What I can't tell from the little I was able to discover about Ms. Glazer is if she actually supports herself by doing stand up.
If she can only "pursue her dream" because of personal wealth (her buy out of tenure), or family wealth, well, her decision doesn't really seem heroic. She might as well have put "retired early" on her bio.
Yep.
Love my job? No. Not the right word.
I was rewarded by my job. I enjoyed the challenges. Big and small situations that required attention. Most all times I was able to achieve positive results, at the best, minima repercussions and the worst.
I was good at what I did. Confidence in my ability to analyze, fashion solutions, implement game plans, made me happy.
The only thing I grow tired of were 80-100 hour work weeks, to many weekends, and never taking a two week vacation just got old.
So I retired, and found a company that supplied me with a variety of part time gigs in agriculture. Working with farmers and retail supplies. Rarely a 40 hour work week, and days off at my whim. But I still enjoy (not love) my work. Even though 70% of it is dealing with farmers upset about the circumstances the precipitated my presence.
I don't mean to be flippant, but a lesbian professor of philosophy & law doesn't really merit a biographical article in the WSJ. Neither does a lesbian stand up comic.
And I can't understand why a lesbian woman transitioning from one to another is all that news worthy without more drama than we are given.
Warren Buffett, who is approaching 90, loves his job and he has said so.
If you haven’t seen his performance at the annual meeting, do so. It is streamed by Yahoo Finance the first Saturday in May. This year from LA so sidekick Charlie Munger can participate. Charlie is 90.
You’ll be surprised how funny he Warren is.
My dad was a laborer, mostly as a mason, but he was one of those guys who seemed to be able to do anything. He was very good at his work, often displaying artistic flair. Decades later, I still see his handiwork all over the area where I grew up, often none the worse for wear.
Among my fondest memories are the times I would be awakened by the sound of him whistling a tune as he walked down the driveway to his pickup truck early in the morning, though I wasn't necessarily so fond of it at the time. He didn't have an easy life, but he had the blessing of loving his profession.
"Do you love your work and if so, does that mean you are in love with your work?"
I work in WMD non-proliferation and technical analysis of global WMD stockpiles. I find the work to be extremely fulfilling in the sense that - if I'm successful and I do my job well - a city somewhere on planet earth will not be vaporized and shrouded in a cloud of some horrific persistent chemical agent.
That said I'm not 'in love' with my job. I am certainly not 'in love' with some of the people I have to deal with or countries I monitor.
the trick to doing a good job at anything is the realization that the light at the end of the tunnel may not ever appear, but the journey is nonetheless important. It is the journey that creates the success itself, not the destination.
I was in love with my career as a Navy pilot. Would have kept doing it "for fun" if I had had the option. When I retired from the Navy had a 20+ year career as a programmer/data analyst. Enjoyed the work, but was definitely not in love with it. Retired last summer and have absolutely no interest in doing it "for fun." I have always done volunteer work (tutoring, Sunday School teaching, sports coaching) with children - mostly kindergarten age - which I am in love with. Do more of that now that I am retired.
Jeff,
I taught for 22 years at a satellite campus on Roosevelt Roads Naval Station. Many of my students were Naval Aviators.
Your comment put me in mind of a conversation in a Compensation Management class. We were talking about fringe benefits or non-monetary compensation. Specifically how sailors accept relatively low pay compared to what they could make make on the beach but made up for it in benefits.
One of my students piped up and talked about how he did take lower pay and put up with a whole lot of Navy bullshit.
But in return, he got to fly an A-4 3-5 days a week. He said he would pay the navy to let him do that if he could afford it.
He had no idea what he would do when he got out (which was why he was working on an MBA) but he knew it would be nowhere near as fun.
John Henry
For me, the dream job was programming. I spent 15 years professionally there. I would ALWAYS bring home work. It wasn’t quite 24/7, but close. It was so bad that I trained myself to solve software problems in my dreams. Indeed, I can’t count the times that I would get frustrated at a problem, and take a nap, knowing that it would likely be solved when I woke up. And if that didn’t workm and it was after maybe 10 pm, I would go home, knowing I would have it solved by the time I got there (about 15 minutes away).
Then, I started maybe to get bored. And see a cap on my advancement, so went back to school, got a law degree, and became a patent attorney. A bit more lucrative, and with a lot more visibility, esp in my last job, of being one of two patent attorneys in a firm of over 300 attorneys. Some very interesting clients - for example I was the patent attorney for the UFC, and worked with some of the very top Alzheimer’s researchers in the country. Became somewhat an expert in gaming (we had the top gaming practice in the country at the time), and could do slot machine patents in my sleep. And before that, I spent five years working on high profile bleeding edge microprocessor designs and the correspond software to optimize its use.
But, the difference was that it was rarely more than just a job. It was a very mentally stimulating job (to adequately prepare and prosecute patents, you need to understand the invention almost as well as the inventors do - sometimes even understand it better). But it wasn’t creative like software was, and continues to be for me. Good friend was a dancer, then artist, married to a decently successful artist. And we still fondly remember our long discussions about creativity, her about painting, and me, about programming.
I had a good career, between software and patent law, but do have regrets. Maybe the biggest career-wise was my decision a couple years after college to switch from CS to Business in grad school. My MBA has been somewhat helpful over the years, but that was never my passion. I think that I switched out of greed, plus, it was what most of my fraternity brothers my year had done. I knew a lot of MBAs, JDs, and MDs from college, but few PhDs. Then I worked with a couple hundred PhDs as a patent attorney, and then my kid got one, and I realized that the average PhD was no smarter than the average lawyer, and the average dissertation was pretty boring and routine. But a late 1970s CS PhD would very likely have opened up a lot of doors to interesting projects. One of the reasons that I switched away was that I didn’t want to teach. But it turns out that most engineering PhDs probably never teach, and are more likely to have gone into business or government (my kid went into industry, turning down government related work because the classification wall made it a one way street).
But that regret doesn’t keep me up at night. I still enjoy a little programming on the side. Much more enjoyable to me than getting my hands dirty working in the yard. Recently, I have been doing a lot of home improvements. That is fun. Just finished cabinets in the laundry room. Before that it was a second level of clothes rods in the closets, etc. I bought a subdivision last year. I am building a large garage by the house in MT, and will probably start building a house or so a year on lots that I haven’t sold. Expect to do some of the carpentry and painting. But I have no real aptitude there, and don’t have the same joy I get from programming, even after a half a century now. Maybe my career change at 40 was not that bad of an idea - I never have burned out in my first love - writing computer software, while I have never missed patent law that much.
Zig Ziglar in one of his tapes talked about Gadabout Gaddis. Gaddis pretty much invented fishing TV in the 50s.
Who could have imagined making a living from basically a hobby?
Ziglar said, and he may have been quoting Gaddis but I don't remember, "Find something you love doing so much that you would pay to do it. Then figure out a way to get other people to pay you for it."
I've been really lucky in that regard. I'm basically an industrial tourist. I get to go all over, spend lots of time on plant floors seeing how things are made, and make a decent living doing it.
I'll keep doing it as long as I am physically able. Then, if I am still among the living, I will focus more on writing about it.
It's not a job, it's an adventure.
John Henry
I think very few people are in love with their work. My sense is that if you're lucky, you like your work and appreciate it, followed by those that are ambiguous about it, and lastly those poor souls who despise their work and dread it, but have no other (real or perceived) option.
Ex helo driver,
I guess you were posting the same thing more or less as I was writing mine.
Curious though Why "pilot"? I've had numerous Naval Aviators tell me in no uncertain terms that they were NOT pilots. The Air Force has pilots, not the Navy.
Pilots land on stationary surfaces. Naval Aviators land on surfaces that are moving in 4-5 axes, in the dark, in 40 knot winds, in the middle of the ocean.
I've seen choppers land on a destroyer that was moving at 20 knots, pitching up and down, moving sideways and so on. I never understood how you guys did it. A pretty amazing skillset.
John Henry
I was a fighter pilot in the Marine Corps. Loved it! Started a law firm in Beverly Hills with a woman I had once worked with at a broadcast network. I would say to her that in our law firm, I felt more married to her than my wife at the time. A few years later...I actually married her. So I certainly love my work.
- Krumhorn
Not just the skills to land on a destroyer.
The pure balls as well.
John Henry
This made me giggle. A long time ago, when I was in my late teens, I complained to my dad that the summer job I had wasn't any fun. His response lives on in the lore of our family:
Fun? Fun? Work isn't supposed to be FUN. If work was supposed to be fun, they would spell it F-U-N.
They mention Glazer was a conservative Jew in an orthodox yeshiva, and based on where she grew up, I'm presuming it's Bruriah HS of the JEC. That place is no joke. Our school would get a few kids a year from JEC when they were asked to leave because they weren't living up to the imposing community standards of Jewish observance.
She sounds like a remarkably bright and capable person. If she's got an ounce of funny, she'll turn it into success.
Curious though Why "pilot"? I've had numerous Naval Aviators tell me in no uncertain terms that they were NOT pilots. The Air Force has pilots, not the Navy.
As a Marine Corps fighter pilot, I was a Naval Aviator, but we didn’t know what those guys were in the brown shoe Navy. They sort of stumbled around...although that woman Navy Lt who was my first carrier qualification instructor pilot was pretty cute and very steady on the stick.
- Krumhorn
---And I can't understand why a lesbian woman transitioning from one to another is all that news worthy without more drama than we are given. [Lewis Wetzel]
I followed your earlier comment to my search engine and found a lot of articles or mentions of this person. She seems highly skilled at getting coverage.
As to the more general topic, Althouse covers the waterfront in that next-to-last paragraph. We know, but sometimes do not adjust mentally for this factor, that the media cover successful career changes and entrepreneurialism. How many failures there are for each success, even a limited success, I would not know but I would start my guessing at 10, suspect 20 is closer, and could be persuaded of higher numbers.
A ratio I think was improved by the internet, but is significantly worsened by our lack of population growth. That rate has been slipping and is currently only 0.47% annually, versus nearly 1% in the 2006-08 period and nearly 2% annually in the wonderful '50s, when expansion (plus pent-up demand) created enormous opportunities. The vigah that JFK liked to cite was already on the downswing even when he said that.
There is nothing an individual can do about this, but it is a background issue that changes the odds a bit.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOPGROWUSA
If you are working for a company, no matter how much you love your job, your company doesn't love you back the same.
I worked for decades in Silicon Valley...I know a thing or two about layoffs.
I only wish I'd learned some of those lessons sooner.
Have you ever let go of a successful line of work because you weren't in love with it? Would you? Would you trust that this other thing that you feel you're in love with would really turn out all right?
"Don't get me started. Don't even get me started."
Interesting. A much higher percentage of pilots here than I would have expected.
I spent most of my 20 year Air Force career as a pilot, the majority of it in F-111s. I loved it, at the cost of having a lot more dead friends than one should at that age.
Since then, 17 years as an airline pilot, a few years flying self-loading cargo for Northwest Airlines, then moving to FedEx. Didn't love it in the same way as being a military pilot, but pretty much always enjoyed it. And being base in Anchorage for 8 years, then another 5 years in Germany added a whole additional list of experiences I would never have had otherwise.
I'm nearly a year into age-mandated retirement. Very unexpectedly, I scarcely miss the job. Perhaps it is because of all the rigamarole that goes with it — pretty continuous studying, spending half my life in hotels, checkrides, sleep deprivation/circadium rythym disruption, schedule bidding, travel arrangements, etc.
I've spent the time since retiring doing what a lot of people do for a job: car mechanic. I've been restoring a heirloom 1969 Volvo 1800S to near showroom new condition.
No idea what I'm going to do with my life after that.
For me, the dream job was programming. I spent 15 years professionally there. I would ALWAYS bring home work.
I was the same way in my programming job (it was also my first "real" job). I remember being so excited that I got a key to the building that would allow me to come in and work on the latest problem I was working on at the time whenever my inspiration would hit. I was hourly and wouldn't clock in because I didn't want to cause problems with payroll.
I was young though to and didn't have a family (or resources).
Now while I'm still in a tech field, I can say I enjoy my job, but I wouldn't do it for free. At least not with any consistency to be effective at it.
And while I'm technically able to retire, I'm not ready yet. That being said there are some days with so much corporate bullshit that I'm read to just walk. I find that as I gain more resources, the drive to work becomes a different calculus.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/SPPOPGROWUSA
Hmm 1992. About the start of internet porn.
Blogger Krumhorn said...
but we didn’t know what those guys were in the brown shoe Navy. They sort of stumbled around
Neither did we.
In the black shoe navy.
But we loved them anyway.
John Henry
My current job pays well, although it's boring. Honestly, I feel like I went down the wrong road. If I could do it over, I wouldn't have gone to grad school in CA like I did, and would have left my last job about a year earlier and moved to Texas. My current plan, if the current job goes full telework, is to move to Austin and sign up for the blacksmithing program at the community college. I've dabbled over the years and loved it. If work is boring, make sure it pays well enough to fund the things which you enjoy.
I have been known to literally skip work.
People do it, but I would never walk away from something I was successful at that made decent money. Not without having something else lined up first.
No, dear, I aint a stupid, b[l]ack-N-forth;
Im a wild, inappropriate NDEr:
♡ en.gravatar.com/MatteBlk ♡
HeeHee
Love ya.
Cya soon.
be@peace.
Whistle while you work, Hitler is a jerk, Mussolini pinched his weenie, now it doesn't work.
"Maybe this is fine, but it isn’t fun."
If it's not fun, why do it?
Rigmarole, not "rigamarole". People misspell it as the latter because people mispronounce it as such.
I love my job as a Grammar Nazi.
THEOLDMAN
JK. I wrote that as an attempt at humor. People who correct others without being asked to or in the situation where it is proper (your children; also people you are mentoring and developing their skills in spelling and speech and it's agreed upon) are rude asshats. Before I even think of correcting someone else, I want to answer the question, what's my motive in doing so.
I have loved certain aspects of my culinary career and my writing career but never the jobs. I usually give more to my employer than they expect or give to me and that's worked most of the time to my benefit. I didn't have high expectations except for the basics. I've left a few jobs where the employer treated me badly, but I gave notice and told them the reason why.
Darkisland,
I never worried about that Naval aviator/not-a-pilot line of thinking. But when I do something I'm proud of, such as an unusually difficult parallel parking (which I am really good at), I will look over at my wife (36 years and counting) with a smirk on my face, wink, and say "Wings of Gold, baby!"
Landing on destroyers could have a very high "pucker factor." But the ones I really tipped my cap to were the rescue swimmers that flew with us. "Go ahead and jump out of the helicopter into (literally) the middle of the ocean. Oh, yeah, there's jet fuel in the water, aircraft wreckage, and there might be sharks. We'll come pick you back up in a few minutes." Also, it was always amazing watching the aircraft carrier flight deck crew during a launch and recovery cycle. An incredible "ballet."
Marcus Bressler:
Rigmarole, not "rigamarole". People misspell it as the latter because people mispronounce it as such.
That's exactly what happened to me. Thanks for pointing it out.
Bruce Hayden,
A fascinating history! Explains some (not all, but some) of your uniformly marvelous comments here.
It reminds me a bit of my Dad. A bit of a screwup early in college, then took a couple years off and joined the Navy -- at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis, he was on one of the nearby carriers that were waiting on standby -- and then came back to college and turned himself around. Got a PhD in biochemistry, did a postdoc, taught at SUNY/Albany for a few years, then did research for a few more. And then went to night law school -- when I was at Juilliard on Saturdays, he'd be in the Fordham Law Library across the Lincoln Center campus -- and graduated from Fordham at exactly the same time that I graduated from high school.
And then he became a biotech patent attorney, and stayed in that work until retirement. There are very few people in the US with both biochem PhDs and JDs -- about 300, I think he told me once -- so he was in steady demand. I think he liked the combination of law and science better than either alone, and he was very good indeed at it.
After retirement, he shifted again. Now he's a wildlife photographer, a good one, and 80 years old. Mom (five years younger) was another UW/Madison biochem PhD, and followed the same trajectory from there, to teaching (Russell Sage), to research, then went pharmaceutical, as a toxicologist/teratologist/mutagenicist, project depending. Ultimately left to be a private consultant, and then retired properly and, like Dad, took up wildlife photography. She's nearly as good as he is.
I was never quite sure which were the "jobs they loved" (though patent law is probably the right answer for Dad), but they are certainly doing what they love now.
I always wanted to fly in the military, but found I needed vision correction at my first medical in 86. Still I never tire of watching F15’s depart in pairs when I am in the pdx terminal. Plan B required several years of instruction and a stint in the regionals making less than minimum wage hand flying 6 legs a day in the weather and loving every minute of it. Now it’s cush flying in the “scare”bus with great people for a great company as the sight of retirement appears on the horizon. The commute is not optimal but once the trip begins I can’t imagine doing anything else, especially after all those years pining for doing the “job”. Another perk is the fact that once the brake is set there is zero requirement to think about work until the next time.
Another perk is the fact that once the brake is set there is zero requirement to think about work until the next time.
And no meetings.
OT but Busdriver reminded me of the time in about 1990-91 when my son and I were taking flying lessons in ultralights.
I remember feeling kind of proud of learning to get the thing on the ground without bending it and mentioned that to one of my students during a break. He was an Captain (equals Army Col) with a couple tours in VN flying Phantoms and a whole bunch of medals.
He told me that I was crazy. There was NO FRICKEN WAY he would ever go up in an ultralight. They were too dangerous in his opinion. Apparently not like a nice relaxing jaunt over Hanoi being shot at with sams and whatnot.
For totally unrelated reasons, mainly cost and weather we wound up quitting after son had soloed and got a sailboat. 27' O'Day. I loved that boat. Wish I still had it.
John Henry
What a delightful comment thread!
Heck, I may as well tell my story.
I started out as a ditch digger for the local Gas Company after dropping out of college. They had an internal search for (COBOL) programmers and I was selected. Programming/ analysis was great fun. As I worked my way up the ladder it became less intellectually challenging but still fun. I ended up as IT Manager / CIO for a large oil and gas company. I loved it up till the very end, when office politics became ridiculous. I was able to take "the package" and retired very early. Went back to school, got a graduate degree for the fun of it and was asked to stay on and teach. I taught three courses for 10 years until I finally *really* retired. Leaving teaching after 10 years was much harder for me than leaving big business after 30.
Greg Geraldo was the best lawyer-turned-comic of all time.
Despite my engineering education, I spent my 38 year career in administration at a large telecom. Always enjoyed it, worked with the best people in the world, and always told my kids they ought to like their job or get another one. After retiring and sitting around awhile, I developed a very successful electronics unit about 12 years ago and have been manufacturing and selling it all over the world on the internet. Working much harder now than ever with the telecom from dawn to dusk six days a week at age 80. So nice running my own business and being able to make decisions on my own without going through a committee structure or waiting on a boss.
For all that, I think I would have been better suited as a history professor as I love reading it so much.
He sounds like Doctor Ken Jeong, a physician who left medicine to become a standup comic and actor.
I retired from the Big Law Firm at 60 because (a) I could, and (b) my wife (already retired) was ready to move into the next phase of our life. As it turned out, I was able to work part-time as a lawyer (for the Big Firm and later for a Small Firm) for several years, while still being retired, moving to FL, etc. I just took a look at my old firm's website. There was hardly anyone left that I knew and used to work with.
It isn't just about liking your job. It is also about the ability to take on responsibility and to do difficult things.
It is about the sense of fulfillment you get when you do something meaningful and you can provide for your family. Life is generally miserable and it is only maybe the last few decades that the idea of "do whatever you want" became a thing.
Almost everywhere else in the world and for the first 100,000 thousand years of human existence life has been about struggle and misery. Most children in human history died before the age of 5. We need to deal with reality.
I feel lucky to have my dream job. I work from home and I am providing meaningful value to a meaningful mission. But there is a small percentage of the population that can do this job. This opportunity is just not possible for over 99% of the people on the planet.
What we really need is for our society to start supporting everyone who works. We need people to do shitty jobs and we need to help them be able to support the people around them. We need to value this in society and that means defeating the people that make everything about money and power.
We need to help build the value of people who work at low skill jobs so that they can provide more value and be paid more. We really need to defeat the people trying to raise the minimum wage. They are truly evil people who are taking opportunity away from the people that most need the jobs and the training.
We need to make it a triumph and a good thing for people to start at the bottom doing miserable work and to work their way up and become more valuable and be able to take on greater responsibility and to be compensated appropriately.
Talking about how awesome my job is doesn't feel good.
It feels like gloating.
I am sorry.
My postal career just passed the 30-year mark last month, and I have another 7+ years of federal service from my military time. I enjoy my job and I like most of the people I work with. My work provides value to our customers, and I'm good at it, through years of experience and because I'm detail-oriented almost to the point of OCD. I believe any job worth doing is worth doing right the first time. I'm also good at troubleshooting and dealing with unforeseen situations on the occasions when that is necessary; I've seen it all and then some over the years, and I know how to roll with the changes.
Next year, I hit age 62 and I can start thinking more seriously about retiring, although to be honest, I'm not sure what I would do with myself if I wasn't working. Work provides social structure and a certain amount of camaraderie. It provides a sense of identity. If I wasn't working, what would I do with my time? I don't want to just sit on my butt and get fatter. I would have to create a new framework of social structure to prevent that from happening.
One of my co-workers is 87, and I've always said that I don't want to be *that* guy who ends up going out with his boots on, working until he dies, but to a certain extent, I can understand why he continues to work, albeit at a somewhat attenuated speed; he needs that social structure and camaraderie, too.
I like my job, but I do plan to stop and smell the roses long before I'm an octogenarian or even a septuagenarian. I have squirreled enough away to able to live a comfortable life in retirement, assuming that Biden* doesn't start a hyperinflation with his bad policies. But I wouldn't want to do any other job, because I know that the pay and the benefits would be much worse, and that alone probably would make me resentful to the point of not enjoying any other hypothetical job. I have seniority and layoff protection and I'll do what I'm doing until I'm ready to retire on my own terms.
And @ Achilles at 6:48 pm:
Spot on! As a society, we are in competition both among ourselves and also with all of the other nations of the world. We need all of our people to be productive and competitive, because we are outnumbered 4:1 by the Chinese and the Indians as well. If we are to maintain our position as the world's pre-eminent power, we cannot waste our nation's talents. China is doing everything in its power to overtake us, and their political philosophy is malign to the extreme. There are four Chinese for every one of us.
That is why it is so outrageous that our educational system is not harnessing the talents of so many of our young people. I read an article about a mother in Baltimore whose son had been getting promoted every year through high school even though he failed almost all of his courses and was truant on over 270 days through his high school career. He ended up getting sent back to 9th grade, and Mama was complaining about how the system had failed her son, that she had "assumed" that since he was being promoted that he had been learning. Of course, Mama wasn't looking at his report cards or his homework or his attendance. She was "working three jobs and had three other kids," according to the article. Well, we all know what happens when you "assume." Mama was part of the problem, just as much as the shitty Baltimore public schools were. Asian "tiger moms" don't have those problems. Culture matters. Still, our Democrat-dominated public school unions who aren't educating these inner-city kids have a lot to answer for, as well as the Democrat politicians who have made it impossible for those kids to get a good education. They are the ones who are handing the keys to the future to the damn Chinese.
Hey Daskol,
I’m a J.E.C. Grad too.
Speaking of work, I have 34 years in as a US Gov scientist, and looking to get out,soon. My agency used to,be about science, but now it is sclerotic and politically correct and woke,and as with all,things progressive, terminally incompetent.
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