CSotD: What did you learn at work today?
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Today's Pajama Diaries – timed for "Take Your Son or Daughter or Other Underaged Dependent To Work Day" — brought a smile, coming as it did after a sourball article on the topic, which I read yesterday but now can't find because it had been linked on Facebook, which means it has drifted away into the ether.
Facebook — For People Who Can't Sustain A Thought
For More Than Half An Hour
Anyway, the event always seemed better in theory than in practice, and I mean that sincerely: If you don't like it, you should replace it with something you like better.
Meanwhile, I have to give props to people like Terri Libenson and any other cartoonists or other creative types who pursue full-time work while managing kids. And by "while," I mean at the exact same time.
I stayed home with the kids before they got into full-time school, but most of my serious writing took place at night. During the day, if I got in three or four hours of actual work, that was a very productive day. I don't know that they saw anything that looked like a career.
And here's something else: I think if they had "Take Your Daughter or Son To Work Two Hours," that might be about right. Once I got into newspaper work, most of the people I saw doing Take-Your-Kid-To-Work-Day ended up disappearing the little urchin at lunch hour.
I'm not convinced any of the kids came away feeling that Dad or Mom had a job that was a lot of fun, which might provide a healthy dose of reality but the event was intended to be inspirational.
By that measure, watching your mom draw cartoons might be as inspirational as the day could be. It beats watching Dad write because, at the end, there's a thing to look at.
But clickety-click-click-click into an electronic box? Come on. That doesn't even inspire me, and I love my work.
Worse than "Take Your Kid To Work Day," however, is the internship day they have, or (I hope) used to have, around February 2 each year. I assume they chose that date because the kids would come out into the world of careers, see the shadows of their future selves and duck back for six more years of school.
Our paper would volunteer to take on a half dozen kids, so we'd by-gawd get a half dozen kids, even if only one of them really wanted to work in media and maybe two others thought it might be better than, I dunno, whatever. The other three would just be there, getting out of school for the day. It was a colossal waste of everyone's time.
I think businesses should do more to help prepare kids for the workplace, but it has to be part of a sensible plan, and dumping the entire student body on the business community at once is not sensible.
I used to give tours of the newspaper, and, when a teacher called to set one up, I'd ask if it was part of a media studies unit or a careers unit, because the two field trips were quite different.
Most teachers didn't realize that newspapers are not entirely staffed by reporters, so my also talking to the kids about things like accounting, graphic arts, press operations, sales or maintenance came as a surprise, though it sure made the kids more attentive.
And I really enjoyed Career Days where you do a series of presentations to groups of kids. The ones where you stand at a table in the gym while kids mill around and compare the sports bottles they got at the Army table aren't nearly as productive or fun.
Once (in the dozen years I did business/school partnership work), I was approached by a teacher who had a student who wanted an internship in the newsroom. I talked to the editor and we sat down with the kid. She had a driver's license, so she could actually do productive work, but she was also a soccer player, which wiped out the entire semester.
But she came back in the spring, when her schedule was clear. Like any cub reporter, she did some clerking work — putting in briefs and updating calendar items — before they sent her out on an actual story.
Her work was so good that they offered her a part-time job that summer, to help offset the staffing issues of vacation season. And, at the end, the editor invited her to come by any time she was home from college, since holidays also found us short-handed.
She came back for the summer between her freshman and sophomore years, and for the next summer as well. We lost her after her junior year because she had a chance for an internship at the Boston Globe.
I don't know what became of her, but I suspect her experience with us beat the hell out of being dragged into her mother's office to watch nothing happen for eight hours.
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