<p>S2 wants to be a lawyer. He is going into the humanities because he feels he needs have a very strong foundation in logic, ethics, and moral thought, as well as in strong writing skills. Makes sense to me. He is no slouch in either math or science either taking the most challenging AP and above courses his HS offered.</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I was a comp lit major, one of the most purely useless majors known to humanity. I loved it, it was wonderful training, and I’ve done quite nicely, thank you. My wife majored in American Studies, and she runs an organization with almost 20,000 employees and an eleven-figure budget. Humanities majors can do fine. (Law school was involved, especially for me; my wife hasn’t practiced law since our children were infants.)</p></li>
<li><p>One of my favorite humanities re-invention stories: My 12-grade French teacher had been a French Lit major at one of those good colleges, and did some graduate work at the Sorbonne. He was also a wonderful amateur pianist. When I met him he was, of course, teaching high school French. He would also sometimes play as accompanist for visiting singers and musicians who were not top-shelf enough to bring their own on tour with them. After several years of this, one of the musicians, a flautist whose star was rising quickly, told him he was her favorite accompanist, and begged him to come to New York. She would make him her regular accompanist and drum up other work for him with her friends. He and his wife had recently split, so he said “What the hell” and did it. Three or four years later, he was no longer accompanying anyone, but he was acting as manager for her and a few other rising classical musicians. Three or four years after that, he teamed up with another respected manager, and they founded a company. They were wildly successful; they managed household name artists; their company became one of the leading high-end arts management companies in the world. He sold out for big bucks years ago, but continues to serve as CEO; occasionally I see a picture of him at some fancy event escorting the diva du jour.</p></li>
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<p>The market for lawyers is really, REALLY bad now. I would advise anyone not admitted to a top law school to reconsider their career choice.</p>
<p>Well, I know. That’s the whole point, but she won’t be deterred. A life long dream.</p>
<p>JHS: Great stories. Kudos to you and your lady.</p>
<p>mythmom writes: “…my son pursuing Classics grad school. He knows he will not attend a school that doesn’t pay him. He has no other ideas in mind, but I do think he’d be content enough to teach Latin at a high school. Not too many of those openings, either, but some…”</p>
<p>Actually, the job market for High School Latin teachers has held fairly steady because Latin is still offered, or even being introduced (!) in just enough high-powered prep schools and charter schools and the occasional regular public school. (If you look at the SAT scores state by state, you’ll see that high school students who took Latin A.P.s are right up there with those who took Chinese A.P.'s in terms of highest average SAT scores. I think it’s great – nothing beats Greek and Latin for an intro to English grammar and thinking analytically about language.) </p>
<p>Someone thinking of doing grad work in Classics and eventually teaching secondary school would also well to attend the conventions in the area to get a sense of that market. And look at the NJCL web pages. </p>
<p>A classics PhD who’s willing to explore secondary school teaching probably won’t make a fortune, and would want to develop a secondary skill, such as coaching a sport, or music, that would make more choices available, but should be able to find work.</p>
<p>EngProfMom: So kind of you to post that. He is also studying Greek, and he did have the highest SAT verbal score in his school. So the relationship did seem to hold in his case.</p>
<p>He is also an accomplished violionist and singer and has performed in many, many orchestras and chorus, so he could do work with music. He is also an actor, and he has a special interest in Classical Drama, so he could do that for a high school, too.</p>
<p>Thanks again. I don’t know what he’ll eventually decide, but I’ll pass the information along. His favorite teacher from HS was his Latin teacher who has a doctorate and is now teaching graduate level courses in Rome.</p>
<p>When discussions arise regarding the value of studying the humanities, William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech comes to mind. Here’s the way it ended: </p>
<p>“It is easy enough to say that man is immortal because he will endure: that when the last ding-dong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking. I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer’s, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet’s voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”</p>
<p>I would be thrilled for any of my children to serve humanity in such a worthy capacity.</p>
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<p>Gauss, who was nicknamed “The Prince of Mathematics” by his math colleagues first showed his genius at age 3 when he began correcting his professor father’s math errors. He made many lasting contributions to both practical and advanced mathematics.</p>
<p>[The</a> Thirty Greatest Mathematicians](<a href=“The 100 Greatest Mathematicians”>The 100 Greatest Mathematicians)</p>
<p>OK, mythmom. I finally found that poem (I thought for a while that I’d lost it!)</p>
<p>Disclaimer: yes, my son was verbally precocious. No, he wasn’t a prodigy, and no, this isn’t a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. But it wasn’t too bad for a 7-year old, and I certainly knew by then that he was going to be a humanities major someday!</p>
<p>And, of course, I was just as proud of him as any parent would be of a child who was precocious at a non-humanities subject. Regardless of the relative significance of the two in the eyes of some. </p>
<p>J.L., 1st grade, age 7
1997
(The line breaks and punctuation exactly follow the way he wrote the poem. I couldn’t make the spacing follow the way he did it, with some lines indented – everything automatically got shifted over to the left margin, for some reason.)</p>
<p>A Rainy Night in New York.</p>
<p>I ran through the gate
into the rain
I could not stand the pain
all I could see was a flickering
in candlelight.
The moist maple leaves
rustled
rustled
and a street lamp
sends
a
light
into
the night
A lady in a
bottle
green
dress
ran
past.
Saxophone music
could
be
heard
from
Some
where
floating through
the cold night air.
A
small
man
dressed
in
gray
stared at me
and walked
from the sea
the clock
tower
struck
6:30 at night
I could tell
of
the rain
that kept painting
A street light changed to
green
A taxi
rushed
past.
Two girls with
braided
hair and green
sweaters
slid past
and a woman
with a macy’s
bag
with a
jet
black
veil
and
fur coat
ran past
I
I
I
walked
to Ren Street
at the
Dibrow
apartment
at my apartment
I sat in my arm
chair
and
read
the
New York Times.</p>
<hr>
<p>He wrote poetry all the way through high school, but doesn’t anymore, so far as I know.</p>
<p>That is unusually good for a seven year old. I think I’m jealous. Hah.</p>
<p>I write stories, and I have to struggle for every word that goes onto the page. It’s taken me a good three years to get past a mechanical writing stage and into something that sounds less like it’s written by a robot.</p>
<p>In short: Very jealous. Pass on my admiration to your son, because that is remarkable for a first grader. Most kids are still writing horribly angsty (bad) poetry in college, much less first grade!</p>
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<p>I am truly sorry that your D had a hard time getting a job with a humanities degree, but MANY college grads are jobless regardless of their major. That doesn’t meant that a whole section of degrees should be downgraded to “minors”.</p>
<p>Thanks on his behalf, Neltharion. Don’t forget, though, he hadn’t learned to be self-conscious about his poems yet back then. It made things easier, I’m sure.</p>
<p>Donna: I really like this poem a lot. I love the imagery. It’s really quite sophisticated. It’s too late to hunt out DS’s poem. I didn’t mean it as a competition, more like camaraderie for these sensitive boys. I hope I didn’t come across as competitive.</p>
<p>But this is a lovely, lovely poem.</p>
<p>I know how you meant it, mythmom. I just didn’t want people to think I had any excessively overblown opinion. Hence the disclaimer.</p>
<p>And, thanks.</p>
<p>Self-consciousness is remarkably common in writers. It all reminds me of a quote by David Mitchell (who wrote Cloud Atlas, if you know that book):</p>
<p>“If you show someone something you’ve written, you give them a sharpened stake, lie down in your coffin, and say, ‘When you’re ready.’”</p>
<p>Such a true statement. It’s taken me years to get to the point that I feel comfortable showing people my pieces. It definitely gets easier as you go, and it helps so much if you dissociate yourself from your actual writing. A thick skin definitely helps as well. (Luckily for me, I’ve developed a very thick skin.)</p>
<p>I am starting to. Having enough stuff in print so that I feel I can really call myself “a writer” also helps, and it’s not all that much, either.</p>
<p>The biggest leap, and I know we’re off topic here, is when one stops saying, “I want to be a writer” or “I’m trying to be a writer,” but “I am a writer.”</p>
<p>CLOUD ATLAS is a strange, wondrous book.</p>
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<p>I really like this poem. I’m no literary critic, but I like the contrast between the beginning when he was out seeing all this stuff, and the end where he is reading about stuff in the paper. I don’t know if that was intended - sometimes I read things into poetry and songs that might not actually be the author’s intent.</p>
<p>Anyway, very nice. Especially for a little kid.</p>
<p>Wow, DonnaL. That is a tremendous poem. What an intelligent, sensitive, attuned little boy you had. What a joy to be his mother!! These sorts of children live especially close to our hearts.</p>
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<p>I have a friend who thinks this is exactly our problem. I suggest to him that our problem is that our ruling elite is not our intellectual elite, and that our elite colleges are only too happy to keep up the masquerade.</p>
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<p>You will like Steve Sailer. Here is his adjusted GRE data:</p>
<p>[Steve</a> Sailer’s iSteve Blog: Graduate Record Exam scores by graduate field of study](<a href=“http://isteve.blogspot.com/2007/08/graduate-record-exam-scores-by-graduate.html]Steve”>Steve Sailer: iSteve: Graduate Record Exam scores by graduate field of study)</p>
<p>Personally, I too think the math ceiling is set too low. They need to reset it so they have a similiar distribution as the V score. This will not be done, of course, because the data will be too revealing.</p>
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<p>Yes. This is the Simpson paradox.</p>
<p>[Simpson’s</a> paradox - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simpson’s_paradox]Simpson’s”>Simpson's paradox - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Read “Berkeley sex bias case” from the above.</p>
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<p>Here in Ontario, teachers are usually trained after receiving a first degree with 1st Class Honours, no mean accomplishment since the average grade given in a large class is a C. So, this certainly does not apply here.</p>