Some time ago, I promised to go a bit more into the reasons why changing careers was a part of Liberating My Life. I do not intend this as a condemnation of my employer, nor of their industry. As I said before, the work they do is important, meaningful, and necessary. Quite literally, they change lives- often for the better. Certainly, working for them has been a contributing factor to my personal growth in the ten years I’ve worked there.
At the time of this writing, I work for a special education school that provides contract services to public school districts. The school takes in students who are at risk of serious educational failure and who have not been adequately helped by their home districts. We usually get students who are desperately in need of smaller classes in a more therapeutic environment. Such students often carry the weight abject poverty, horrific trauma, deep neurological deficits, or mental or sociological illness- in many cases all of the above.
For many students, this school is their last chance before incarceration- either in a hospital or a prison. Over the last decade, I have seen far too many of my students slip into that abyss. It’s hard not to see one’s own failings in their collapse, though in reality we lost them to circumstances beyond our control- most often a dysfunctional home and/or an uncaring or impotent bureaucracy that was supposed to step in and help, yet did nothing.
Of course, it’s not all heartache and doom. There are the days when a child, wracked by countless diseases and invasive surgeries, smiles innocently while playing in the sun as much as his frail body will allow. There are the graduations- like when a student, sent to us for stabbing his principal, goes on to college and a future beyond the violence of his youth. There are a lot of good times amongst the bad.
It is meaningful, GOOD work.
But it is not my vocation. Indeed, I drifted from the teaching path some years back when I took over the school’s information technology (IT). In the years since, I’ve made sure that our school was as technologically advanced as our meager budget would allow. I’ve slowly been bringing our record-keeping into the modern era of relational databases. We’ve moved to mobile labs and are increasingly using mobile devices in our work. Last year I even won a national innovation award for describing ways that mobile devices could support field trips.
But IT is not my vocation either. I drifted into that realm from a marketing job back in college when I often had to provide my own tech support. While I can perform many of the tasks in IT, I have no special love of it. I might be able to fix a printer faster than end users, but figuring out what printers to buy or developing a strategic program to improve printer performance takes me a long time. I have to specifically move into the proper mindset to do IT work, and it is not a natural mindset for me.
Teaching and IT both require specific mindsets- ways of thinking that are often in direct conflict with each other. I’m not talking about things like applying Microsoft Office to a lesson plan, I’m talking about tasks like network administration, server management, device management, strategic planning, and so on. These skills require, for me, a special type of concentration that is incompatible with being a good teacher, role model, and disciplinarian. For some people, I’m sure, this is not the case. For me it is.
However, because I work for a tiny school that is forever short of money, my time is split between the two roles. It is not uncommon for me to spend an hour or two with students, then be expected to perform various technical tasks before resuming a classroom role in the afternoon. I am frequently told that I am intelligent- brilliant, even. My job does not allow me to feel brilliant. I am frequently exhausted by the constant tug-of-war inside my head made necessary by the ever-changing requirements of my work environment.
Perhaps the fact that I can do so at all is evidence of some brilliance, but I’m too busy putting out fires to see any light through the smoke.
The end result of this is that things slip. I can perform neither role as well as the people at that school deserve. Similarly, I cannot be as good a husband as my wife deserves, nor as good a friend as my friends deserve.
I am creating value far below my alleged potential. According to Information Week, people in IT roles similar to mine, in my industry, earn twice what I do on average. To be fair to my boss, whom I’ve taken to task for my low salary- I cannot currently create that much value for the organization. It often seems like a catch-22: I cannot create my full value because they can’t afford to let me focus, so I can’t focus on creating full value to make the focusing possible. I’m trading time for money, and there is not enough time.
Ultimately, though, the problem gets back to vocation- i.e., one’s calling. I sincerely value the work that the school does. I want them to succeed. I’ve spent the last ten years of my life helping them to do so. But I have been selfish. Were I generating value commensurate with what others seem to think I am capable of, I could do more to further their work indirectly, as a donor, perhaps- than I am now doing directly.
I have been expecting them to pay me to further their work, when it is not really my work to begin with. My calling lies elsewhere- in some form of education, maybe, maybe not. Perhaps my calling still includes some kind of technical component… But my vocation is not working as a half-time teaching assistant and half-time IT director. I am still discovering what my work really is, and until I know it, I will continue to do what I am doing as long as I can.
Simply knowing that trying to trade time for money is part of the problem helps. It is beneficial to learn a portion of my failing is in mistaking time for value. I am, slowly, painfully reconfiguring my life to find ways of providing value in line with my gifts and my self. Hopefully, this will enable me to let go of the trap of employment and to support myself and my family through my vocation- Whatever that is.
(Author’s Note: The stress and workload associated with ending the school year and starting our summer session is a major reason why I have not updated regularly since June. I’m trying to do better.)
