Scott Cawelti

Published this morning in the Waterloo Courier.  Graduation season 
provokes long, long thoughts.   

Finally it’s May, graduation month.   Time for ending and beginning. 

Ending, meaning getting certified with a degree. That’s the first half.   

Hearty congratulations to certified graduates.   If you’re renting a robe and flat hat this month, you’ve completed half of your graduation. 

The other half?  Beginning the rest of your life.  That’s what “commencement” means, after all. 

Graduates, you’re now supposedly ready to begin.  And if you’re not a tad 

terrified, you’re not paying attention.  

Truth is, your formal schooling cannot have made you ready.  Not even close.  

Nothing that formal education offers, and I mean from Ivy Leagues to taxpayer-supported all-purpose schools—has given you enough knowledge and skills for the churning world you now enter.  

This is not due to grade inflation, rewarding mediocrity with high grades for little work.  Nor because states have cut back radically on financial support for academics, downgrading education in favor of sports for entertainment.   

The problem lies deeper and is more insidious.   

The fact is, our lives and times no longer can be prepared for.  We’re living in an evolving world of utter unpredictability.  A world of black swans, to quote from Nassim Taleb’s book of that title.   

Events erupt for which no one could have prepared or predicted. 

Make no mistake: More black swans wing their way toward us.  

Examples:  Superbugs capable of inflicting pandemics that make past plagues look like rehearsals.  Weather gone wild, with climate change creating challenges beyond our capacity to accept. Widespread “Colony collapse” of honeybees that pollinate a third of the world’s crops. 

A major religion hijacked by fringe elements ready to die and kill for their beliefs.  Nuclear weapons and other WMDs likely to fall into the hands of fanatics/lunatics.  North Korea’s there now.   

More positively, breakthroughs in biology, chemistry, physics, and psychology that will create or clone humans who live virtually forever, if they can afford and endure it.  Humans who are more machine than human, as Ray Kurzweil explores in his book “The Singularity is Near.”  

Machines that outthink, outlive, and outmaneuver us at every turn.  Siri, anyone?

And other events too bizarre to even imagine, but that will cause us all to rethink everything.   

That’s the world you inherit, graduates, and must somehow negotiate.   

You will wake up any number of mornings and face calamities and/or breakthroughs that not even sci-fi writers have conjured, at least in any accurate detail. 

You think I jest?  Imagine a columnist writing in 1961, the year I graduated, and 

offering some version of what actually happened from then to now. 

Instant fingertip knowledge, 500-channel media, digitization of media, Facebook and Twitter with billions (yes, billions) caught up in seeking and finding their 15 seconds of fame for capturing anything bizarre enough. Passenger jets turned into missiles by fanatics.   Bottomless oceans of self-expression that engulf us all in shameless narcissism. 

Were 1961 grads  “ready” for any of this?  Writers from that era who foresaw what actually did occur would have been reviled or ignored.  Of course none did. 

I was no more ready for those shattering decades than sleepers are ready for a sinkhole to swallow them whole.  

I would have chosen to stay in my little early sixties comfort zone of electric typewriters, secretaries who did the paperwork, women who stayed home and cooked and cleaned.  Tiny televisions broadcasting three channels. Three-chord pop music with great melodies and nonsense lyrics.  

Most of what my classmates and I thought and did before our commencement 

no longer makes sense.  I had to reinvent my worldview and myself several times, and only partially succeeded. 

The times are not just a-changin’. They’re exploding—in every field, in all directions, at speeds beyond comprehension. Compared to the last fifty years, the next fifty will be on steroids.  

So forget about being “ready.”   Rather, be teachable.  Malleable.  Flexible.  Curious.  Humble.  

In short, become a human learning center, ready to be taught by anything and everything as it occurs.   

That’s the beginning—commencement—of real readiness. 

Written and published in the Waterloo Courier in December of 1985, it tackles the question of who really works hardest.   (It sort of begs the question of what is "work,"  and whether mental or physical work makes the most demands.)  

In any case, this came up recently on Facebook when someone posted the list of 'least stressful jobs for 2013" and "University Professor" came up as #1--the very least stressful job.  

And I'm here to say:  Wrong.  Really wrong.  Dreadfully wrong.   Read on, from 28 years ago:   

Let’s examine candidates for the world’s hardest work.

Some of the obvious ones would be those that require hard physical labor. Welding, maybe. Or riveting. Or sand-blasting. Or tearing up streets with jackhammers. Or cutting down trees with chain saws. Hard, grinding work if done for hours daily.

Less obvious candidates are those repetitious tasks that require little mental involvement but have to be done right, the same way every time. Like soldering seams in registers. That’s a job that I did daily for weeks every summer, and it was hard. Actually, the hardest part was staying focused on the task, since the repetitions numbed my mind to the point of hallucinating.

High pressure jobs also have to be considered as serious candidates: piloting a 747, for example. That’s hard just because surely no one really believes those monstrous projectiles will actually fly. Or if they fly, that they will never get down except as flaming fragments. Someone once said that piloting a big plane amounts to “years of boredom mixed with moments of terror.” Hard.

Or life-and-death jobs, like battlefield generals and surgeons. Imagine having that much power over someone, knowing that with a flick of the wrist or a wave of a hand (the orders to charge) someone could die or live.

Then there are the decision-makers, those who sit in board rooms or behind legal benches deciding the fates of companies and criminals. Hard.

BUT NONE, my friends, none is as hard as the simple act for which so many remain so grossly underappreciated and underpaid. This act, performed daily in literally thousands of homes and offices all around the country, requires uncommon skills, extraordinary patience, the rarest of sensitivities, the most willing and open of minds.

It even requires enough physical effort that after just two steady hours of doing it, the hand and wrist ache for time off.

I’m talking grading essays and term papers. And not just slapping down A’s to F’s without comment, though that’s sometimes done as a shortcut by harried paper-graders.

I mean the act of reading other people’s attempts to make meaning – and commenting on how well they did. That’s the hardest work in the world, and those who are willing to spend time at it deserve nothing but praise, especially if they’re at all good at it. Maybe even a bit of adoration.

Granted, grading essays doesn’t look hard. The teacher just seems to be sitting and writing comments in the margins, at the end, or both. Naturally, pulling a knife across a human body, or lifting a 747 off the ground looks harder.

BUT EVERY COMMENT goes straight from the pencil of the grader out into the student writers’ heads as a judgment of their thoughts, their skills, their maturity, their style, their intelligence. Every comment, every final grade amounts to a judgment on their whole being, if they’ve take their writing at all seriously. And many students do, especially if the teacher does.

In the course of grading 25 papers – a common occurrence in a writing teacher’s life – hundreds of judgments have been made and communicated which have the power to make the student fly, or cut him/her to the quick.

So don’t talk to me about how hard those pilots and surgeons have it. The paper-grader both flies and cuts for a fraction of the pay and appreciation.