Can you do it?

[akiva]

One of my biggest ethical dilemmas as a teacher is repeatedly telling students that if they work hard at something, they can be whatever they want. I want the students to work hard and succeed, but I also know that most people end up in the same socieconomic status as their parents. Social mobility is much rarer than a lot of people think. And that's not even counting the students who want to be singers or professional athletes--if the vast majority won't make it, should we be encouraging them to try?

During the week before school, the teachers watched a graduation speech from Denzel Washington about pursuing your dream. Things like that piss me off--I pursued my dream for almost 15 years, and it wrecked me. So why the hell should I tell someone else to pursue theirs?

[Eliahad]

I don't know? I try and get my students to find the thing in their life that they cannot do without and do that for their living and everything else be damned.

When a student comes to me and says I want to go to music school, I explain to them that it's a life choice, not a career choice and that you have to ask yourself...when everyone else is going out and having fun, you're going to be working, can you live with that? You're going to get no support from the government, can you live with that? You're going to work so many unpaid hours that if you actually calculated your hourly wage it's going to be less than the minimum wage for decades of your life, are you okay with that? People are going to tell you that it's nice that you get to do what you love for a living and then try and short change you, are you okay with that? You NEVER get to leave your work at the office, are you okay with that? You will never have paid vacation, paid sick days.

Is there anything /else/ you can be doing and you can still be a musician for fun when the work day is over?

If they're okay with all of that, and then they decide there isn't anything else they can do with their lives, I tell them that I'm about to ramp their lessons up to 11, because for music school you already have to know everything. And in that moment, they truly decide if they're ready to put in the hard work to meet their dreams. Except it's not a dream, it's meeting that little voice in the back of their head that says you are going to do this, because you can't live unless you do this one thing.

And that's the ACTUAL thing that superstars have, isn't it? The realization that they do the thing they do because they cannot feel okay with doing anything else in their lives.

Anyway, I guess more to your point, I think yes, we should be encouraging them to try, if only to teach them what hard work and dedication looks like. That way they can go into the lottery of life with the most chances to have their number called. And if they end up finding the thing that they MUST do, they will be that much prepared to meet the call.

[Phoebe]

I generally don't suggest this to people; to my own kids, partially yes, because I know they are privileged enough in life for it to be mostly true, but even then they're still living in this system. It's more like, you can accomplish the things that would put you in contention for almost anything, but then there's a lot of luck and timing and things that are beyond your control. If there's anything being on the other side of the hiring/awarding/rewarding table has taught me, it's that a lot of this is incredibly random - people do not tend to make rational decisions about this stuff, but highly personal and tribal ones. People prefer to reward people who are "like" themselves, and someone has probably already written the psychology book about why, but people mistakenly believe they want to work with others who are superficially like them. The ways that being akin actually matters are different! Other forces of influence also operate in unpredictable ways: you may think you want to act in a certain way, only to find there are powerful constraints on your action.

That said, my son has decided it would be preferable to be a Supreme Court Justice to being the president, so that's what he plans to do, and I am in no way disabusing him of this notion. Indeed, I have told him how to follow that very narrow pathway, and this is why he has to get good grades. His main worry is that he won't be able to get there in time to accomplish certain things he wants to accomplish. Same, kid, same, we can't get you eligible soon enough.