They don't have a dream

From what I remember, school careers guidance consisted of a useless interview with a council careers officer, a grumpy woman with massive hair and unfortunate blue eye shadow, who hadn’t even met any of us before. Big hair would suggest the boys go into the army, the girls into hairdressing and those stubborn enough to refuse her first option were encouraged to go into accountancy (I was a stubborn one). Has anything changed?

There has been a lot about university fees in the news these last few years, as the cost of a degree is set to rise to a staggering £27,000. Much opinion about students getting a free ride, and whether or not they should have to pay fees and have access to grants and loans is dominating already pretty depressing news headlines.

But to me, the deeper issue is that kids are often coming out of University having completed a degree they don’t care about, and wasted not only their time and money but the chance to follow their dreams.

I followed school with a wasted 2 years of A-levels (and not a bean of careers guidance offered there) followed by 2 years of working in an office. I knew it wasn’t what I wanted and needed help. After some serious foot stamping I managed to procure a fairly useless appointment with the same big haired blue eyeshadowed lady I had seen 4 years previously, who told me to go travelling. I went to University after doing evening classes. But even at Uni, I received no careers guidance and my degree went virtually unused. Ten years later, having done nothing with my degree, I am now studying again, this time not the skill of writing but how to actually make a career out of it.

The man says he never had a dream, never had a passion for a career and didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. Many of my peers are only now discovering their true vocation and starting to carve out careers that not only bring in the money they need but also the satisfaction of doing something they love.

“They” have got it all wrong. Stop focussing on exam results, qualifications and the three R’s, go back even further than that and start teaching kids how to form ambition and dreams. Teach them to get to know themselves so they can follow a career that they are passionate about and find rewarding. Give them the confidence they need to make these decisions and the bravery to change their minds if something isn’t working.

Maybe this is the job of the parents. But how can we as parents encourage dreams and ambition in our children if we don’t have any ourselves? Like all education, it should be a partnership between parents and the education system to give those who need support the skills they need.

The outlook seems bleak to even the cleverest and brightest of kids. They hear nothing but unemployment, war, recession, cancer, obesity, STD’s, terrorism… it’s a scary world out there. Is it any wonder that many of them look for nothing more than money and fame, which seem, on the surface at least, to give them some protection against the miserable future that faces them? Teach these kids that they have to power to change the world, and they might just do it.

We need to help kids nurture their dreams, and give them the skills to really understand what kind of career would suit them. There’s no point in people coming out of university with all this debt if they are not going to get a job they enjoy, and there is no point in people giving up education simply because they want to earn some money, sentencing themselves to a lifetime in a job they eventually despise.

Higher education services people who like to learn, and there are just as many people who get more out of learning through doing things, but there needs to be more help for those who just don’t know. Who don’t know what they want to learn, let alone how.

Maybe this would redress the balance between those who are going to Uni for the right reasons, and those just there for the crack. And maybe this would create a better society of employed rather than unemployed and fulfilled not disillusioned.

Get rid of the useless degrees in areas that are not going to lead to a solid career, and make those degrees that are available more relevant and useful. But most importantly, make quality careers guidance freely available to all. Maybe then Big Hair would have found a more suitable profession, instead of being paid to wrongly steer the paths of impressionable youngsters.

How Do They Do That?

Son number one has recently discovered the concept of jokes, although he doesn’t quite understand it. He just takes a bunch of random words, puts them into a sentence and labels it a ‘joke’. “What did the tree say to the poopy?” “Um, I dunno.” “DOG POOPY!” Cue hysterical laughter. Anything involving poo, wee, farts and bums is the comedy flavour of the month.

It was after one of these ‘jokes’ that I decided it was time to introduce him to knock knock jokes, so he at least had a few he could pull out with other people, avoiding the embarrassment of being told his jokes weren’t technically jokes and also trying to quell his tendency to shout the punchline “POOPY!” at the top of his lungs while going round the supermarket.

“I’m going to teach you a proper joke, it’s really funny, OK?”

“Ok.”

“Right, I say “knock knock”, you say “who’s there”? Ok? Ready?”

“Ready.”

“Knock knock.”

“Knock knock.”

“No you say “who’s there?” OK, ready?”

“Ok.”

“Knock knock.”

“Come in.”

“NO! You say “who’s there?” Right, knock, knock.”

“It’s me.”

“You’re really not getting this are you? You say “who’s there”? Ok? Knock Knock.”

“Who’s there?”

“Doctor.”

“Um, come in?” Even once we managed to get the joke right he is far too young to even know who Doctor Who is so it was wasted on him and we were back to the “what did the car say to the road?” “poopy poopy brum brum” school of comedy.

Son number two is at that really frustrating age where he’s got lots to say but can’t quite get past the babbling stage. He makes his feelings known through a system of babbling, pointing and patting us on the arm. He has a complicated rule process that everyone must follow. For instance, no work clothes or apron at the dinner table. If I sit down in my apron he won’t eat any dinner until I’ve taken it off, and god forbid if the man sits down in his dirty work t-shirt, apparently it is much less rude of Daddy to sit bare chested and half naked at the dinner table.

He also doesn’t like eating dinner while wearing shoes, likes to watch Toy Story 3 from start to finish at least 5 times a day, and he doesn’t like it when people wear glasses when they don’t need to (Nana is only allowed to wear glasses for reading, nothing else).

He is amused by the strangest things. I spent twenty minutes at the saving stamp machine in Tesco this morning because he found it highly entertaining that it kept rejecting my pound coin. Each time I put the coin in and it rolled out underneath, he would cackle hysterically, red faced, eyes watering. I ask you, what exactly is funny about that? I kept doing it because it was an extra few minutes of not being at home watching Toy Story.

The kids woke me up at 4am today and told me it was morning. I (as usual) was half way to the bathroom to brush my teeth when I realised it was still pitch dark outside and they were at least 2 hours too early. So once safely back in their room, I decided to plug our fan in to drown out the noise of them sorting through Duplo (why kids have to do that in the middle of the night is something I will never understand). As I was fumbling around in the dark on the mans side of the bed trying to find the plug, the man, half asleep and thinking I was one of the kids fiddling with his stuff (this happens often) growled “Leave it”. “It’s just me,” I said “Oh ok” he said, back to his normal voice. But being on the receiving end of that growled “leave it” was not nice, and I realised I speak in that growly (or shouty) voice to my kids hundreds of times a day. They are great kids, but I seem to spend my entire life shouting and being stressed with them. I really need to start enjoying them more. No more shouting, I said to myself.

When I did get up at 7am, to discover they hadn’t actually gone back to sleep but had spent the last few hours trashing their bedroom, son number two didn’t stop whining and crying (because he was tired, surprisingly) and son number one insisted on eating three weetabix flake by flake (still in his pyjamas ten minutes before we had to leave for school), so despite my resolution I was red faced and screaming within minutes of waking up.

I don’t know how kids manage it, no one else in the world has the ability to irritate us and make us cross like they do. But they also have the ability to make us laugh like no one else does. I mean come on, ‘dog poopy’? That’s pretty funny.