20150701.0715

My most resplendent and wonderful wife has her birthday today. I know the number, and I have no trouble reporting it: 29 + taxes and fees. What I am doing with her is our business, thank you kindly, but you may rest assured that I will be taking care of her. (I was going to write "as she deserves," but I am not able to do that; she deserves more than I am able to give.) That she will get to see her parents today and that we are hosting her nephews help with that, though.

The experience of hosting those nephews is proving to be interesting, certainly. Aside from Ms. 8, I have not got a lot of experience with children outside of a classroom (I have taught elementary school kids, and I was certified to deal with grades 8 through 12), although the one nephew is at an age I remember well (instead of in flashes of embarrassment and pain, as the younger's age) and seems to be interested in such things as grilling and being useful about the house; there is some connection to be found. The younger, though, eludes me. Sherwood Cottage is simply not set up for an elementary-school boy (which makes sense, since the birthday woman and I have not got one), and I did not do terribly well at that point in my life...

I did note in my morning reading Jeff Sellingo's LinkedIn piece, "Wanted in College Graduates: Tolerance for Ambiguity." In it, after relating an anecdote for an early job interview, the author makes the assertion of the title, noting that those who are mentally flexible are most likely to find career success in the face of increasing automation. He references the research of Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck in support of his claim, invoking her findings about purportedly "fixed" psychological qualities such as intelligence to bolster his claims about flexibility before returning to his opening narrative and remarking that striving for flexibility in any field will prove helpful. It is a charming piece, one that does well enough for the venue in which it appears, although there are points where it could be improved.

In effect, Sellingo argues for a position not unlike that staked out in Asimov's "Sucker Bait," a story I have referenced before in this webspace. Like the Good Doctor, if less elegantly, Sellingo praises the "connective tissue" among ideas, the ability to take knowledge from one field of human endeavor and apply it to another. It is a praiseworthy thing, to be sure, one lauded in my own education (I am "a literary generalist" in many of my cover letters, which makes sense since my graduate program was explicitly generalist), as well as in broader academic work (the push towards interdisciplinarity) and contexts broader yet (the jack-of-all-trades figure)--although I own that there are problematic depictions of the diversely-skilled (Tolkien's Melkor had part of the knowledge of all his kindred and turned evil, and Milton's Satan is of much the same type, as I have argued). Unfortunately, though, even if such flexibility is noted on job advertisements as desirable, it does not seem to be reflected in the hiring systems I have encountered, and it is not reflected in the attitudes of students who view schooling as a means to acquire a narrow set of technical skills they think will equip them for careers--and no others.