Comments on: A Different Kind of Puzzle

By: robert_piepenbrink

robert_piepenbrink — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 19:54:16 +0000

Congratulations! This may be one of those “education” vs “training” things, by the way. In a Service training environment, the “railroad paper” is just the sort of thing you want to teach–the simple technique, which, applied consistently, will never lead you astray. When you’re dealing with jet engines and live ammunition, you give up a lot of elegance in favor of never being wrong.

By: jem

jem — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:42:38 +0000

My parents–who never got beyond high school–were very insistent that I go to college. However, when my father remarried after my mother passed away, my stepfamily–who are all white and middle class to some extent– have entirely different standards for what constituted education. Two members of that extremely large family made it through college. I recall my stepmother commenting on a college education: “it don’t do no good.” Don’t get me wrong–they are all extremely nice and generous people but the majority have chosen blue collar jobs rather than professional ones. It is true, I think, that a college education is not necessary for someone just to earn a living. And that’s the way my stepfamily seem to equate it. X amount of instruction or experience = y amount of dollars. Some colleges and universities, so I understand, work toward this goal: education should result in more money not knowledge, now, much more than when I was an undergrad in the early ’70s. I can’t say I’ve observed first hand that this same mindset is present among my daughter’s black friends or, even necessarily, among the young black men and women I worked with in a large urban library. Maybe they didn’t attend inner city schools. I congratulate you on reaching this young woman.

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:06:41 +0000

Yeah, I’ve seen that sort of thing. My own family strongly encouraged education – so did my mother’s family, although, unlike my father’s, most of the people before my mother’s generation didn’t have a lot of formal education. So I was one generation off the ‘first from family to finish HS/university’ thing. But I knew a lot of people in school and in university who were. Sometimes, they had a lot of encouragement at home; sometimes, not so much. I even knew someone slightly in my university classes who went against family pressure to drop out of high school and get a job to bring some money into the house until she married. She eventually became not only a doctor, but a specialist. I remember the students, who, with the authority of Psych 101 under their belts, went home and lectured their granddads on the vagaries of human nature. And the parents who didn’t have the faintest idea what their daughter was studying, exactly, but it was something about science, and they were proud as punch that she was doing so well. And, of course the ones who put down anyone who was different.

By: MaryF

MaryF — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 13:57:36 +0000

Wow, Jane – that must have been really gratifying, to see her come to understand the concept.

Cheryl – I do know what you mean. Some people resist what they’re told all their lives and others don’t. I’m doing a Master’s in my spare time and there was a young woman in my class last spring who is from rural Louisiana. She’s very bright and does well- she wears flashier stuff than I do, but I thought she was just another middle-class person whose preferences differ from mine, which is, let’s face it, okay.

Then one day my friend found her in a chair in the building lobby, sitting there quietly crying. Jo stopped to talk to her and discovered that in the culture she was raised in – poor, rural, black, Southern – doing well in school or standing out at all is considered bad. The only thing her family ever praised her for was for LOOKING good. But somehow she learned to love school, and she graduated high school, got into college, graduated college, got a job and now she’s working a professional job and going to grad school on weekends. All very admirable, right?

But she’d just been talking to her mom on the phone or something and it was brought home to her that she no longer fits in her family’s culture any more – really has almost nothing she can talk to them about. It’s tough. It will be tough on Jane’s students too, if they succeed. But my God, this young woman is tough, and smart. And she’s going to do well.

Have I already told this story here?

By: Cheryl

Cheryl — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 12:17:04 +0000

I doubt if you can have anything so pervasive that’s just due to the ‘system’. Chances are that parents, older siblings and neighbours (or at least some of the above) have been chiming in with ‘You think you’re somebody, huh? Who do you think you are?’ and choruses of mockery at every childish attempt to ape the adults.

And still, some kids get through it. Some either don’t buy into the put-downs or do for a while and then learn to see through them. What I think never works for change is the conviction some people have that it’s all one-way, that the only cause is the system, my parents, my friends, my relatives/parents’ friends. If they really believe that, it means they didn’t and don’t have any ability to choose an opinion of themselves other than that drummed into their heads.

It’s scary to put your work out for correction, especially if the work is important to you. It sounds like you reached this person. Congratulations.