Moving Beyond Generation Limbo, the Lost Generation, etc...

“What it’s like for 20-somethings to go looking for meaningful work- and not find it.” Welcome to the Lost Generation. The other day The New York Times came up for another name for us: Generation Limbo.

So what’s a well-educated 20-something to do? About 14 percent of people who graduated between 2006 and 2010 are unemployed. A greater chunk work in dead-end jobs that pay little more than the rent- if even that. Indeed living at home with mom and dad have less to do with laziness and everything to do with graduating college, prepared for a world that isn’t yet prepared for you.

But the real danger goes beyond the obvious financial woes and dilemmas. Long term unemployment or lack of meaningful employment can give rise to a way of thinking that internalizes the problem as less to do with an economic crisis and more to do with personal shortcomings.

So what can be done in times like these to avoid both the financial and emotional toll caused by lack of meaningful employment?

Consider moving.

Maybe it’s time for a scenery change, and nothing says employment with that change of scenery like Minneapolis, Houston, or Washington D.C. according to Forbes Magazine’s “America’s Best Cities for YoungProfessionals.” Good Magazine just released their own guide of best cities forthe young and broke, with cities like Austin and Philly making the list.  

Keep a schedule

Going to bed late, waking up late, and passing 72 hours in your pajamas is enticing for all of about 72 hours. After that, you’ll need something to stay positive. Set a schedule. Work out regularly. Schedule time for job searching and cover letter writing. Pencil in informational interviews, and be deliberate in scheduling time to grab lunch or coffee with friends and acquaintances who can help you on your search (and maybe pick up the tab for lunch or dinner).

Volunteer

Countless studies show that it becomes increasingly difficult to transition from a job that requires no degree to one that does. So while working for pay is ideal, if you can afford to volunteer part time or full time in a field more closely alligned with your career goals, look into it. Is there the possibility your volunteer work will lead to full time work? Check into it with an organization you've always wanted to work for.

Go back to school

If you were planning to go back to get an advanced degree anyway, well, there’s no time like the present. Depending on what you’re planning to study, there might also be great scholarship opportunities, usually based upon academic potential. So in your schedule, provide significant time to study for the GRE or GMAT.

Teach English Abroad

Always wanted to study abroad but never got around to it? In a way, now is your chance. Teach abroad, experience a new culture, hopefully even save up a little money, and add international experience (and maybe new language skills) to your resume. WorldTeach and JET are the names most people have heard of, but check out Matador Notebook for other leads.

Reach out to your Alma Mater

Call the career development office at your alma mater and see what sort of assistance they can provide. No longer live in the area where you completed your undergraduate degree? If you went to a Jesuit university, I know you can usually contact a career center at a local Jesuit university or college to gain access to the reciprocal services they offer to students and alumni of other Jesuit schools. Didn’t go to a Jesuit university? Call your school’s career center and see if they have any similar partnerships.

Looking for more advice?

Brooklyn based blogger Allison Jones has some great easy to follow advice in a blog post on Brazen Careerist.

And finally, going back to where we all started, keep a positive outlook, however trying that becomes. These trying times are no indiciation of your ability or work ethic. In the words of James Carville- “it’s the economy, stupid!”

I Retract a Previous Blog Statement

I always thought (and have said) Spanish was harder than English. I even vented about it in an earlier post. You have 30,000 plus verb forms compared to our 3,000 some. There are two ways to say the word “for” and nouns and adjectives are assigned to be masculine or feminine and the way you say the word “the” corresponds according to the gender assignment. Clearly then, my line of thought went, Spanish was the harder language.

I have since seen the light. Allow me to explain.

First, pronunciation. In Spanish, pronunciation never changes, what you see is what you get. English, we have words spelled nothing like they look. Letters in English change sounds frequently… soft a, hard a, somewhere in between a. Consider the name Abraham. Three different sounding a’s. In Spanish, Abraham has the same “a” sound across the board.

And while I could go on with many more examples (window v. widow) or the different (there, their or two, too, to, or bear, bare, OK ENOUGH!) I will close my argument with the true deal sealer: the verb get.

Consider this. In English, the verb get can be used as follows:

1. To obtain (Can I get the list?)
2. To contact (I got in touch with my friend.)
3. To leave something like a vehicle (I just got off the train.)
4. To reach (When you get to the street, turn left.)
5. To buy (Can I get a cup of coffee?)
6. To recover (I hope you get better soon!)
7. To Return (He can’t wait to get back to Albuquerque).
8. To Receive (I got the fax this morning.)
9. To Prepare (I need to get ready before I leave.)
10. To Begin (Let’s get started at seven).
11. To board (Get on the first bus that passes).

I tried showing it’s complication to a friend here by writing this paragraph…

I need to get in contact with a travel agent so I can get a plane ticket and get back to Ecuador. When I get off the plane, I walk until I get to Customs. I don’t get why it takes so long. But I wait, get my documents ready, and think about the newspaper I will get at the store outside When I read the paper, I always hope the world is getting better. It’s not. I get a taxi, and get ready for my meeting. I get out and see my boss who doesn’t say hello, just asks “Shall we get started?” As soon as I get onto my office floor, I already wish I was somewhere else!

English is hard. You get what I am saying?

The Choices We Have To Live With

Punishment is a tricky thing here at the center. The basic facts of the matter are that kids are kids no matter what part of the world you find them in. And being in the position of a teacher now, that also means inevitably my priorities (that they learn something) are going to clash with one of their most frequent priorities (that they get away with doing something they should not be doing). That said I always hated hearing that classic teacher’s diatribe about how “this is not a democracy and blah blah blah”…and wouldn’t you know I used it the other night.

Make rules and keep them consistent. Establish your classroom management. The advice was all there, and it all seemed so easy. And yet, I’ve learned in my brief time here, as a teacher, if there is anything that is my responsibility, it’s less about sticking with the rules I made and more about seeing these kids and situations through loving and logical eyes. For if kids are a tricky thing, so too are parents.

I confiscated a cell phone the other day. RULE= Items that have nothing to do with my class become mine for a week. And so, when a 10 year old was text messaging under her desk (something I did countless times as a student) I seized the phone. The girl stayed after class and begged for her phone. My response was simple. No. After my next class, she was there again, begging even more. No. Tears were almost in here eyes. But rules are rules, and I insisted, no.

And then near the end of the day, I started to process just why she was so desperate. It was nagging me, something about the way she looked at me. You get to know your students in a way where an unusual reaction stands out. Not exactly one of the teacher’s pets, this girl had already had her fair share of runs in and punishment with me, and never flinched before. So why now? I spoke with a colleague who put it into perspective. “Some of the parents here are still learning good parenting. And so, her mom might hit her if she comes home without a phone tonight.” There it was, clear as day, and complicated as all hell. Keep the phone and drive home my point of classroom management. But at what possible cost? It was my call.

Follow through seemed less and less viable but I didn’t want to let the girl walk off free of punishment for breaking a rule. And as the day came to a close, out of time and without an answer, I pulled the student aside from a class to speak to her. Maybe I am a sucker and maybe it will come back to bite me, but I gave her the phone back with nothing more than a talk about respect and a huge assignment: writing lines. I told her she was a great student but I needed her to be more attentive. Next time I wouldn’t be so lenient, but I told her I was hoping there would not be a next time.

I left school that day, failing at the one thing every expert told me was a must win situation: class room management. But I can tell you this. I slept a little easier knowing that in the everyday struggle to size up as a teacher, I at least had the common sense to look at the student first, the rules I created before I knew what I was doing, second. Would she have gotten hit by her parent? I don’t know, but I at least learned a little something about myself that day. Simply enough, whether she would get hit or not wasn’t a gamble I was willing to take over a stupid cell phone. That said, tomorrow it’s back to the routine rhetoric of “this is not a democracy… this is a pure and simple dictatorship.” (= Just kiddin, I don’t really say that… at least not the dictator part.

My Legs Hurt- My Life As a Teacher

My legs hurt and I’m talking to myself a lot. It’s been about a month in the classroom now, and that is the short and sweet analysis of it.

I guess it makes sense. I mean, most of my days start boarding a bus at 7:10 AM to head to our downtown school. Unfortunately, the downtown school is very urbanized and therefore lacks adequate playground equipment. And so, from 7:45 AM to about 8:00 AM I serve as the in-house jungle gym for all the younger kids. Truth be told, it’s a highlight of my day, no matter how tired I am.

And come 8:00 AM, the magic begins. Downtown, I’m teaching English to little kids, or that is to say, corrupting young minds to say the most essential of English phrases. You know, “book, eraser, hello, hi, I’m fine, Patrick is the coolest person ever,” etc… So two hours of English and then two hours of what we call Girl’s Program. Girl’s program is time we provide our girls while the boys are out working. It’s their time to learn to cook, work on the computers, and make arts and crafts that they are able to sell and make money off of. It’s also a great opportunity to get to know the story of these little girls, and for that, it runs a close second to the human jungle gym as the best part of my day.

And come noon, I am on a slow moving city bus working my way back to our other campus. A quick bite to eat, a scan of the Miami Herald, and I am off to my most magical class. I don’t know what more I can say other than I taught a 17 year old boy how to read a sentence and count past 20 for the first time in his life. You can’t put a price tag on being present for that moment. And so three hours a day I work with him and three other students with one simple goal: get them up to the educational level they should be in Math and Spanish reading, and do it quick. It is my most challenging course, and my most meaningful one as well.

Come 5 PM, it’s English with little boys. Come evening, on Monday and Tuesday I am teaching Industrial English (words I don’t understand in English or Spanish) and Religion the rest of the week. At 8:30 PM, I call it a day, and head home where we eat dinner as a community. A little lesson planning and paper grading, and then off to bed and the whole process starts over again. It is not much of an exaggeration to say personal time is bed time. Period.

There is so much room to complain about the long days, until your think about your students. I can’t begin to explain to you how moving it is day in and day out to meet my evening English class and shake the little blackened hands of boys who themselves have been working all day as well- but they make their living shining shoes. On my weekends, I have the opportunity sometimes to participate in house building projects in the community or respond to the whinny chants of Ecuadorian kids calling my name to join their pick-up game of basketball. Did I mention we live on the campus we work on? It’s the coolest thing ever to hear them shouting for you to come outside. And ever played bball with little Ecuadorian kids? Two words on how it makes you feel- Michael Jordan.

So here I am, living in Quito, Ecuador, working with one of the most phenomenal organizations ever. My legs hurt and I am talking to myself a lot. A small price to pay for the many gifts this experience is giving me.

“Don’t ask so much what the world needs. Go out and do what makes you come alive, because what the world needs most are people who have come alive.” Howard Thurman

What It´s Like To Be a Teacher

I don’t know. It’s those three little words I have repeated again and again since beginning to teach English. The students I work with are absolutely great, almost too great. When I was in high school, I loathed Spanish. Perhaps it is something in our culture, but I could not wait until my two year requirement passed and I could at last stop taking foreign language classes. But these kids are in my class because, in addition to the required English classes, they want more English.

And so day by day, their fascination creates both wonder and confusion in my own struggling mind. Often, as perhaps anyone who has taught a second language might identify with, knowing how to speak it is one thing- teaching, quite a different thing.

Day after day, questions like this come in. “Profe, would I say he is a person that is nice OR he is a person who is nice?” Usually my answer leaves them looking confused, the smarter ones on to the game I am playing... Either works I tell them. Then I quickly scramble to a computer to review English language laws.

But perhaps the greatest trick the English language has played on me as a professor comes in the textbook I have to use.

On my first day of class when I had yet to even see the book we were using (I got thrown right in), I wrote an example sentence on the board. “It is an honor to meet you Mr...” and before I could finish, one of my most intelligent students interrupted me. “Profe, you spelled honor wrong.” I did a double take, spelled it in my head, and disagreed. “No, profe, really, you spelled it wrong. If you don’t believe me, look at page 20 in the book.” I flipped open the book to see the word honor spelled HONOUR. Reading on, academe and other flippant words popped out at me. I was horrified.

I befriended a wonderful priest named Martin Hardy during my time in Bolivia, and we used to go back and forth between the languages, English vs. American as he might say. I have to believe this is God’s way of siding with Martin.

It is a struggle to teach your own language because what comes so natural for one is so hard for the other. But day by day goes by and more and more I get comfortable in the classroom, sensing when my students understand and when, in the universal world of high school culture, they are utterly lost but much too afraid to raise their hand and admit it.

The questions ring on, the answers come stuttering out, and I find myself learning as much about English as I am Spanish anymore. (=