more on priorities

I talked a little bit about the work ethic and success in college before. I think another part of the equation is setting priorities - what a person's top priorities are and how he or she decides to set them.

I think, in this culture, there are a lot of people who have a crisis of priorities. Either their sense of what should take priority - in terms of their being a successful person and fulfilling their responsibilities - is backwards, or, in some cases, they take on far too many things for other people and wind up wearing themselves out.

I have to admit most of my experience in dealing with messed-up priorities is of the first kind. I've had people agree to help me with things, and then not show up - and when I called, they tell me either they were "tired" or there was "something good on tv" or "something came up at the last minute." (and not something urgent - something fun but not-urgent).

Or I've had students tell me they are going hunting/skiing/camping/leaving early for a trip, whatever, and that they're going to miss a Friday class. Or that they're coming back late, and they'll miss the scheduled Monday exam.

And you know, what I think, when I hear someone say, "I'm going fishing, so I won't be in class Friday"? I think "Yeah? I'd LIKE to be out antiquing but my JOB says I can't."

(Because: honestly. If you are in college, you should view going to class as your JOB. Or at least part of it. Unless you're some independently wealthy layabout who's just attending school for kicks and giggles, you're going to need to learn this stuff, because you may be called someday on the job to DO it. You know, you MIGHT need to make a life table someday. Or you MIGHT need to explain to someone why random sampling and good experimental design is important. Or you MIGHT need to know how to do a simple t-test.)

And then, people who set their priorities so "fun" is at the top and "work" is at the bottom come crying that they're getting Ds, or they're not getting promotions at work, or something. And it makes me want to tear my hair - because it seems they do not understand the fundamental trade-off of life: you put the time and effort into the things that you want to work out. If you don't put in enough time and effort to something, do not be surprised when you don't succeed.

There are a lot of things I'd like to be trying to do - but I don't - because my time is limited and I know that I couldn't do them well enough to satisfy me, or that I'd have to take time away from something else.

One of my old grad-school buddies used to teach high school. He used to spend the first day of class talking with the kids about their expectations of careers and such. He said most of the kids expected their starting salaries would be in the $30K-$50K range (this was in the late 80s, when he was teaching) but when he asked them, "How will you get there?" not a one of them suggested hard work as the way of doing it.

And he used to frequently remind them of that, he said - pointing out to them when they goofed off, or cut class, or didn't do projects, or plagiarized, that if they didn't get a good base in high school, if they graduated without knowing their stuff, they would probably only need to know five more words for the rest of their lives:

"You want fries with that?"

He was kind of amazed at the mismatch between their expectations of what they wanted to do, and what they had to do to get there. They thought they could get that $30K a year job (in 1987 dollars) even if they slacked off in school, went to a community college and continued to slack off, if they did the bare minimum all the time.

And he would point out to them: there are hundreds of thousands of people who think they can get by on the bare minimum. Why should an employer hire YOU over any one of them?

I don't know how many of his students took that to heart or not. It's kind of the same song my colleagues and I sing to some of our "kids" - that, despite what they want to believe, "D" is NOT "for diploma" (and I've had students tell me that, when they came to check their grades, and I told them they had a D), that the world of hiring is competitive, and unless you've got a daddy who really knows people - or a mom with lots of dirt on the folks in the office where you want to work - you had better count on doing something to distinguish yourself from the pack, and that includes re-ordering your priorities. That you can't get your dream job by cutting class to go fishing or by not handing in lab reports because "they're too much work."

(It may be the same song, but tenure or not, I've been afraid to pull the "only five more words you ever need to know" bit on anyone. Then again, I don't quite have the imposing qualities of my old grad-school buddy)

I don't know. It frustrates me when people set a high priority on doing things that it seems they could be doing at another time and then complain when they don't get good grades, or don't get the job they want

Yes, waterskiing is fun. And fun is good. But fun should have its appointed place, just as work does. And don't expect me to take on more work (in the form of writing a make-up test just for you) because you want your fun time to bleed into your work time.

(And really - if you hate what you are majoring in so much that you have to skip class several times each semester, that you can't take some joy out of doing it - maybe you need to reassess your career path.)

Of course, the other issue is that some people do take on too many responsibilities. They "pencil in" their families and other things that are supposed to re-energize them. For some people, this is a short term thing - kind of a Hell you must pass through to get to the other side (like, for example, finishing a doctoral dissertation.) Or some people develop a martyr complex - where they don't allow themselves to have fun, because then they get the dubious fun of hanging that over the heads of everyone else in their lives.

Still, I tend to think that in our culture, the first problem - people placing a lower priority on responsibilities and a higher priority on fun that you COULD PUT OFF a day or a week or two.

I went to a Christian women's workshop this weekend. (It wasn't 100% voluntary on my part; a friend of mine who no longer drives because of a vision problem really, really, really wanted to go, so I offered to drive her. She paid my way, so it wasn't like I was out the $50). (And I have to admit: I must be an atypical woman. It was so share-y that it made me almost come out in hives. No, I'm sorry, I don't feel like sharing my "inner pain" with you right now. I don't feel like trying to explain how I'm "like" all these Biblical women...okay, I may identify a bit with Lydia as she's a woman living without a husband (in her case, a widow) but still managing to make a good living in a "man's world." But I really get kind of skeeved out with having to relate myself to Esther, or Mary of Magdala, or all of those others. And actually - another rant for another time - I don't like the trend in some faith-based things to make your own life the measure of everything. Look, I think what Esther did was great, really. But I don't need to compare myself to her, or re-fit her story to shoehorn how I'm living my life into it.)

One of the themes of the workshop was something like "don't just pencil yourself in!" Meaning, as women, we need to take time to 'take care of' ourselves. Now, granted - maybe if you're talking to a young working mother whose husband comes home at the end of the day, drops his briefcase, slumps into the recliner, and says, "Man, I'm beat. Honey, when's dinner?" the idea of making sure to have time for myself would be a more exciting concept. But one of the senses I got from the conference was that it was okay to be kind of self-indulgent and self-absorbed, because "we deserve it" (It's funny, hearing the word "deserve" thrown around at a Christian conference...for me, a big part of faith is that we have a lot of things that are far, far better than what we DO deserve...)

I don't know. I do think there's a healthy balance in life: do what needs to get done first. Then take some time for yourself. Maybe it's just ten or fifteen minutes a day - there may be times in your life when it's just like that, and yeah, it's kind of sad, but you know? Sometimes you just have to put up with difficult times in the hopes of future times being better.

What I don't want to see is women calling up their mothers and asking to dump their kids on mom's doorstep for a day or so - against mom's wishes - just so the woman can go have a spa day or some dang thing. (My mom never took "spa days." Yes, she took a half hour [at least] out of the day when she told us it was her time to read, and we were supposed to play quietly, and we should only come to her if one of us was bleeding or if the house were on fire. There are more ways than going whole hog of keeping some part of the day to yourself. And if we wanted to come in and read quietly in the same room as my mom was reading in, she welcomed us.)

Because, sometimes I kind of feel like our culture has a crisis of priorities - so many ads telling us 'we deserve it.' So many temptations to drag us away from doing what it is probably in our long term best interest to do. Things like governing bodies spending time on purely symbolic - and bitter spite-filled symbolism at that - "statements" instead of trying to solve the real problems of the world. So many people who agree to do something and then find something more entertaining at the last minute*

And I wonder: who is going to get things done in the future, if our sense of "duty" has gone down the toilet?

There are a lot of things that go undone - I had someone buttonhole me at the very conference this weekend and chat me up about a volunteer "opportunity" and I KNOW she was trying to get me to agree to do it - but I cannot. I have too many pulls on my time already, and taking on one more thing would mean that something would not get done the way it should be, or would not get done in a timely fashion. The best I could do was tell her if I thought of someone, I'd put them in touch with her. (But I'm even leery of doing that, because I've seen people volunteer eagerly for things and then peter out over time, and I don't want to do that to this person.)

(*Yes, dammit, I know. I'm bitter about that and I keep bringing it up. But it frustrates me - I've had at least 3 "helpers" with the Youth Group who've started and who've then just disappeared - without any warning and without letting me know they were quitting - so now it's down to me and one other woman, and it's sometimes hard for just the two of us to get 100% control of the kids...and it's just a frustrating situation.)

So I don't know. I think part of it is that "duty" is, for so many, now a bad word - kind of a restrictive straitjacket, a thing that keeps people from doing what they want to do. But duty - doing what you need to do - can be a joy. There can be a certain satisfaction in doing what needs to be done, and getting it done right. The best weekends, the most relaxing breaks I have had have been the ones where I've worked and worked to complete some task, and then gone home (or gone on vacation) knowing that task is done, and I can relax with a clear conscience.

And there is also the concept of delayed gratification and trade-offs. Yes, sometimes you have to put the "fun" on the back burner for a while - but in return, you wind up with a better, more-enjoyable-over-the-long-term career.

To use myself as another example: I bitch about taking work home with me. I do not like spending my evenings grading. But - I could be a "ten key" operator in some business and get home at 5 pm and be done for the day, but have spent 8 hours doing something that is basically meaningless to me. The tradeoff for doing the grading at home - or the teaching prep on the weekends - is that I have a career that matters to me and is - honestly - kind of fun a lot of the time. (And I didn't get here by sitting on my keister throughout school, either).

I don't know whether my unhappiness with how some people seem to set their priorities is a function of the fact that I work with a lot of 18 year olds - an age group not always known for mature choices - or if there really is a sea change in our culture, where taking on responsibility is something to be rejected and shirked by a sizable minority of the population. Or that you're a "chump" if you do what you're "supposed to." And it's not so much the bad choices that bother me, it's the fact that people then spend a great deal of time complaining that "life is unfair" because they must face the consequences of their choices - that they can't sleepwalk through school, party every weekend, and hold down an incredibly exciting and remunerative job.