"You may be all that the good people who raised you say you are"

"You may be all that the good people who raised you say you are; you may want all they have shown you is worth wanting; you may be someone who is truly your father’s son or your mother’s daughter. But then again, you may not be."

Via Mental Multivitamin comes this (mostly) excellent essay in the Oxford American, "Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?" I love the anecdote about his high-school graduate father demanding that he major in what interests him (Parents who don't have upper-middle-class status to protect might be the last ones with the gut to do that.) I love the discussion that follows about the purpose of college, an unusually articulate definition of 'finding yourself.' I don't love the excessive partisanship towards the humanities. I also don't like the use of the "don't worry about making money, you'll write a successful book" argument:

                        "[The elementary school teacher] buys shirts from the Salvation Army, has intermittent Internet, and vacations where he can. But lo—he has a gift for teaching. He writes an essay about how to teach, then a book—which no one buys. But he writes another—in part out of a feeling of injured merit, maybe—and that one they do buy.         Money is still a problem, but in a new sense. The world wants him to write more, lecture, travel more, and will pay him for his efforts, and he likes this a good deal. But he also likes staying around and showing up at school and figuring out how to get this or that little runny-nosed specimen to begin learning how to read."

Writing a successful book is rare. Maybe you'll just be poor but happy. And doctors and scientists can be soulful and authentic too.


Another essay in the same issue of the OA is a useful corrective. Emily Witt reviews Ross Perlin's Intern Nation and largely agrees with the book's premise that labor, especially that of the recent college graduate, is massively undervalued. If elementary teachers were paid more they might not have to bet on that book. Pin It