The Cynical Career Counsellor Explains Your Future As

A High School Journalism Teacher
Oh--I remember you. You're the kid who did the exposé on how the flashlight batteries in the emergency kits hadn't been replaced for three years--hard hitting stuff, that. Really? I'd a figured you'd want to run the foreign desk at the Washington Post some day or something... A journalism teacher? You realize I've already got a stack of brochures about teaching on the...no, not journalism specifically. Why didn't you talk to Ms. Willings? Oh right, the stress leave thing. Too bad that--they say she's getting better though--apparently the maniacal giggling at the sight of newsprint responded well to the risperidone...

Okay, I think we've both seen first hand what can happen to a young, bright woman like yourself after a decade or two of journalism instruction, but you think you can handle it, so here goes:

You'll attend university and study journalism. Remember the ideals and values they try to instill, because once you're in the classroom, you'll look back and giggle at their naivete. After your bachelors, you'll do the post degree work and a practicum required for your first teaching job, where you'll realize, to your chagrin, that journalism will occupy no more than one quarter of all the classes you're paid to teach, but take up three-quarters of your waking hours. The horrific marking load of your English classes you'll have to take care of late at night after crawling home from your gruelling attempt to meet yet another yearbook deadline.

It won't just be the yearbook, though--you'll have the school newspaper to contend with as well. In the old days, it was just a few sports results and some jokes lifted from the Reader's Digest printed on an old ditto machine, but now it gets distributed on the internet for the world to see, and everyone from the crankiest PTA member to the district's paranoid legal team can analyze every nuance of every word on the world wide web. Your adminstration sees your work as potentially embarassing at best, and continues to censor your paper for fear of expensive legal consequences.

The final crisis for the paper comes the morning you release the edition with the explosive story about how the money for new field hockey sticks has vanished while the teacher's lounge suddenly has been furnished with deluxe espresso machines and a new flat screen television. You pick up your copy that day to find your students' hard work has been deleted, and replaced with an editorial by the principal denouncing the societal decay evidenced by the recent spate of new graffiti by local "tag" artists.

You are furious, but are called into the office where you bite your tongue and hear that your funding for the newspaper has been cut, and you are ordered to focus all of your attention on finishing the yearbook on time. Since you've no longer got the responsibility for the paper, your principal feels justified in adding a remedial English class to your already soul-destroying teaching load. It becomes even worse when you call together your students and they accuse you of being a collaborator in the muzzling of free speech, and you go to your car that night to find several swastikas scratched into the paint.

They soon find an outlet for their anger, though--an underground newspaper whose masthead features an amazingly good charicature of you burning the bill of rights. Even though you're the most frequent target of their mocking and wrath, the rest of the staff somehow has the idea that you're involved in the illicit scandal sheet, and they ostracize you for it. The students you counted on to help you with the yearbook all walk out on you two weeks before your final deadline, and you're forced to complete using the worst kids from the "behavior mod" class who've been compelled to assist you as punishment for setting up a meth lab in an unused chemistry classroom.

The yearbook is completed on the strength of your will and a two-week ephedrine high. When it comes back from the publishers you feel a moment of pride in your accomplishment--perhaps "instant" would be a better word--and then the recriminations begin.

You used a photo taken of the football team when the star receiver was home sick. You forgot the school's macrame club entirely--though since they only had one meeting it's not hard to understand. Still, understanding is what each shrill complainer has little of. The worst of it all stems from a seemingly minor mistake. You mispelled the last name of a late arrival to the school--his 12 syllable moniker has only two vowels in it and is entirely unpronounceable, but still, you listen to the complaints of his family. It seems that the resulting spelling is the last name of the death squad commander who executed all their relatives and caused them to flee the country with no more than the clothing on their backs.

After you apologize for the 10th time, you finally go home, ready to sleep for a week. You are woken by the explosion in your kitchen that narrowly misses killing you. It seems the internet version of the spelling mistake attracted some attention from the secret police of the obscure eastern european country whose shadowy politics have now targeted you as a person of interest.

The school determines you to be a risk, and hides you out in the juvenile detention home, where you teach future drug dealers and hit men basic academic skills, while you spiral downwards past anger into depression and serious paranoia.

When the danger to you is determined to be over, the school reinstates you to your old job, but insists you continue it as part of the newly expanded behavior mod. program. Functional illiterates become your only companions as you struggle through the long days and lonelier evenings.

The final straw comes as you're nearing the yearbook deadline the following year, and you discover you can't install the desperately needed pagemaker update when it finally arrives because none of your school computers have sufficient memory capability.

The psychiatric crisis team is gentle as they finally get into the principal's office, where you holed up for two hours, after stripping off all your clothes and fending off all who tried to approach with the power washer you stole from the maintenance crew.

Tranquil Oaks is a lovely place--as long as you swallow the pills--and you and your former mentor spend many evenings writing editorials on the backs of the old Yahtzee scorepads, which only the two of you ever read.

So--that's it, kid. Oh here--you dropped the brochure for the "Future Journalists of America" camp you're going to next week. Have fun.