I’m going to give a “but” to my statement a couple hundreds posts above.
There are 2 “but’s” which we communicated to our kids:
We discussed w/our kids the example of their amazing middle school art teacher, who got an advanced degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. She’s very talented. And also poor as heck. Struggles to make ends meet on her art teacher salary. Lives in a mobile home park in a lousy part of town. Does not have a significant other or roommates that she can rely on to help out. Amazing teacher.
Unemployed artist mom of 1 of our kids’ classmates when they were in middle school. Single mom, 1 child, both living with artist mom’s mother. Artist mom chose not seek out other gainful employment because she didn’t want to dampen or hamper her artistry (told me this directly, not through 1 of my kids). Lived on public assistance, Medicaid, help from her mom, etc. But there was a public art piece of hers on display near the airport somewhere which inspired her to continue on with her craft.
So we told our kids…learn from these examples. We also told them that if you choose to be a starving artist, don’t come to the Bank of Mom & Dad expecting us to financially support you throughout adulthood just because you’re too foolish to even go get a job at Starbucks or Target.
Teacher’s salaries are dependent on where you live. Our art teacher, music teacher etc make a nice salary. They won’t be rich, but they can live comfortably for them.
I work in a school and am on the teacher’s salary guide and contract. If I had to live alone on my salary, I could.
My 28 year old does well living on a teacher’s salary. I need to add that she does summer school for an extra $13,000 a year, and has opportunities to tutor through the district for additional pay. It all adds up. She can afford to live independently in an expensive city.
Your post reminds me of a moment with my youngest daughter. When she was about six or seven, she told me very seriously one day, “Mama, I just want to let you know that I want be a teacher when I grow up, but you don’t need to worry, my back up plan is to be a rock star if the teaching thing doesn’t work out.” Her older siblings burst out laughing but I thought it was very sweet.
We are in TX and our teachers don’t make the kind of money those in NY and other areas do. You can still buy a modest home under 200k in a decent neighborhood.
Apropos to this thread…
I am a college counselor and working today. I just was editing one of my student’s activity resumes. In the annotation for her summer art program at a very well regarded art college, she wrote that she received a full ride scholarship to the program which will allow her to attend since her parent does not approve of the art path. She has a lot of art activities and talent in this field. I run into this a lot, where a student’s parent does not approve of them going into the arts. This is true in many cultures, though in this case, parent is an Asian immigrant. I worked with this girl’s sister this past year, and she is going into Physics, alas.
Of course there is nothing wrong with going into Physics!! Yes, it is just as “noble” as the arts!!
My point was that physics was acceptable to the parent and art is not. I feel sorry for kids whose parents will not support their chosen field of interest.
I work with MANY college applicants pursuing STEM majors. I’m all for it. Not sure why you would assume otherwise. I’m into pursuing what is of interest to the student.
This whole discussion reminded me just now of my older daughter’s personal essay for college admissions. She got into how she had many sides…she had one foot in athletics (three varsity sports) and one in the arts (two instruments, band, jazz band, dance, musical theater) and never wanted to give up any of them to focus on one. She got into how she straddles the dichotomy of being a logical thinker and a creative thinker. And this is all what drew her to the field of architecture because of its interdisciplinary nature between these two modes of thinking. There’s the creative elements, and the math and science of the building technology, plus the history and social ramifications. She now works in sustainable design in an architecture firm and this does straddle many interdisciplinary fields.
In response to some posts about one can’t predict what future lucrative jobs will be. A lot of people at IBM and Kodak were fired when their products were no longer in demand, but I think a lot of those people were also able to find other jobs.
I was fired from a very senior job in my early 50s. I had to reinvent myself. I asked myself what I really enjoyed doing that aligned with the market demands. It took me 5+ years working at different industries and capacities to finally find my niche. Now at near retirement age I am probably at higher demand than when I was in my 40s.
I had 2 liberal arts degrees, same with my girls. I don’t think I ever really used my degrees other than to impress employers, but my liberal arts degrees really taught me critical thinking.
On the topic of luck, let me just say that it is not a four letter word. If someone offered me the choice on whether I could be lucky or I could be smart, the younger immature me would have picked smarts. The current me would pick luck every time. If I picked smarts, it means I have an ego.
I completely agree with you on this. In fact at Princeton, they sort of treat CS also as a liberal arts topic, and a very senior prof (Kernighan) teaches it to non-majors, saying they should all be aware what it is all about.
I know this post will start off-topic, but I would just be in awe if I was being taught by Brian Kernighan. He along with Dennis Ritchie are gods of the computing industry.
These two, along with Ken Thompson, were co-inventors of UNIX, the first widely available multi-processing operating system. UNIX is so important that variants of it are used in every Apple and Android smartphone in existence. These two also invented a programming language called C, and C and its variants are the most widely used programming languages in the world.
Dennis Ritchie happened to die about the same time as Steve Jobs. For those in the know, Dennis Ritchie and Brian Kernighan are far more important than Steve Jobs in terms of their impact on the computing industry. But Jobs got the fame because he got the fortune.
In terms of tying it back to the topic, both focused on what they loved to do, which is create technology, rather than focus on making the fortune they way Jobs did.
When Ritchie died, I asked some of the tech guys in the office if they heard the news. None of them knew him. I felt sad. To be fair a lot of the younger tech folk working in the financial industry are less into CS and more into business applications. That is the great divide :-). I suspect it is hard to be passionate about business applications, but easy to be passionate about CS. Because as a part of CS you are can also deal with questions like what is truth, and what does it mean to know something etc. If I have kids studying CS, I would like them to be passionate about CS. Because the subject is capable of generating some passion. Not so much building business applications.