School Daze

By the time I received my PhD, I had been in schools of one sort or another continually for 19 years. I was fed up with school. Who wouldn’t be tired of living in a small apartment, earning the less-than-magnificent sum of $4700 per year? I wanted out, and so the idea of taking a job as a professor or teacher simply did not appeal to me. I wanted to work in some manufacturing industry, and I did so for 29 years. Yet, here I am, starting my 19th year as a teacher. What changed?

I grew older. Some jobs are better for younger people. I have mentioned in the last three posts the fact that I did some traveling in most of my jobs. Here is a hint as to the extent of my travels. My first trip on Delta Airlines was when I flew to Georgia for a job interview. Ten years later, I had accumulated one million air miles in my Delta Frequent Flyer account. The sad thing is that Delta was not the only airline I flew: Delta didn’t go everywhere I needed to be. US Air Frequent Flyer Miles gave me four round-trip tickets to London. Those tickets did not deplete my US Air Frequent Flyer account. That is the sort of travel schedule that is more difficult to keep up the older one gets. Unless you are a recruiter for a football team in the SEC, there really isn’t all that much travel involved in the education business.

A second reason for the change is corporate BS. I would not change professions for that reason alone, as there is a certain amount of BS associated with every job. But academic BS seems tame in comparison with corporate BS. One paper mill I visited lost a small piece of hardware at 2:00 AM, and had to shut the paper machine down because they didn’t have that little piece of hardware (cost at that time: approximately $1.50) in the machine shop. Why did they not carry that little item? Mill manager bonuses that year were based on cost reduction, and one way to reduce costs pretty quickly is to keep a low inventory of spare parts. The fact that the $1.50 little piece of hardware was not in inventory meant that the machine was shut down until the local hardware store opened, six hours later. The fixed cost for that paper machine was about $10,000 per hour. But since downtime was not included in the calculation of the mill manager’s bonus, that lost $60,000 did not affect him personally. Corporate BS.

I found that corporate BS extended to every corporation. I once had a vice president who defended every decision that came down from corporate as though they were engraved on tablets and brought down from Mount Sinai. When Coca Cola decided to ditch their classic Coke formula for something called “New Coke”, the whole world saw that this was a blunder of massive proportions. That same Vice President (who did not work for Coca Cola) defended the decision. More Mount Sinai nonsense. Managers with a rank higher than his were never wrong. To admit that any CEO is a normal, fallible human is to admit that the leadership of my own corporation may not necessarily be composed of geniuses.

This is not an indictment of all the managers I have worked under. Most have been competent and logical. Two or three, though, were not. They constituted living proof of the Peter Principle.

The corporate BS in academics is an entirely different affair. It is nearly absent in the private schools where I have taught, and a source of humor in colleges and universities. As Sayre’s law reminds us: "In any dispute the intensity of feeling is inversely proportional to the value of the issues at stake. That is why academic politics are so bitter."

A third reason for the change is that teaching keeps me mentally challenged without being overwhelmingly physically challenged. I have been fortunate in that most of my jobs have kept me on my toes, mentally. But travel at my age becomes physically challenging, especially air travel. And travel was a big part of my most mentally challenging job. I can keep my mind from turning into Jello by teaching without placing inordinate demands on my body.

All the above are true, but the fourth reason is the real reason I am doing what I do: I enjoy it tremendously. Every time I see a former student’s profile on Linkedin I feel a touch of pride, in that I contributed in some small way to their successes.

I had three major events this summer. First, I became a grandfather for the fifth time. Second, Kathy and I took the trip of a lifetime to Portugal and Spain. And third, two of my students from the 2024-2025 school year, ready to head out for their freshman year in college, took me out to a steak dinner to thank me for helping them.

The truth is these two are great students, and they would have done well regardless of who the teacher happened to be. But it really did warm my heart to see these two lads heading out to begin a new phase of life. They would have done well without me, but I did help them in my own way.

So that is that. My teacher work days begin on Monday, with students on the campus the following Monday. As I have done every summer since I began teaching, I have been going over the last year in my mind, looking for areas to improve. I am ready for a new school year. Let the School Daze begin!