Looking back on the ten years I spent teaching piano lessons to children, do I think that this framework would have helped me decide if it was a good career?
The topic was music. One way of describing the content was a combination of sitting down with children, managing behavior, explaining how to read music, correcting errors, negotiating with parents, accounting, driving between houses, buying music books, workshopping learning and emotional challenges, inventing new approaches to teaching songwriting and improvisation, and providing encouragement. I could have anticipated that with forethought.
That dry verbal description captures absolutely nothing of the rich and rewarding experience I had teaching music lessons. And just getting a sense of the day-to-day, as by job shadowing another teacher, would have also been more deceptive than descriptive. Having relationships with children that evolve and deepen over the course of years, experimenting with solutions to problems and having the satisfaction of seeing some of those solutions work out, and creating musical performances at nursing homes that put a smile on the face of the elderly residents, are experiences that become vastly more interesting and meaningful when it’s your life, rather than somebody else’s.
So my concern with this approach of focusing on the content, rather than the topic, is that I suspect I’d have been really bad at anticipating the content. And the more work I put into it, I suspect the more confident that I would have become in my misinterpretation. Coming into a job with a sense of mission and purpose, but an open-ended sense of what it was actually going to be like, actually seems to me like a better approach than trying to somehow imagine how the day-to-day experience will feel like from the inside, and then trying to choose from the imagined option that seems the most attractive a priori.
For me, the focus on the topic of music, rather than the content of teaching, helped spark my imagination for what music lessons could be like. I wanted to do something very different from the way I’d been taught growing up.
Maybe another way of pointing at the same thing is that topic/content is not actually the division that makes the most sense to me. Instead, it’s something like “psychology/behavior.” It’s the division between what the job feels like to do, in terms of the emotions, ideas, and stories involved, versus the concrete physical and social activities you perform on a daily basis. The former seems much more important to me than the latter, from a meaningfulness perspective. Behavior is important for your experience, in terms of energy expenditure, risks of injury, and so on. But meaningfulness is often a big component of what keeps people at their jobs, and I just don’t think that a focus on “content” would have helped me connect with or anticipate that aspect of my previous line of work.
It feels to me like the meaning element makes an excellent third side of a triangle. Contrasting the content between cases where the results are meaningful to us versus where they are not would be pretty useful information.
I am reminded of a presentation I saw (YouTube? TED?) where a researcher was talking about a series of experiments they had done where the task was to assemble as many toy robots or legos or something as possible. The point was that it was trivial, and any functional adult could do it, and probably efficiently if they were motivated. The key was that in the control group they just put the completed toys away in a bin under the table, but in the experimental group they pulled them back apart right in front of their eyes, and then dumped the pieces in the bin under the table. The group with their work being undone before their eyes consistently produced less in the allotted time, even though everyone in both groups knew that the task was strictly meaningless.
I feel like the same sort of mechanism will affect the content elements of this idea, and that the same mechanism should work in reverse as the perceived meaning of the work increases. Probably worth noting that false meaning that is easy to perceive will also be effective under this model, which explains a lot about some of startup culture’s picadillos.
Terminologically, I like topic/content/purpose. Where ‘purpose’ includes potential results from the job (including pay) and how much you care about and are motivated by them. It could be difficult to split content and purpose, though. E.g. being able to see and talk with the people you’re helping could be very motivating, but it doesn’t fit purely into either content or purpose.
Having relationships with children that evolve and deepen over the course of years, experimenting with solutions to problems and having the satisfaction of seeing some of those solutions work out
What you describe here is the content of teaching in general. Not just teaching music. Within the topic of music you could have also chosen to become an employee at a record label doing administrative work and you wouldn’t have any of those rewarding experiences you describe.
I believe that’s the authors point. Your point about incorrectly predicting the content of teaching is probably driven by the authors lack of teaching experience. If an actual teacher was to give a list of the content of teaching I have a feeling it would look much more like what you described.
All this to say I think the essence of the authors point is spot on but there could be some tweaks to the word choice and examples perhaps that would avoid any of the reservations you have.
From my perspective, this is why society at large needs to get better at communicating the content—so you wouldn’t have to be good at “anticipating the content.”
The meaningfulness point is interesting, but I’m not sure I fully agree. Some topics can me meaningful but not interesting (high frequency trading to donate money) and visa-versa (video game design? No offense to video game designers).
I bet we agree on the substance, and that any disagreement is probably just a word choice thing. Like, if we could figure out how to describe and predict the “real content” for a given person—the way they would feel psychologically and physically on a daily basis to do the job—then that would clearly be much more useful than just knowing the topic. And we probably can improve at that task as a society. I just think it is a difficult problem (as you point out), and I worry that solving it might seem to some people like all it requires is a small change in mental focus. In my experience negotiating a mid career job change and hearing about the experiences of others doing the same, I am skeptical of how much the job shadowing and such helps.
However, I have gotten quite a few benefits from the line of thinking you sketch here. In particular, just knowing how many hours per week a job (or course of schooling) can be a big help. When I originally considered med school, one of the factors that decided me against it was the 80⁄90 hour weeks, and lots of reports that med school students/residents who are parents rely entirely on their partner for parenting duties.
Looking back on the ten years I spent teaching piano lessons to children, do I think that this framework would have helped me decide if it was a good career?
The topic was music. One way of describing the content was a combination of sitting down with children, managing behavior, explaining how to read music, correcting errors, negotiating with parents, accounting, driving between houses, buying music books, workshopping learning and emotional challenges, inventing new approaches to teaching songwriting and improvisation, and providing encouragement. I could have anticipated that with forethought.
That dry verbal description captures absolutely nothing of the rich and rewarding experience I had teaching music lessons. And just getting a sense of the day-to-day, as by job shadowing another teacher, would have also been more deceptive than descriptive. Having relationships with children that evolve and deepen over the course of years, experimenting with solutions to problems and having the satisfaction of seeing some of those solutions work out, and creating musical performances at nursing homes that put a smile on the face of the elderly residents, are experiences that become vastly more interesting and meaningful when it’s your life, rather than somebody else’s.
So my concern with this approach of focusing on the content, rather than the topic, is that I suspect I’d have been really bad at anticipating the content. And the more work I put into it, I suspect the more confident that I would have become in my misinterpretation. Coming into a job with a sense of mission and purpose, but an open-ended sense of what it was actually going to be like, actually seems to me like a better approach than trying to somehow imagine how the day-to-day experience will feel like from the inside, and then trying to choose from the imagined option that seems the most attractive a priori.
For me, the focus on the topic of music, rather than the content of teaching, helped spark my imagination for what music lessons could be like. I wanted to do something very different from the way I’d been taught growing up.
Maybe another way of pointing at the same thing is that topic/content is not actually the division that makes the most sense to me. Instead, it’s something like “psychology/behavior.” It’s the division between what the job feels like to do, in terms of the emotions, ideas, and stories involved, versus the concrete physical and social activities you perform on a daily basis. The former seems much more important to me than the latter, from a meaningfulness perspective. Behavior is important for your experience, in terms of energy expenditure, risks of injury, and so on. But meaningfulness is often a big component of what keeps people at their jobs, and I just don’t think that a focus on “content” would have helped me connect with or anticipate that aspect of my previous line of work.
It feels to me like the meaning element makes an excellent third side of a triangle. Contrasting the content between cases where the results are meaningful to us versus where they are not would be pretty useful information.
I am reminded of a presentation I saw (YouTube? TED?) where a researcher was talking about a series of experiments they had done where the task was to assemble as many toy robots or legos or something as possible. The point was that it was trivial, and any functional adult could do it, and probably efficiently if they were motivated. The key was that in the control group they just put the completed toys away in a bin under the table, but in the experimental group they pulled them back apart right in front of their eyes, and then dumped the pieces in the bin under the table. The group with their work being undone before their eyes consistently produced less in the allotted time, even though everyone in both groups knew that the task was strictly meaningless.
I feel like the same sort of mechanism will affect the content elements of this idea, and that the same mechanism should work in reverse as the perceived meaning of the work increases. Probably worth noting that false meaning that is easy to perceive will also be effective under this model, which explains a lot about some of startup culture’s picadillos.
Terminologically, I like topic/content/purpose. Where ‘purpose’ includes potential results from the job (including pay) and how much you care about and are motivated by them. It could be difficult to split content and purpose, though. E.g. being able to see and talk with the people you’re helping could be very motivating, but it doesn’t fit purely into either content or purpose.
What you describe here is the content of teaching in general. Not just teaching music. Within the topic of music you could have also chosen to become an employee at a record label doing administrative work and you wouldn’t have any of those rewarding experiences you describe.
I believe that’s the authors point. Your point about incorrectly predicting the content of teaching is probably driven by the authors lack of teaching experience. If an actual teacher was to give a list of the content of teaching I have a feeling it would look much more like what you described.
All this to say I think the essence of the authors point is spot on but there could be some tweaks to the word choice and examples perhaps that would avoid any of the reservations you have.
From my perspective, this is why society at large needs to get better at communicating the content—so you wouldn’t have to be good at “anticipating the content.”
The meaningfulness point is interesting, but I’m not sure I fully agree. Some topics can me meaningful but not interesting (high frequency trading to donate money) and visa-versa (video game design? No offense to video game designers).
I bet we agree on the substance, and that any disagreement is probably just a word choice thing. Like, if we could figure out how to describe and predict the “real content” for a given person—the way they would feel psychologically and physically on a daily basis to do the job—then that would clearly be much more useful than just knowing the topic. And we probably can improve at that task as a society. I just think it is a difficult problem (as you point out), and I worry that solving it might seem to some people like all it requires is a small change in mental focus. In my experience negotiating a mid career job change and hearing about the experiences of others doing the same, I am skeptical of how much the job shadowing and such helps.
However, I have gotten quite a few benefits from the line of thinking you sketch here. In particular, just knowing how many hours per week a job (or course of schooling) can be a big help. When I originally considered med school, one of the factors that decided me against it was the 80⁄90 hour weeks, and lots of reports that med school students/residents who are parents rely entirely on their partner for parenting duties.