I don’t know what came over me when I signed up to be a presenter at Career Day in my kid’s school. I guess it was a moment of delusion wherein I believed that children ages 6-11 might find my job impressive. My job which, for the most part, involves me hunching in a chair, typing sentences, deleting the sentences I just typed and occasionally emitting groans of frustration. This is not impressive to anyone, let alone children. But once the moment of delusion had passed, it was too late. I had signed up for Career Day and there was no backing out.
I put together a slideshow and grabbed a few copies of the newspaper, but nothing could truly have prepared me for what to expect when I walked into the first classroom.
My fellow volunteers and I — many of whom looked as though they had more interesting jobs than mine — were given a schedule and a list of four classrooms to rotate through in an hour. My first class was a second grade room with a substitute teacher who had no idea what any of the computer passwords were, which meant there was no hope of getting my presentation mirrored on the projector. So I had to wing it and present all my bullet points off the top of my head. It didn’t go great.
I had prepared a slide about travel and the places my job as a journalist had taken me for stories. One of those places was Disneyland. Which I revealed way too early. And the conversation never really moved beyond that because suddenly every kid had a comment or question or something to say that was neither a comment nor a question but instead some random statement that had little to nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which was supposed to be my job. Those questions/comments/statements included:
“Did you see Patrick Mahomes at Disneyland?”
“Did you see my sister at Disneyland? She was there.”
“The ride I went on when I was at Disneyland had a 60-foot drop.”
“Do you see Taylor Swift at Disneyland?”
“Today I’m dressed as a doctor.”
We had a great time talking about our favorite rides and why that one kid was dressed as a doctor, but I don’t think I did much to steer hearts or minds toward journalism.
No matter, I thought. What are mistakes if not learning opportunities? What I learned was to not mention Disneyland until the end, if at all. And I headed into the second classroom, full of first graders.
I made it through the entire presentation without any Space Mountain-related interruptions. But when I opened the floor for questions, I realized I had not explained what I do especially well. “What’s the name of the book you wrote?” one kid asked. And when I clarified that actually I did not write a book, I write for a newspaper, their faces could not have looked more puzzled. Which does not bode well for the future of my industry.
So I walked into the third classroom with a different strategy. Explain what a newspaper is first, and display the copy of the paper I brought with me. These were fourth graders, the oldest kids of the day, so they got it pretty much immediately. Which was great. At first. But things took a turn when one of the fourth graders stood up, walked over, and handed me a Post-it note with her name on it. “I want you to put my name in the newspaper,” she explained. Twenty other fourth grade faces lit up, and all at once they each wrote their name on Post-its, and all at once, despite their teacher’s protestations, they walked over and handed me their names to be included in the newspaper.
After my hands were full of Post-its from Ada Tanner, Sarah Johnson, Kimball Jones, Abby Affleck, Tessa Barton and other names that I misplaced somewhere (sorry, guys), someone asked if I played Fortnite. I do not, I told them. Do my kids? they asked. They do not, I said. Why don’t we play Fortnite? they asked. We should really play Fortnite, they said. And then my time was up.
By the time I got to the fourth classroom, I had abandoned all plans and decided to operate solely on vibes. This happened to be my kid’s classroom. So I had only one real objective — avoid embarrassing her. And I think I did OK. I explained what a newspaper is, what I write in it, where I’ve been, who I’ve met, and why I like my job. I was ready for their Disneyland commentary and their questions about the book-writing process and managed to address both while keeping the conversation relatively on track. And I left feeling like not a failure. Like I had maybe even left a lasting impression and convinced a kid or two to pursue writing as a profession. Maybe I had won Career Day, I thought.
Until I walked outside and saw one of the other volunteers giving the kids a tour inside the cabin of his big rig. That guy absolutely won Career Day.
But at least I saved some kids from a future of hunching over a laptop. Maybe.