Seeping Matter

I have a good friend named Chris Cooper.  (No, not the actor.)  I worked for Chris for many years when he was Director of Developer Services at Novell; now, Chris is a partner with UV Partners, a venture capital firm in Salt Lake City.

Working for Coop (he goes by Coop, not Chris; calling him Chris seems weird) was a very important educational experience for me, primarily because Coop is a businessman, not a technologist, by background.  Because of this, Chris taught me things about the software business that no other manager or director that I’ve worked for has been able to teach me.  In particular, Coop helped me understand many of the reasons why Novell made some of the decisions they made, and why they didn’t make others I thought they should.  Knowing this doesn’t mean that they are right, but it certainly helped me to gain a different perspective.

Some time ago I had the opportunity to meet Coop for lunch in Salt Lake City.  I asked him how he was liking his work and he gushed about how much he loved his job.  Then he admitted, “You know, I never would have even considered this as a career opportunity for me, let alone would I have thought I would like it so much.”  He briefly covered his background — education in business, joined Novell as a sales representative, established key relationships with others, always tried to execute in his assigned role — and then this opportunity played out for him.  We discussed how odd it is that as young people we fret so much about which major to choose and which college to go to and which classes to take and which job opportunity to pursue, almost as though we think that the sum of of these decisions is going to head us down a career freeway, at high speed towards a specific destination, with no exits or detours or scenic byways, when in fact many, many people end up somewhere completely different from what they had planned.

I mentioned this later to a long-time friend who had spent many years in his chosen profession as a physical therapist before making a career change to sell educational technology to schools (yeah, I know!).  Of course he could really identify with this.  He said that often we think of our career not only as a path, but as a freeway like I just mentioned.  But in fact, he said, our career is more like a waterway.  It might be a little stream, or a large river; it might be straight or twisty; it might be fast-moving and exiting, full of whitewater rapids, or it might be slow and steady, if somewhat boring.

He continued the analogy by saying that as you float along the waterway you’ve chosen, you might eventually realize, “Uh, I don’t think this is going where I want to go anymore.”  Maybe it started out going the direction you wanted, but quickly or gradually turned a different way.  Maybe you thought it was heading one direction, only to find that it actually wasn’t heading where you thought it was.  Or maybe it is still going where you once thought it was, but you’ve changed your mind about what you want.  Clearly, if you want to end up where you intended to go, you’ll have to pull your raft out of the waterway and choose another one.

That’s why I say, your career path probably isn’t.  It probably is a waterway.

This is why this post over the weekend by Seth Godin really stood out to me.  I’ve got a big extended family with lots of younger people (siblings, siblings-in-law, cousins, etc.) for me to give advice to that they can quickly ignore.  I’ve seen many of them struggle with this.  They choose a major because it is easy instead of choosing a major because it is interesting, or they don’t finish their degree at all, or they don’t even make choices in college or a career because they are afraid to commit their whole life to it.  I believe in the value of education, but sometimes I’ve wondered why it matters at all if your career is so much left to chance?

Seth’s post identifies the link for me.  Education should be preparing you to take the choices as they become available to you.  You might have a career endpoint in mind, but you can’t be so in love with that endpoint that you won’t consider opportunities and alternatives that become available to you along the way.  How do you even know you will like that endpoint anyway?  Fretting about choosing the right endpoint is pointless.  Your career isn’t a path, it is a waterway.  You don’t know whether the waterway leads where you want or not; you choose one based on the best available knowledge and judgment you have at the time.  You can always get out and choose another one.  So just get in and get started!

Against my better judgment I’m writing about education.  Education is a topic where, if you disagree with the status quo, you are automatically labeled as anti-education, which is logically ridiculous.

So, for the record, I’m decidedly pro-education.  I have a lot of opinion on the topic, and since this is my blog I guess it’s time I break the ice here and start talking about it.  Nevertheless, I’m sure that there are people who are going to take my opinions as being an attack on education or even themselves personally, even though I’m just now calling them out on it.  It isn’t meant that way.  But whatever.

Back to the topic.

I was thinking about this question the other day.  Actually, quite a while ago.  It was picture day at school, and so that morning the kids were concerned about what to wear and what does their hair look like and other such things.

For some reason it occurred to me:  Why do they even have picture day at school in the first place?

The de-facto knee-jerk answer to this question is:  ”So you can have a picture of your child!  Don’t you want a picture of your child?  You know, someday your child will be grown up and you’ll wish you had something to remember their childhood by!  What is wrong with you anyway?!?”

See, the thing is, that is not the answer to my question.  That’s the answer to the question, “Why should I have portraits taken of my child?”  But my question is, why is it done at school?

It surely was not always this way.  If you went back far enough — 50 years, or 80, or 100? — you would certainly get to a time period where kids went to school but there was no picture day.

I can envision the business model here, for a company like LifeTouch that does school picture days all over the place, or at least Utah.  It is actually pretty sweet.  There’s no real estate costs, since you don’t have a studio.  You just set up at the school you are at every day.  You’ve got business automatically provided to you.  In a single day, you might shoot 100, or 200, or even 500 portraits.  Even if you only sold a $20 package to half of the, say, 200 portraits you shoot in a day, that’s $2000 of income in a single day!  That’s a pretty sweet business!

What really struck me as odd was when I asked my wife why our kids were even participating.  See, my wife worked as a professional photographer when we were first married, shooting high school, prom, bridal, and family portraits among other things in a full studio setting, with adjustable lighting and props and everything.  She can do just fine shooting pictures of my kids.  So for years we’ve avoided spending the admittedly lofty prices for boring picture packages from school and instead we’ve shot our own, which are much more interesting and are of comparable to better quality, and less expensive.

Knowing this, I didn’t understand why our kids were even having their pictures taken.  I mean, we know already that we aren’t going to buy any.  Why make the photographer shoot and develop pictures we know we aren’t going to buy?  So I asked Amber, and she said, “Well, it is harder to get them out of it than just to have them go along with it.”

I thought about that, and it makes sense.  Of course it is hard for the teacher to monitor kids that are getting pictures taken if some of them are also back in the classroom not getting pictures taken.  And of course it is hard for the teacher to know if the kids parents really don’t want their picture taken or whether it is just that the child himself is trying to avoid the picture for some reason.

But why is it even the teacher’s responsibility in the first place?

This was what finally hit me.  The teacher’s job is to teach my kids.  Why is there even a school picture day?  Why is it that educators, who have a minimum number of days that they must provide instruction for our kids, are counting as a day of instruction one where time is spent shuffling kids through a picture-taking process that has nothing to do with their education?

I don’t know the real reason, but I’m willing to bet it rhymes with Sick Jack.  But for most people, including education professionals, I don’t think they ever even think about it.  We’ve always had school pictures.  It is just part of the schedule.

I’m not particularly opposed to school pictures, but I fear it is setting a bad precedent.

In years past, they’ve held a book fair at my kids’ elementary.  I seem to remember this going on when I was in elementary school also.  The kids would go down to the book fair, as a class, and look through the books that were available for purchase.  Then their assignment is to come home and pester their parents for money to buy books.  Presumably this is allowed because books are educational, although one time I actually went to the book fair and only about half of the items for sale in the book fair were books.

It gets worse.  This past year at my kids’ elementary, there was another similar thing going on.  It operated exactly like the book fair.  As classes the kids were taken down to this little store that was set up in part of the school.  They were instructed by their teachers to go through the store and identify the things they wanted to buy, and how much they cost.  Then they were told to come home and discuss with their parents the things they wanted.  Then the next day they should bring their money, because they would go down to the store again as a class and anyone who brought money could buy stuff from the store.

Consider:  At this point, we’ve given up on trying to have anything in the store even remotely resemble education.  They pitched this as a finance unit, where kids could learn about how much things cost and how to pay for them.  In our case, however, this was no different than when our kids come with us to a regular store (you know, the kind that pays for its own real estate), where their job is to ask us for money to buy stuff they don’t need, and our job is to say, “No.”  The only difference is that the crap in this store at the school was significantly overpriced.  Significantly overpriced.

Well, when our kids came home and asked for money, of course we said, “No.”  We told them they were free to blow their own money on stuff, which they did.  The sad part of this story is that my daughter spent about $25 of her own money to buy Christmas presents at the store.  She spent about half of what she earns in a year to buy stuff she could have picked up at the dollar store for about $5.

She did this because the store was at the school, and because she was taken down to that store with her class, and encouraged to look at what she wanted to buy, and then come back with the money.  And she spent her own money because, unlike much of the world, we don’t want to encourage our kids to blow money on stuff they don’t need, and so we push back.

It angers me that this situation was even there in the first place.  Someone is setting up a business where they don’t have any real estate, instead setting their shop up in public schools.  Why in the world are we allowing private businesses to run out of a public school?  Why are we allowing children to go down to patronize these businesses as a part of their day that is supposed to be spent learning?

This is something that simply should not be happening, in my opinion.  The only logical reason I can think of why this happens is because the school system profits financially from doing it.  I can’t explain it any other way.  And if I’m right, it really makes me upset to think that the public education system is tricking people into funding the system and shortchanging our kids education in the same process.