Friday, September 04, 2009

Comfort Zone

It is not that unusual to see young people who were successful in school go into teaching. This is particularly true of young women. It is an environment whose rules they have mastered. It’s easy to see why they would find it comfortable, at least initially. I suppose there could be something mildly pathological about it, being unwilling to enter unfamiliar and adult environments, but I doubt that lasts very long.

I wonder if it is even more true at the next level of education. I don’t simply mean the academic rules of engagement, but a fondness for something about college culture.

2 comments:

raf said...

I think there might be something to this. In my case, it was the reverse. In many ways, school was where I excelled and I found great satisfaction in helping/tutoring others, but I found the environment so UNcongenial, that I never considered it as a career.

Ben Wyman said...

I would suspect that those who really enjoyed college life - which is obviously a very different fish from high school - might re-enter the world as an IT worker, or a theater manager, or publications specialist, or something similar. But I think that being a professor would be an entirely different personality type entirely.