An article in the Chicago Sun-Times discusses which jobs you might want to consider having if you’d like to keep them should your country hit a recession.

Top Ten Jobs With Security:

1. Computer systems analyst.

2. Network systems and data communications analyst.

3. Network and computer systems administrator.

4. Registered nurse.

5. Teacher, postsecondary.

6. Physical therapist.

7. Physician and surgeon.

8. Dental hygienist.

9. Pharmacist.

10. Medical and health services manager

The data-cruching and compiling was done by Laurence Shatkin, who wrote the book 150 Best Recession-Proof Jobs. I have the book in my possession and flipping through it makes me grateful that Shatkin crunched the numbers and did all the research for me; it’s a nicely streamlined wealth of information.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

To state the obvious: Education is not just the formal classroom/teacher/textbook parts of one’s life. There’s also the being out in the world part, away from homework and exams, and continuing to deposit new information and ideas in one’s head. That’s an important phase, because unless you’ve managed to figure out how to get paid to go to school, at some point your formal education will com to an end, they will ask you to leave, and someone chucklehead will tell you to get a job and stop with the learning already. Which means that the majority of your life will be spent in the less formal, self-educating phase.

There are several ways to accomplish this independent knowledge absorption. Taking an interesting class or two is great if you have some extra time and superfluous cash. A cheaper option is removing yourself from your standard routine and spending a Saturday afternoon in a new place. Unfamiliar terrain and new input is good for the brain and you’re bound to learn something. And there’s my other favorite informal education option: books, which are free if you go to the library.

I adore books, and libraries are as close to a Cathedral Moment as I get. I spent my childhood and into my twenties collecting books. Before I hit thirty, I’d used up all the bookshelf space in my house. Because I refuse to end up an old woman surrounded by unsafely leaning stacks of books, that meant no more buying books or asking for books as gifts.

That’s a turn of events which would have sucked a lot more if I hadn’t re-discovered the public library. Now I’m a total library spaz and my husband makes fun of me for having the Seattle Public Library’s Web page as my browser’s homepage. I obsessively check my holds list and my checked-out items. I’m a dork I know, but it’s free books. How can you not love free books?

Penelope Trunk just wrote a post about how to not waste time by making bad book choices. Knowing your book likes and dislikes and what hasn’t worked for you in the past is good information to keep track of. However, I would also like to add a simple piece of wisdom my book-addict stepmother imparted to me.

First let me point out that my stepmother (who is not evil and whom I love very much) reads more books than I do, easily three times as many, possibly even four times as many. When I asked her once, in a cheerful and casual tone, if I could see her life book-list (all the books she’s read thus far) so I could copy it down and get some good book ideas, she laughed at me (not with me) and asked if I really thought I was ready for that. Which scared the crap out of me and I have never laid eyes on her list, nor have I ever asked to see it again. With any luck, she’ll die before I do and I’ll finally get a chance to look at the thing.

Enough with my morbid sense of humor; here’s her wisdom. I told her once that I tended to never give up on a book I’d started—I keep reading even if I’m not enjoying it. Some people can just read a few chapters, decide the book is not for them, and be done with it. Once I start, I feel like I should slog on through in case the wonderful bits are hidden in the last paragraph. My awesome stepmother said that she rarely gives up on a book. She said, “Even a book I really don’t like can teach me something.” My stepmother doesn’t tend to fill a room with words, so there’s not a lot to choose from. But that particular sentence is one of my favorites.

Other Book Lists (Not My Stepmother’s) With Which to Informally Educate Yourself:

Century of Books
The Guardian UK Observer’s 100 Greatest Novels of All Time
The Hugo Awards 1946-2008
The Hungry Mind Review’s 100 Best 20th Century Books
Library Journal’s Most Influential Fiction of the 20th Century
The Man Booker Prize List 1969-2007
Modern Library’s 100 Best Nonfiction Books
Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels
The National Book Awards 1950-2007
National Book Critics Circle Award 1975-2006
Orange Prize for Fiction 1996-2007
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 1981-1995
PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction 1996-2007

And here’s the be-all, end-all mother lode of book lists: The Booklist Center. It will overwhelm you in less than five minutes but it’s totally worth it.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I have a large stack of books with an education bent going right now. Must be the crisp autumn weather that’s triggering my current brain-cravings for non-fiction that’s educational on all levels. They are all interesting (especially to education junkies/geeks like me) and worth reading if you’re into that sort of thing.

Stuck in the Shallow End: Education, Race, and Computing by Jane Margolis

The co-author of Unlocking the Clubhouse: Women in Computing writes again about the computer science have-nots. This time it’s students of color in three different Los Angeles high schools. Margolis makes an excellent point regarding the difference between having access to a computer and having access to computer science education.

Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet by Christine L. Borgman

How the Internet and access to incredible amounts of information and information-sharing can and will affect academia, and the infrastructure needed to maintain that information, research and knowledge. I like books that make me think a few aisles over from the intended subject matter; this one is making me ponder mankind’s modern day intentions for the pursuit of knowledge.

Research and the accumulation of information used to be (mostly) for the betterment of human existence. Now it seems to be an embarrassing competition for grant money, tenure, and recognition. If everyone’s in it for the money/fame, then I suppose we can just chuck the whole Internet infrastructure improvement idea and it can be every researcher for themselves. No more sharing, no more building on past data, no more standing on the shoulders of giants. If you can’t figure out how to play together, then you’re on your own.

Learn Me Good by John Pearson

A thermal design engineer gets laid off, becomes a teacher, and writes effing hilarious e-mails to his friend about his first year of teaching.

Tested: One American School Struggles to Make the Grade by Linda Perlstein

A well-written account of how the No Child Left Behind Act affects a suburban Maryland elementary school that was already on the edge and falling apart.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I can’t stop re-reading this interview in the NY Times Magazine. Deborah Solomon interviews Charles Murray about his new book, “Real Education,” and it’s like some morbidly funny train wreck and I can’t not look. Some choice excerpts:

Although attending college has long been a staple of the American dream, you argue in your new book, “Real Education,” that too many kids are now heading to four-year colleges and wasting their time in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree. Yes. Let’s stop this business of the B.A., this meaningless credential. And let’s talk about having something kids can take to an employer that says what they know, not where they learned it.

You’re not the first social scientist to knock the liberal arts, but you may be the first to insist that only 20 percent of all college students have the brains and abilities to understand their assigned reading. Eighty percent are not able to deal with college-level material, traditionally understood. Someone can sit down with Paul Samuelson’s textbook and stare at the pages and know what most of the words mean. That does not mean that they walk away from it understanding economics as it is taught in the textbook.

What do you propose that 18-year-olds do instead of trying to learn the difference between macro- and microeconomics? Oh, the world of work out there!

Do you see your new book as an extension of the “The Bell Curve,” which caused an uproar in 1994 by suggesting that people are only as promising as their I.Q. scores? In many ways, it is a distillation of things I’ve been thinking since “The Bell Curve.”

Europeans have historically defined themselves through inherited traits and titles, but isn’t America a country where we are supposed to define ourselves through acts of will? I wonder if there is a single, solitary, real-live public-school teacher who agrees with the proposition that it’s all a matter of will. To me, the fact that ability varies — and varies in ways that are impossible to change — is a fact that we learn in first grade.

I believe that given the opportunity, most people could do most anything. You’re out of touch with reality in that regard. You have not hung around with kids who are well in the lower half of the ability distribution.

Have you? [He has not.]

What do you make of the fact that John McCain was ranked 894 in a class of 899 when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy? I like to think that the reason he ranked so low is that he was out drinking beer, as opposed to just unable to learn stuff.

What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.

She attended five colleges in six years. So what?

Pompous a** is all I can come up with. And yet, while I’m shaking my head in disbelief that karma alone hasn’t mowed this guy down, I also can’t stop laughing. He’s such a jacka** and is totally unapologetic about it. Whether you agree with him or not (I don’t) you have to respect the ballsiness of someone who can write a damn book explaining why the smart people should be in charge and the dumb humans should do the work. Nice.

His argument implodes for me as soon as he gets to the nonsensical/illogical portion of the interview where he’s all for McCain and Palin regardless of their questionable intelligence. He just brushes those facts aside because they clearly have no relevance. When research scientists do that, they aren’t allowed to call it science—then it’s just called “making stuff up.”

I’m confused. Is Murray saying that only the smart people should be allowed to go to college and do the super important jobs, but we don’t want any of those smarties running the country? Is running the country not an important job? Maybe he classifies the presidency as one of those below-average-intelligence-havin’ labor jobs. If that’s the case, then I’m an even bigger fan of that smart Obama guy, who, it seems, is too smart to be running the country.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

image: alec holst/school of visual arts

It seems so obvious that basing decisions about college majors and careers on one’s personality would save the individual in question much angst, time, energy, tuition and frustration. And yet college students tend to choose their major according to whatever career path they pulled out of their asses while sitting (a) at the dinner table, their parents demanding some answers about their teen’s future; or (b) in the high school counselor’s office, wading through college admissions paperwork.

Neither of those scenarios is ideal for making sound life choices. I’m a firm believer in the philosophy that the major a college student chooses is of much less import than people seem to freak themselves out with by believing. Quite a few college students make themselves miserable spending four years and thousands of dollars earning a degree that isn’t the best fit.

College is hard enough, even when one is eyebrow-deep in courses they love. There’s just no reason to pursue a major (and certainly not the matching career) that makes you contemplate chucking it all and escaping to an island with nothing but mangoes and naked time.

To assist in the decision-making processes of weighty life-choices that will no doubt affect the path your life takes, here are a smattering of the multitude of books available for perusal:

10 Best College Majors For Your Personality

50 Best Jobs For Your Personality

The Adventures of Johnny Bunko: The Last Career Guide You’ll Ever Need

How’d You Score THAT Gig?

Career Match: Connecting Who You Are with What You’ll Love to Do

The College Board Book of Majors

The Princeton Review’s Guide to College Majors

Posted by Alexa Harrington

In honor of Danica McKellar’s new book, Kiss My Math, I’m re-posting my thoughts on the hotness of smart girls below.

My daughter doesn’t have math homework yet, but I’ve already staked out helping her with it as my exclusive territory. Fortunately, my husband was a political science major, so he’s totally fine with “letting” me be in charge of all math and science-related aspects of our kids’ education. He will be in charge of teaching them how to turn boring discussions into heated debates, how to argue their way out of paper bags, and how to confuse the opposition using vocabulary words in lieu of logic.

I suck at debating—I’m more of an action girl. But I am good at math. It’s logical, it follows clearly laid-out rules, and when you do it right you can almost hear the little snick sound the universe makes when everything clicks into place.

Thus far, according to my daughter, everything Mommy does is super cool. Mommy being good at math, Mommy coloring inside the lines in the Flower Fairies coloring book, and Mommy knowing the lyrics of every Social Distortion song all come in under my seven-year-old’s umbrella of My Mom Is Super Cool (Except When She Tells Me Princesses Are Helpless Pains In The Ass). Someday this bubble will burst and my daughter will drink the Math Is Hard Kool-Aid and see me not as a trigonometry badass, but as a supremely embarrassing dorky mom who likes math (how lame).

Before that happens (somewhere around middle school, I think) I have to convince her that being smart is hot and knowing how to kick algebra booty will not be detrimental to her future. I have less than eight years to instill in her a solid smart-girl ethic before she hits the teen years and never speaks to me again.

If worse comes to worst, I can always employ some cranky military tactics and make her watch The Wonder Years until she gets how hot Winnie Cooper is. Then I’ll show her this math proof and tell her the hot girl coauthored it. Then I’ll give her the book Math Doesn’t Suck by Danica McKellar (Winnie) and tell her to read it if she knows what’s good for her.

Or not. Sometimes you can lean so far to the left that you end up going to the right. Don’t worry, I won’t crush my good intentions with evil tactics. Between me telling her that Barbie was wrong and all of the positive attention girls, math and science are getting lately, it’s conceivable that my daughter’s relationship with math could be healthy and well-adjusted.

Good articles on girls, math and science:

For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They’re Good at It

Approach to School Affects How Girls Compare With Boys in Math

Math, Science, and Girls: Can We Close the Gender Gap?

Girls’ Math Anxiety Undermines Performance in Other Subjects

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Some of my vacation reading included How’d You Score That Gig? A Guide to the Coolest Jobs [and How to Get Them] by Alexandra Levit. I’m a girl who likes clear instructions that are as exact as possible when embarking on a new experience.

I’m a big fan of the informational interview, and back when I was a student I always always always (I couldn’t not, it seemed) read every page of my textbooks. This included the copyright page, which I was never once tested on. It’s a thing: I have to know as much information in advance so I will feel properly prepared for my mission. Oddly enough, I only feel that I must do this for work or academic situations; when I travel (sans children) I am perfectly content to just go.

From the perspective of someone who appreciates having new career situations described to her, I must say I found Levit’s book extremely helpful and well-researched. She describes in detail 60 careers and how one might go about landing a job in a particular field, including the education required and how the people she interviewed came to work at their current positions.

At the beginning of the book, before you jump into reading about the specific careers, there’s a smarter-than-Cosmo test to ascertain what personality type you are, as it relates to your professional life. The list includes: Adventurer, Creator, Data Head, Entrepreneur, Investigator, Networker, and Nurturer.

I fully admit to bending the test a little; Levit instructs you to choose the single best answer for any given question. For several of the questions I could honestly have chosen three or four answers that described me exactly; there was much pondering and I couldn’t find just one.

In the end I counted up all worthy answers, and saw which columns had the most answers that pertained to me at the end. I had a ’score’ of seven in the Creator column, and eight in the Investigator column, which makes me both. I agreed with that, and with the descriptions Levit writes about both types. I had never labeled myself as either of those before, but it made sense when I thought about it. And really, are any of us just one thing?

I can recommend the book as an excellent tool for figuring yourself out, as well as researching some career options prior to jumping into a particular career pool feet first, fully clothed and blindfolded.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Given everything in the previous post, it will shock no one to learn that I started to read to my kids when they were in utero. They both have impressive personal libraries, but we supplement their kiddie-lit collections with twice-weekly trips to the library. We frequently discover new authors and check out every book he or she has written. Our most recent find is Jon Scieszka (rhymes with ‘fresca’).

My daughter thinks The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is hilarious. We are also enamored of Baloney (Henry P.), an alien who’s late for school and has the best excuse ever. I, of
course, love Science Verse and Math Curse, and my son thinks the Trucktown book Smash! Crash! is loud and shiny. My daughter and I are starting on the Time Warp Trio series next.

In the midst of our Jon Scieszka streak I was reminded that he was recently appointed by the Librarian of Congress as the first ever National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. I’d heard the interview about it on NPR and was stoked that someone so happy, excited and humorous had been given this responsibility. He sounds very enthusiastic in all of his interviews (see below) and has a list of the stuff he thinks he should ask for as the Ambassador: cape, sash, bejeweled goblet, jetpack, Popemobile, Ambassador underwear, epaulets and a red phone.

Part of why Scieszka is such a vastly entertaining author is that he’s trying to get kids interested in reading. Boys have proven more difficult to convince. To remedy that, Scieszka started Guys Read, a site that promotes the following ideas to get boys to read:

–Letting them choose what they read
–Expanding our definition of “reading” to include:
–nonfiction
–graphic novels, comics, comic strips
–humor
–magazines, newspapers, online text

Anyway, it’s a cool site, Jon Scieszka’s a cool guy, and I think he’s a perfect choice for National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature.

Further Reading:

Stinky Cheese! Ambassador for Children’s Literature
‘Stinky’ Jon Scieszka has a read on kids
Here Comes Jon Scieszka to Make Reading Fun!
Reading Rockets Interview

Posted by Alexa Harrington