I find myself in a high pay job, with career advancement potential in a company with global reach and I wonder how I got here. Its career discussion time at work and every employee needs to have a plan in place to show they are advancing in the company. They need to demonstrate that they are improving themselves to justify pay and promotion and bonuses.
Why is this so hard for me? Well let’s start at the beginning.
I think I last did serious homework when I was 10. It was fourth grade and I liked my teacher and I liked Andrea, a girl in my class. I remember she was staying after to get help with Math and I stayed after too for really no good reason. Math came easy to me, but I don’t think I ever figured out girls. I think that was my peak in the public education system. Sometime around then I realized I didn’t need to study in order to understand 90% of what was going on in school. I could listen in class; or not, and pick up what I needed for any test. The trouble was that homework become redundant so I stopped doing it for the most part.
It worked in 5th Grade, but in 6th Grade it was a problem. This was the first time I realized that teachers were different and that some only cared about what you knew and some cared about doing work. My 6th Grade teacher wanted homework and I didn’t do any. I was one of two or three problem kids in class who always got yelled out and was punished in some way or other. I did not get an end of year invite to the 6th Grade Party at my teacher’s house and was pretty much labeled one of “those” kids.
7th Grade was the start of Jr. High and the first day of 7th Grade math we took some standardized test. I don’t know what I did on the test, but it resulted in me getting called to the counseling office the next day; they wanted to put me in Pre-Algebra with the “smart kids.” About 60 students out of a class of 200 or so were at this level and for a kid labeled “dumb” and a bit of a troublemaker this was a surprise to the rest of the student body. Not to my parents and sisters of course. At some point I’ll list their educational accomplishments, but in short they expected this at some point or at some level.
I remember going into that class on day 3 of 7th Grade and taking a seat while kids I had known since kindergarten loudly whispered “What is he doing here?” On the first day we were doing some in-class assignment and one kid leaned over and looked at my work and announced to those around me how crude and stupid it was. What a joy to be with smart kids.
Side Note: I don’t plan on naming names of people who did me wrong or with whom I had or have an axe to grind. I don’t assume some 12 year old is the same person they are today because I’m not the same person. Stuff happens and it affects your life and how your personality forms, but I don’t hold blame against anyone to a degree that I would call them out on this blog.
Jr. High was a lot like Grade School in that some teachers cared about homework and some did not. I got A’s and B’s from those who relied on testing and C’s and D’s from all the rest. I continued to not do homework unless under severe duress and during progress report time my parents would have to talk to half my teachers about the plan for Charles to pick up his grades. This continued through 8th Grade and only in Math and Science did I show any quality that separated me from the kids who were expected to drop-out at 16.
In 9th Grade I had a chance, midway through the year, to work at our State Capitol as a House Page. My father was friends with the ranking republican and that meant a 3-week job doing what pages do. Someday I’ll write a lot of about that 3-weeks and how much the memory of that time kept me going through most of my life. You can image a kid who sucks in school getting a chance to be around successful kids who assume he is successful too. My teachers tried to prevent it from happening. My grades were really bad that year and they thought it was not merited and that it would hurt my schooling.
Attention History: I was right and my English Teacher and my HomeEc Teacher were wrong. Sometimes a kid who is miserable is school needs to do something else to convince himself that he is not worthless. I can draw a line from those three weeks as a page to my later success as an adult right now.
But that was the future. I got a D in History at the end of the year and as everyone knows 9th Grade is the first year your grades count towards graduation and college. I think this was also the beginning of me not caring about what grade I got. At the end of the year, I felt better about myself than any time since 4th grade.
High school continued my trend of not doing homework and getting terrible grades from some teachers and good grades from the few who cared only about what you knew. I never got another D, as I learned to do the minimum required in most classes; just the minimum. Thanks Mr. Studer. My 10th Grade Chemistry teacher who assigned homework every week, collected it sometimes and never tracked whether it was done or not. My first straight A’s in school and I can remember my table partner Brian just beside himself with annoyance at my total lack of homework. Mr. Studer also taught Calculus in 12th grade. I had done badly in my Advanced Algebra Class in 10th Grade and came close to failing my Trig class in 11th, so it was not expected that I would take Calculus in 12th Grade. In fact, my Trig teacher lobbied pretty hard to not allow me to take the class. I remember a talk with Mr. Studer about it and he just didn’t care and signed me up anyway.
Attention History: Mr. Nestigard was my Trig Teacher and he was right and he was wrong. He was right in that I needed to learn how to study at some point in high school or I was in for trouble later. He was wrong about Calculus; I got straight A’s.
So there I was, graduating High School with a 2.63 GPA and going to college at the best 4-Year institute in the state; the University of Washington. The same school that graduated my father in the 1950s and my sister Laura in the 1980's. My memory about the guidance office was that a minimum of 3.2 was needed and a 3.5 would be the only assurance in getting into the U of W. My backup schools were Washington State University; my older sister Leslie’s alma mater and my second backup was Central Washington where my older sister Linda graduated and my mom went to school in the late 40’s. The guidance councilor didn’t think I would get into any of these and that I should shoot for community college.
She would have been right, except that part of the entrance process was taking those darn standardized tests again. I got an okay score on the Washington Pre-College, did good on the SAT; certainly better than my GPA would predict, but I also took the ACT which is not popular on the West Coast like it is on the East Coast. I wanted as much documentation on my side as possible with my applications. I didn’t miss a question on the Science Section of that last test.
The U of Washington turned me down even with all that good paper. I’m not sure why, but I decided to submit forms to have them reconsider. I made a few calls, setup an appointment, but before I could make my case I got a note saying they had accepted me. To this day I don’t know if my calls made a difference or if I was just on some waiting list to be called when other students changed their mind. Perhaps the U of Washington was some crazy persons’ backup school.
Let’s take a moment to reflect on where I am at this point in my life’s story. I’ve been able to get into my college of choice and have none of the skills people associate with college. I have no patience or temperament to do any homework, I can’t write worth a darn and I have never read any assigned book in any class. I was doomed.
Over the next three and one-half years there were high points. There was my first English writing class, my first class that had essay examines and there was Astronomy. But mostly it was a downward spiral that resulted in dropped classes, failing classes, repeated classes and dropped quarters. My fourth year found me leaving school before I was asked to leave so that it would be easier to go back some day; ended up being a good move on my part.
The fact that I made it three years was a testament to my skills at doing what I could with what I had. I found it nearly impossible to do homework, but I did develop a skill of doing a lot of work at the last minute under pressure. Every paper I every wrote in college I wrote in one night and any other work I needed to do always got done in one sitting, just before it was due. Let me explain by talking about my computer course in FORTRAN my second year.
The teacher started the course telling our class of about 500 that if they knew BASIC; which I did, that we should unlearn it in order to do well in the class. He was wrong and I still do this day can’t figure out why he said that. Sure some of the structure was different, but the ideas of how coding worked were the same and I had taught myself BASIC in High School. (Hell, it wasn’t homework when I was writing games to play on my TI-99/4a)
Every Monday we had a program due in that class. Our grades were based on 8 assignments turned in Monday morning at 9:30am and one final test at the end of the quarter. The programs got harder and longer and more complex as the class went on. The first ones only took me a few minutes to type in, compile and run. We had to check-out a terminal at one of the computer centers, log into the VAX and do the work. The right way was to write up your code on paper, check it and they type it in. I just composed at the terminal and made it up as I went. We had a computer lab in my dorm that opened at 11pm when the main lab closed (limited the number of simultaneous logons) and I was there at 11:01pm every Sunday to do my homework for Monday morning.
This worked well for the first few weeks, but eventually the homework got harder and the nights got later and later. I think for the last month of that class I had to pull an all-nighter every Sunday in order to finish the assignment. I remember showing to class, turning in the work and then going back to my dorm to sleep the day away; skipping all my other classes. I think I got a 3.2 out of the class, but I really cemented in my brain a work approach that I deal with today.
Not much to tell since then on this subject. I dropped out of school and did several jobs over the next few years. I went back to the U of Washington and came within 1 class of graduating before I ran out of steam and money. My big break was getting a temp Job for a contractor who did work for my current employer some 11 years ago. I was 32 years old and had never made more than $19,000 in any one year. It turned out I had this ability to do quality work in a short amount of time, to understand problems fast when I get the details verbally and liked to tackle problems. These skills really come in handy and make me look like a super employee. I was hired full-time after 6 months and have basically been doing a version of my FORTRAN class ever since. I’m a little better at homework and study, but I still really suck at long-term planning and projects. I struggle every day to get my job done using my skills and avoiding my problems.
And that brings up back to Career Discussion Time. I’m suppose to have a plan for improving myself and what I really want to tell my Boss and my Company is that every time I do work on a long-term project I’m pushing my own boundaries. That I struggle to get up in the morning and go to work because like that 7th Grader, I’m convinced I don’t belong in my job.
This ends my first Blog Post. I wrote it from one end to another in 2-hours without stopping. No surprise there.
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