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Last weekend we drove to UMD to visit The Girl and catch a basketball game. The crowd at the game offered some remarkable accidental eavesdropping—“Caitlin has one husband who’s incinerated and another husband who’s incarcerated!”—but the lines that really raised an eyebrow came from TG herself.
As longtime readers know, TG is a voracious reader with a terrific sense of narrative. She’s majoring in English and is already building rapport with her professors. Even allowing for some parental bias, she’s a terrific student.
Already, not one but two of her English professors have warned her against trying to become an English professor.
She wasn’t shocked by the message—having a dad who does what I do involves hearing a few things about the academic job market over the years—but she was a bit puzzled by it. How, as a student, is she supposed to respond to that?
As she relayed the messages, they were offered in hopes of preventing exploitation. One of them helpfully drew a distinction between “you’ll never get a job with an English degree,” which is false, and “you’ll never get a job that requires an English degree,” which may be true. The fact that they seemed to feel the need to tell her was, in its way, a vote of confidence: they see that she has the talent, which she does. (As a counterexample, nobody ever had to warn me that the odds of being a professional baseball player were long. My attempts at batting made that obvious enough.) They meant well.
But part of the professor-student interaction involves role modeling. When the ostensible role models start early and often with “don’t do what I did,” the relationship gets a bit complicated.
Luckily, TG is savvy enough to be able to place the messages in their intended context, even as she notes the awkwardness of it.
Wise and worldly readers who teach in liberal arts fields, how do you handle conversations like these with students like these? As always, I can be reached at deandad (at) gmail (dot) com, on Twitter at @deandad or on Mastodon at @deandad at-sign masto (dot) ai. Thanks!
