Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
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Monday, July 10, 2006
The “inspiring” lessons of summer jobs
Over at the teacher blog Get Lost, Mr. Chips, the question is, “What were your best and worst summer jobs?”
OK, I’ll play your silly game.
My best summer job, hands down, was when I got paid $8.25 an hour to watch TV for Dayton Power and Light while I was in college.
My boss was the recently-hired VP for public relations at the power company, and he was sick and tired of going to meetings and being asked about news items other top executives had seen on the news but that he had missed. He had a clipping service for newspapers, but it was impossible for him to watch every news broadcast on every station.
So he bought three televisions and three VCRs and hired a college student. I came in every day around 8 a.m. and reviewed the 11 p.m. news from the prior evening along with the early morning news. Then I’d return about 7 p.m. and watch all the mid-day and evening news broadcasts. If there were any stories that even mentioned DP&L, I dubbed a tape of the report and left it for the VP to review and route to other top execs.
Not only was this easy money, I also made funny highlight tapes of news bloopers, weird stories and sports highlights. I kept the job into the school year and ended up with a great compilation of news reports about the University of Dayton’s NCAA tournament basketball run my senior year and the accompanying near riots in the student neighborhood known as the “Ghetto.”
My worst, or at least weirdest, summer job was in high school when I was growing up in Princeton, N.J. Somehow I got a job one summer as an “animal caretaker” at Princeton University’s psychology department research laboratory. My first day I was led into a room stacked to the ceiling with caged rats. It was my job to feed them, water them and clean their litter. By the end of my time there I was immune to bad smells that overcame others who entered the “rat room.”
There was also the monkey room. The monkeys were the most trouble. The little buggers spent the whole summer outsmarting me. Their cages were spring-latched, and I noticed how one monkey in particular, they named him Honduras after his home country, would watch intently as I opened each cage. It didn’t even occur to me that he hoped to pick the lock!
But sure enough, by watching me Honduras figured out how to open the cage. At first I would find him sitting in there with the cage door wide open in the mornings. I tried wrapping the door with a chain, jamming the lock with a stick and other improvisations to keep Honduras from getting the door open but every morning that door would be sitting open and I swear he’d have a little smirk on his face at the back of the cage.
Then Honduras got a little braver. One night he opened the cages of the other five monkeys on his cell block. These guys were housed together in a small room with a little more than a small desk and cupboard. But his cellmates were not afraid to scavenge around. By morning, I had a huge mess to clean up and the monkeys had about made themselves sick by eating a whole bottle of their apparently tasty vitamins. And I got chewed out by the lab director.
So what did I learn from these experiences? Well I suppose it was clear at an early age that I had a real talent for watching television and that when it came to brains, I was no match for a central American monkey. Inspiring, eh? Perhaps I can blame a few low grades on these experiences.
What were your best and worst summer job experiences?
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Girls think careers, boys go for easy money
On Sunday, the New York Times had a long takeout on the “boy crisis,” the notion that American boys in general are in serious trouble because their academic performance has declined significantly in several areas when compared to girls.
There’s a lot of debate on this question, and much of the Times story retraces some of the broad themes of the national discussion.
But there were a few new twists in this story. Here’s a couple things that struck me:
—For many young women, high achievement in school is a way to establish themselves professionally early to allow wiggle room for career interruptions to start families later.
From the story:
Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American University in Washington.
She has a dean’s scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean’s list almost every term and also led the campus women’s initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor’s degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master’s.
She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. “The women here are on fire,” she said.
Smyers goes on to explain why:
“Most college women want a high-powered career that they are passionate about,” Ms. Smyers said. “But they also want a family, and that probably means taking time off, and making dinner. I’m rushing through here, taking the most credits you can take without paying extra, because I want to do some amazing things, and establish myself as a career woman, before I settle down.”
—For young boys, skipping out on college and professional jobs can seem perfectly rational, even sensible, in their early adulthood.
Again from the story:
There is also an economic rationale for men to take education less seriously. In the early years of a career, Laura Perna of the University of Pennsylvania has found, college increases women’s earnings far more than men’s.
“That’s the trap,” Dr. Kleinfeld said. “In the early years, young men don’t see the wage benefit. They can sell their strength and make money.”
At UNC-Greensboro, where more than two-thirds of the students are female, and about one in five is black, many young men say they are torn between wanting quick money and seeking the long-term rewards of education.
“A lot of my friends made good money working in high school, in construction or as electricians, and they didn’t go to college, but they’re doing very well now,” said Mr. Daniels, the Greensboro student, who works 25 to 30 hours a week. “One of my best friends, he’s making $70,000, he’s got his own truck and health benefits. The honest truth is, I feel weird being a college student and having no money.”
—OK, this comment from high administrator at an eastern Pennsylvania school, part of a discussion about when and how colleges combat shortages of boys, just struck me as bizarre:
Longtime Dickinson administrators say that at isolated campuses with their own social worlds, gender balance is especially important.
“When there were fewer men, the environment was not as safe for women,” said Joyce Bylander, associate provost. “When men were so highly prized that they could get away with things, some of them become sexual predators. It was an unhealthy atmosphere for women.”
Huh? A small group of men surrounded by a lot of women somehow turns the men into “sexual predators?” She can’t really mean that, right?
Permalink | Comments (3) | Categories: Colleges and Universities
