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Saturday, August 6, 2022

Career options



Could it be that high school guidance councilors are falling down on the job? Are they steering people away from good options?


Thursday my lovely wife and I drove over to Vermont to listen to the Patrick Ross Band. They are on all the streaming services. We’ve known Patrick and his wife Cindy for years. We went to their wedding.  One winter they house sat for us. He’s making a decent living as a full time musician.


In fact, we’ve a number of friends making a full time living as musicians. Guidance councilors never tell someone to follow that career path. They also don’t tell people they can be artists or writers. However, I’m friends with at least a dozen people who make all or significant parts of their income from those professions. 


We don’t live in a major arts city. Most of those creative people have backgrounds in blue collar towns.   None of them are pampered trust fund people. None of them were told by guidance councilors to follow artistic careers. Good thing they follow their own passions.


-Sixbears

10 comments:

  1. Not sure why someone would take the advice of a "guidance counselor". I mean why would anyone take such a job if they had any reasonable capabilities. It's a "make work" .gov job. As such it's filled with people of that caliber.....very low caliber.

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    Replies
    1. There are exceptions -people who really want to help young people, but dang, too few of them.

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  2. My wife's a high school counselor. Her son wanted to be in acting since elementary school. He followed this passion all through public school and graduated college with a degree in Theater & Directing. Currently he is an actor in Manhattan. She never attempted to redirect his interests growing up.

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  3. It's funny , I ended up marrying my HS English teacher's daughter. In later years she had much to do with influencing my life.
    Yet not once did the guidance counselor bother with ever having a talk with me about after HS.
    The GC sucked at his job.
    Thank the gods my mother in law was great

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    Replies
    1. Too many GCs hate their job, so how can they advise others? Sometimes they force teachers to take the role in addition to their normal job. At my HS a French teacher was forced to do GS as his class schedule wasn't full.

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  4. I was ready to leave school in my final year - couldn't see the point. My GC convinced me to stay on and try Architecture. I'm very glad I did - my closest friends come from that period. Great course, but I bombed out after 2 years and became a rock and roll roadie!

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  5. Part of my job has to do with the navigation of the language of the High School Guidance councilor. My advise, write everything down, get signatures, show it to a specialized linguist, then trust only half of what was originally said, after translation.

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    Replies
    1. It's a foreign land with strange customs and expectations.

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