Upper Valley Business and Education Partnership

Excerpts from Externship Journal, Summer 2000
Susan Rump, English Teacher, Thetford Academy

Sunday, July 23, 2000

Anxiety ruffles me in these days approaching the Externship...What am I afraid of? Ohhh, getting confused and looking stupid compared to the cyberpunks who probably man (mostly men, I'm sure--who look like Dilbert!) the cubicles. Twenty-somethings in button-downs...yet the PR man I'll be working with wore shorts and teeshirt on the day I went for my interview. Is it dress-down all week? Dress, skill, and very big confidence--the precise level of casual-sarcastic-cocky--seem to be the signals for success in this decade. Not heavy into self-promotion, I am afraid of botching work in front of younger people who are skilled in realms we are supposed to be regarding as the "wave of the future." My plan: First, dress for business all week.

Monday, July 24, 2000

Dressed for business, I chugged through a busy commute (now, this is different from my four-mile junket to school each morning! A rush-hour, eighteen-or-so-mile trek when everybody else in the Upper Valley seems to be on the road too reminds me of a hair-raising commute on route 128, "America's Technology Highway" of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies!

Most people here are very warm & welcoming. Such characters, already! In this department, there's an aura of celebration, party! A table stands within the cubicle area of the Marketing & PR area with tablecloth, confetti, food to share, like our "Tuesday's Treats." I'm wondering as I meet people who seem to enjoy what they're doing: are they really like this all the time? R., my boss, referred jocularly to a "crying room" near his office, one with a venetian-blinded window and a dark, small, cell-like feel. Was he serious? No job is without its headaches. I wonder what they are [here]...

Tasks I completed today: Reacquainted myself with Windows 95, learned a little about working with Microsoft Office '97 and Outlook; read and critiqued entrance exam writings--press release and case study--by almost new-hire, made a recommendation on training for that new employee; read and wrote a short comparative critique of a professional in-house writer's case study and R's write-up of the same thing; read and critiqued R's article on the "I Love You" virus, due by email tomorrow, and offered an addition to his article "tips" that could help readers online.

Tuesday, July 25, 2000

Let's start with my assigned place. My "cubicle" is a biggish office with a Dell/Trinitron computer (yes--with Windows '95, and MSOffice '97--a biggish adjustment but not as drastic as I'd feared, and Outlook for email) and a phone set up for me. It's clean, bright, with state-of-the-art features. The employees helped the design committee, so they feel, I believe, empowered and happy about the place itself.

This seems to be a well-run company, too, in the mode of the tribal corporation that Daniel Quinn describes in Beyond Civilization (1999). In the two days I've worked here, I have been asked to help make some important decisions that affect the company in small but meaningful ways. My boss, the PR Director, is a good boss with an easy way about him and a patient, gentle managerial style. Even though I am not in the running for a PR job here, I am enjoying this week so far--a pleasant surprise after my anticipatory fretting Sunday.

Tasks I completed today: Opening, loading, and perusing entry software sent by the Business Finance Vision Awards program for company reporting, practices & procedures; reading the enclosures and offering a recommendation that it would be too much to complete in one week and too demanding of financial and employment records for him to want to handle alone, if at all; updating the listing of [the company's] location, contacts, and products on Microsoft's website in a note to that webmaster; began the reading, listing and interpretation of newsblurbs R. had amassed during the time he was traveling; began the updating of a long list of business & other magazines & e-zines as contacts for R.; searched MetaCrawler and Google for editorial calendars.

Wednesday, July 26, 2000

R. and I began by discussing the challenge for the day--to come be a listening part of conversations with two resellers whom R. wants to quote for promotion of the resale business. R's efforts to reach two of the resellers was met with voicemail; unflummoxed, he left cogent, warm messages. I am seeing how harem-scarem the PR business is. It's as fraught with tension as I'd suspected. Though [the company president] (you know, I still haven't met him--don't even know what he looks like!) has succeeded at creating a "family environment" for his workers, the truth remains that people here are working at high-pressure jobs without much supervisor-imposed structure. As with most things, the more creative the jobs are, the more the worker must self-assign and then live up to the high expectations s/he has created in others of her/himself. That's intense in itself!

R & I talked some about the new corporate vision, which is not all that new in its demands, but which is configured differently and is youth-oriented. The pile of magazines he handed me to catalogue and peruse for [the company's] references was topped by an issue with a cover article on the "elderliness" of workers age 35 and up in high-tech businesses. .... it also may mean that R's days here himself are numbered--unless [the company's] philosophy is different from the current trend. It occurred to me that few people here are past forty. High-tech really is a youth industry. With the world's population changing, though, how long will the US stay at the forefront of it? Succession! It rears its ugly face again, and again, and again. Which makes [this company] different in another way: I don't feel old, and I have energy, enthusiasm, and some skill to give. The company--or was it R.?--gave me a chance anyway. Maybe he/they could see who I really am.

In our talk this morning, we grew somewhat philosophical. Work comes down to the Great Questions of Human Existence: Why am I here? What do I do with my life? What does it all mean? One thing I love that R. said today: "A lot of my job is planting seeds. Some grow, and some don't."

Tasks I completed today: Conferences w/ R. re: his background , the nature of PR work, setting tasks & goals in the PR effort for the company's betterment; work toward updating the publications websites/contacts/ editorial calendars list and collection (which I'm making into a looseleaf booklet).

Thursday, July 27, 2000

I'm reflecting on what the architecture and tribal-friendly design of the [company] plant do to facilitate genuine, not forced, pleasantries between people. Our renovated campus does that to a certain extent at TA, but the other tensions interfere. We clearly have more work to do to get the effect that [this company] has achieved. An instant coffee from the department machine jump-started me, and with the rest of the pod quiet with industry, I concentrated non-stop and saw my list of to-dos dwindle.

Finding those editcals was sometimes quite difficult, and as I did so, I mused on what that alone reflects about the changes in the industry. The article R. gave me to read--"The Decline and Fall of Public Relations," an unsigned column in Red Herring, an IT industry 'zine, quoting various interviewees on the perceived poor quality of PR these days--if read between the lines, offers a veritable curriculum of skills and attitudes for students who are considering jobs in PR. It also gave me a closer view of the demands of R's job. It's evident that he must keep up-to-date all of his info on individual reporters and editors and then toe a very fine line with each one of them. It also raises the question of what devices might be designed that would alleviate some of the aggravation people feel towards each other for being so diverse!

Tasks I completed today: Finished looseleaf notebook of industrymag editorial calendars, corporate contacts, and URLs that R. had asked me to make for his work. I even made a cover page using a pretty clipart logo and entitled the thing "Contact and Promote!" After that, I attended the speakerphone interview R held with D. of [Company] in Kentucky, took notes, and fired off a paragraph of quotes by D. that showcased the partnership between [this company] and [his] and the value of [our product] to [their company]. Later, I created a mock-up of the interview-quotes paragraph that will be added for an individualized press release. When I checked for R's response, he said he liked the work I'd done.

Friday, July 28, 2000

I whirled into action by finishing the work--all of it--that R's assigned me. Well, if I were there longer, I'd revise my library list several times and then create links for the sites I found--easily. R came in holding this morning's Manchester Union-Leader, obviously enthused and wanting to show me something important. He was pleased that his own fast action in promulgating the applicability of [our product] to Napster and Gnutella vigilantes had resulted in front-page attention by the paper to [the company]. Despite his enthusiasm and pride, he stayed fairly cool about it. I can see that success in this (PR) industry could have an intoxicating, maybe even addictive effect, which R. coolly eludes.

After a hearty discussion about this and other aspects of the job, and after we'd agreed to a timeline of tasks for the day, R stayed in his office, door closed, and revised his Love Bug article into a better edition, then greeted a corporate visitor before conducting a scheduled tour. I worked to complete the remainder of the tasks R. assigned on Monday and took a bit of time to schmooze with others in the pod. I gave out Lake Champlain chocolates to give people who've been really nice--I had just enough! Later, R., strapped for time because he needed to leave early, made time for our "exit interview," evaluating my work as "helpful" and "useful in helping [him] through the transition to working in a [PR] team format." I gave him a chunky little box of four LC truffles, and we parted with a cheerful handshake. I wished L. farewell--but hope we'll be in touch soon to chat--and left the parking lot, a feeling of satisfaction moving me calmly into the weekend.

Tasks I completed today: I completed the shelving of the June and July issues of the trade magazines into the library shelves kept on the second floor, north pod. I copied the articles set aside by R and an additional one that touched on [our product's] application to Napster, Gnutella, etc., and created June and July summary sheets on the articles to display on the in-house bulletin board. One summary dealt with the Manchester Union-Leader article that featured R. himself this morning. I added six revised listings of 'zines and websites to the publication update I turned in yesterday. I read and offered a critique of R's revised article on the Love Bug (the "I Love You" virus that hit machines a few weeks ago); with his specific citations from interviews he'd done with four people-in-the-know, it was a much punchier article.

My Conclusions

Afterword, August 2000

Some things learned or reinforced:

Reading my earlier writings and reflecting on the Externship, I'm back once again to contemplating the nature of learning, especially of learning something considered very unfamiliar and daunting.

• I am reminded of how much our language can divide us, to sequester and intimidate us--just as much as it can illuminate and clarify and inspire! Language scared me at first. (See my comments back on July 23, Sunday, before beginning my work.) The smug, clickety-click cyber-language I mentioned at the start of the Externship is really just another jargon, and every profession has its own. Being given readings, being expected to learn and use the lingo as it is directly applied, right at the start, was very helpful. The language and the terms change fast enough that any IT lexicon is immediately obsolete at the time of its publication. So, the same applies to me as it does to my students trying to learn the vocabulary I ask them to learn: The best ways to learn a new vocabulary are those of total immersion--by reading relevant materials, by hearing the words correctly used for daily purposes, by using them for oneself so that they are quickly internalized, so that they become part of one's own life. The more I was using and reading/writing about TCO's (total cost of operations), outsourcing (subcontracting), editcals (editorial calendars), assets (computer equipment--hardware--in use by a company for necessary business purposes), sneakernet (hand-to hand delivery of information), metering, messaging, end-user activity, etc., the more reasonable and the less flippant the terms sounded to me.

• I'm reminded of the learning curve, the accompanying feelings and sensations, that parallel what I experience as a student taking a course--especially the week-long intensives. What a much younger student experiences...the extreme lack of confidence, the being off-balance, the just-like-a-seventh-grader feeling in the pit of the stomach--it's only a little less extreme. Anticipating the new work environment would have been easier if I had concentrated on seeing the similarities to what I know and can already do, rather than thinking only of the differences and of my own supposed inadequacies. When I think of the implications for my own teaching, in all areas, and what I can bring back to students about this aspect of the psychology of human learning, the implications resound. Even if this is the only thing can comes out of this externship, it will all by itself have justified this entire UVBEP externship!

• Reflection on the parallels to working in a school environment have helped me to see the transition I made and what I would need to teach students about it. The need for individual skills--proficiency with spoken, read, and written language, research techniques, and creativity--is critical; the need to work well with others is one of those skills. Personal qualities--"transferable skills"--like trustworthiness, reliability, ability to work independently, and company loyalty, perseverance, and good cheer are also essential, and arguably a bit more necessary. Then there is the atmosphere, and [the company's] is, though newer and less traditional, very much as TA's has always been (at least, in my sense of it since 1972, when I began there): innovative, family-style (podlike, teamed, or "nesty"), small, and relevant. Just as we are a unique school, [the company] is a unique business--though that uniqueness may be fading as more schools and companies recognize the rightness of that approach for maximum student/teacher/employee efficiency.

The differences are obvious in that TA is a not-for-profit school and [the company] is a business for profit. To say that TA kids are in training while [company] workers are not would be wrong; to say that [company] people are creating products while TA people are not is equally wrong. But the emphases are different. Too, the differences lie in the general ages of those involved (TA people being mostly younger) and in the main purposes of the institutions (TA's being to coach and develop the learners, [the company's] being to make money for its proficient adult workers). In a sense, the differences are attributable to matters of places we occupy in our life cycles and in our specific accountabilities.

• Like everything else, the nature of PR is changing. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of what I learned, not because change bothers me but that the increasing complexity of this profession poses greater challenge and possibly difficulty for students. It certainly makes it clear that English and social studies teachers need to look at curriculum and "basic competencies" we need to teach students in terms of the complaints articulated in the article R gave me and the ones I found on further research. In the current phase, it will be impractical to return to a Warriner-style grammar teaching; it took years and hundreds of hours to inculcate the rules I grew up learning. Indeed, now, many of them have been modified or abandoned. (For example, has my prose lost clarity or acceptability because I ended this paragraph's topic sentence with an -ing verb? or because I have used so many non-sentences (fragments) in this journal? Deciding which rules to abandon is almost a study in itself. It's simply not that easy an argument to resolve! Cyber-realities, diversity of demography, and mobility of individuals and groups have caused language to be more, not less, fluid.)

• Tribalism in the corporate world--and even in our school: how do we maintain the feeling as our tribe expands to include diverse strangers? The need for schools to include more children as the Upper Valley grows in population has already changed the intimate atmosphere of many of them. The growth of [the company] will challenge that company similarly. Unless an improved economy inspires new schools to spring up (or ancillary units of existing ones) in an answer to the need for smaller, more manageable schools; likewise, unless [the company] can diversify or establish alternative structures that allow retention of productive employees in ways that ensure the profits' continuing to flow in, the same problem will bedevil both groups.





			Excerpts from Externship Journal, Summer 2000 Susan Rump, English Teacher, Thetford Academy Sunday, July 23, 2000 Anxiety ruffles me in these days approaching the Externship...What am I afraid of? Ohhh, getting confused and looking stupid compared to the cyberpunks who probably man (mostly men, I'm sure--who look like Dilbert!) the cubicles. Twenty-somethings in button-downs...yet the PR man I'll be working with wore shorts and teeshirt on the day I went for my interview. Is it dress-down all week? Dress, skill, and very big confidence--the precise level of casual-sarcastic-cocky--seem to be the signals for success in this decade. Not heavy into self-promotion, I am afraid of botching work in front of younger people who are skilled in realms we are supposed to be regarding as the "wave of the future." My plan: First, dress for business all week. Monday, July 24, 2000 Dressed for business, I chugged through a busy commute (now, this is different from my four-mile junket to school each morning! A rush-hour, eighteen-or-so-mile trek when everybody else in the Upper Valley seems to be on the road too reminds me of a hair-raising commute on route 128, "America's Technology Highway" of the 'Sixties and 'Seventies! Most people here are very warm & welcoming. Such characters, already! In this department, there's an aura of celebration, party! A table stands within the cubicle area of the Marketing & PR area with tablecloth, confetti, food to share, like our "Tuesday's Treats." I'm wondering as I meet people who seem to enjoy what they're doing: are they really like this all the time? R., my boss, referred jocularly to a "crying room" near his office, one with a venetian-blinded window and a dark, small, cell-like feel. Was he serious? No job is without its headaches. I wonder what they are [here]... Tasks I completed today: Reacquainted myself with Windows 95, learned a little about working with Microsoft Office '97 and Outlook; read and critiqued entrance exam writings--press release and case study--by almost new-hire, made a recommendation on training for that new employee; read and wrote a short comparative critique of a professional in-house writer's case study and R's write-up of the same thing; read and critiqued R's article on the "I Love You" virus, due by email tomorrow, and offered an addition to his article "tips" that could help readers online. Tuesday, July 25, 2000 Let's start with my assigned place. My "cubicle" is a biggish office with a Dell/Trinitron computer (yes--with Windows '95, and MSOffice '97--a biggish adjustment but not as drastic as I'd feared, and Outlook for email) and a phone set up for me. It's clean, bright, with state-of-the-art features. The employees helped the design committee, so they feel, I believe, empowered and happy about the place itself. This seems to be a well-run company, too, in the mode of the tribal corporation that Daniel Quinn describes in Beyond Civilization (1999). In the two days I've worked here, I have been asked to help make some important decisions that affect the company in small but meaningful ways. My boss, the PR Director, is a good boss with an easy way about him and a patient, gentle managerial style. Even though I am not in the running for a PR job here, I am enjoying this week so far--a pleasant surprise after my anticipatory fretting Sunday. Tasks I completed today: Opening, loading, and perusing entry software sent by the Business Finance Vision Awards program for company reporting, practices & procedures; reading the enclosures and offering a recommendation that it would be too much to complete in one week and too demanding of financial and employment records for him to want to handle alone, if at all; updating the listing of [the company's] location, contacts, and products on Microsoft's website in a note to that webmaster; began the reading, listing and interpretation of newsblurbs R. had amassed during the time he was traveling; began the updating of a long list of business & other magazines & e-zines as contacts for R.; searched MetaCrawler and Google for editorial calendars. Wednesday, July 26, 2000 R. and I began by discussing the challenge for the day--to come be a listening part of conversations with two resellers whom R. wants to quote for promotion of the resale business. R's efforts to reach two of the resellers was met with voicemail; unflummoxed, he left cogent, warm messages. I am seeing how harem-scarem the PR business is. It's as fraught with tension as I'd suspected. Though [the company president] (you know, I still haven't met him--don't even know what he looks like!) has succeeded at creating a "family environment" for his workers, the truth remains that people here are working at high-pressure jobs without much supervisor-imposed structure. As with most things, the more creative the jobs are, the more the worker must self-assign and then live up to the high expectations s/he has created in others of her/himself. That's intense in itself! R & I talked some about the new corporate vision, which is not all that new in its demands, but which is configured differently and is youth-oriented. The pile of magazines he handed me to catalogue and peruse for [the company's] references was topped by an issue with a cover article on the "elderliness" of workers age 35 and up in high-tech businesses. .... it also may mean that R's days here himself are numbered--unless [the company's] philosophy is different from the current trend. It occurred to me that few people here are past forty. High-tech really is a youth industry. With the world's population changing, though, how long will the US stay at the forefront of it? Succession! It rears its ugly face again, and again, and again. Which makes [this company] different in another way: I don't feel old, and I have energy, enthusiasm, and some skill to give. The company--or was it R.?--gave me a chance anyway. Maybe he/they could see who I really am. In our talk this morning, we grew somewhat philosophical. Work comes down to the Great Questions of Human Existence: Why am I here? What do I do with my life? What does it all mean? One thing I love that R. said today: "A lot of my job is planting seeds. Some grow, and some don't." Tasks I completed today: Conferences w/ R. re: his background , the nature of PR work, setting tasks & goals in the PR effort for the company's betterment; work toward updating the publications websites/contacts/ editorial calendars list and collection (which I'm making into a looseleaf booklet). Thursday, July 27, 2000 I'm reflecting on what the architecture and tribal-friendly design of the [company] plant do to facilitate genuine, not forced, pleasantries between people. Our renovated campus does that to a certain extent at TA, but the other tensions interfere. We clearly have more work to do to get the effect that [this company] has achieved. An instant coffee from the department machine jump-started me, and with the rest of the pod quiet with industry, I concentrated non-stop and saw my list of to-dos dwindle. Finding those editcals was sometimes quite difficult, and as I did so, I mused on what that alone reflects about the changes in the industry. The article R. gave me to read--"The Decline and Fall of Public Relations," an unsigned column in Red Herring, an IT industry 'zine, quoting various interviewees on the perceived poor quality of PR these days--if read between the lines, offers a veritable curriculum of skills and attitudes for students who are considering jobs in PR. It also gave me a closer view of the demands of R's job. It's evident that he must keep up-to-date all of his info on individual reporters and editors and then toe a very fine line with each one of them. It also raises the question of what devices might be designed that would alleviate some of the aggravation people feel towards each other for being so diverse! Tasks I completed today: Finished looseleaf notebook of industrymag editorial calendars, corporate contacts, and URLs that R. had asked me to make for his work. I even made a cover page using a pretty clipart logo and entitled the thing "Contact and Promote!" After that, I attended the speakerphone interview R held with D. of [Company] in Kentucky, took notes, and fired off a paragraph of quotes by D. that showcased the partnership between [this company] and [his] and the value of [our product] to [their company]. Later, I created a mock-up of the interview-quotes paragraph that will be added for an individualized press release. When I checked for R's response, he said he liked the work I'd done. Friday, July 28, 2000 I whirled into action by finishing the work--all of it--that R's assigned me. Well, if I were there longer, I'd revise my library list several times and then create links for the sites I found--easily. R came in holding this morning's Manchester Union-Leader, obviously enthused and wanting to show me something important. He was pleased that his own fast action in promulgating the applicability of [our product] to Napster and Gnutella vigilantes had resulted in front-page attention by the paper to [the company]. Despite his enthusiasm and pride, he stayed fairly cool about it. I can see that success in this (PR) industry could have an intoxicating, maybe even addictive effect, which R. coolly eludes. After a hearty discussion about this and other aspects of the job, and after we'd agreed to a timeline of tasks for the day, R stayed in his office, door closed, and revised his Love Bug article into a better edition, then greeted a corporate visitor before conducting a scheduled tour. I worked to complete the remainder of the tasks R. assigned on Monday and took a bit of time to schmooze with others in the pod. I gave out Lake Champlain chocolates to give people who've been really nice--I had just enough! Later, R., strapped for time because he needed to leave early, made time for our "exit interview," evaluating my work as "helpful" and "useful in helping [him] through the transition to working in a [PR] team format." I gave him a chunky little box of four LC truffles, and we parted with a cheerful handshake. I wished L. farewell--but hope we'll be in touch soon to chat--and left the parking lot, a feeling of satisfaction moving me calmly into the weekend. Tasks I completed today: I completed the shelving of the June and July issues of the trade magazines into the library shelves kept on the second floor, north pod. I copied the articles set aside by R and an additional one that touched on [our product's] application to Napster, Gnutella, etc., and created June and July summary sheets on the articles to display on the in-house bulletin board. One summary dealt with the Manchester Union-Leader article that featured R. himself this morning. I added six revised listings of 'zines and websites to the publication update I turned in yesterday. I read and offered a critique of R's revised article on the Love Bug (the "I Love You" virus that hit machines a few weeks ago); with his specific citations from interviews he'd done with four people-in-the-know, it was a much punchier article. My Conclusions Afterword, August 2000 Some things learned or reinforced: Reading my earlier writings and reflecting on the Externship, I'm back once again to contemplating the nature of learning, especially of learning something considered very unfamiliar and daunting. • I am reminded of how much our language can divide us, to sequester and intimidate us--just as much as it can illuminate and clarify and inspire! Language scared me at first. (See my comments back on July 23, Sunday, before beginning my work.) The smug, clickety-click cyber-language I mentioned at the start of the Externship is really just another jargon, and every profession has its own. Being given readings, being expected to learn and use the lingo as it is directly applied, right at the start, was very helpful. The language and the terms change fast enough that any IT lexicon is immediately obsolete at the time of its publication. So, the same applies to me as it does to my students trying to learn the vocabulary I ask them to learn: The best ways to learn a new vocabulary are those of total immersion--by reading relevant materials, by hearing the words correctly used for daily purposes, by using them for oneself so that they are quickly internalized, so that they become part of one's own life. The more I was using and reading/writing about TCO's (total cost of operations), outsourcing (subcontracting), editcals (editorial calendars), assets (computer equipment--hardware--in use by a company for necessary business purposes), sneakernet (hand-to hand delivery of information), metering, messaging, end-user activity, etc., the more reasonable and the less flippant the terms sounded to me. • I'm reminded of the learning curve, the accompanying feelings and sensations, that parallel what I experience as a student taking a course--especially the week-long intensives. What a much younger student experiences...the extreme lack of confidence, the being off-balance, the just-like-a-seventh-grader feeling in the pit of the stomach--it's only a little less extreme. Anticipating the new work environment would have been easier if I had concentrated on seeing the similarities to what I know and can already do, rather than thinking only of the differences and of my own supposed inadequacies. When I think of the implications for my own teaching, in all areas, and what I can bring back to students about this aspect of the psychology of human learning, the implications resound. Even if this is the only thing can comes out of this externship, it will all by itself have justified this entire UVBEP externship! • Reflection on the parallels to working in a school environment have helped me to see the transition I made and what I would need to teach students about it. The need for individual skills--proficiency with spoken, read, and written language, research techniques, and creativity--is critical; the need to work well with others is one of those skills. Personal qualities--"transferable skills"--like trustworthiness, reliability, ability to work independently, and company loyalty, perseverance, and good cheer are also essential, and arguably a bit more necessary. Then there is the atmosphere, and [the company's] is, though newer and less traditional, very much as TA's has always been (at least, in my sense of it since 1972, when I began there): innovative, family-style (podlike, teamed, or "nesty"), small, and relevant. Just as we are a unique school, [the company] is a unique business--though that uniqueness may be fading as more schools and companies recognize the rightness of that approach for maximum student/teacher/employee efficiency. The differences are obvious in that TA is a not-for-profit school and [the company] is a business for profit. To say that TA kids are in training while [company] workers are not would be wrong; to say that [company] people are creating products while TA people are not is equally wrong. But the emphases are different. Too, the differences lie in the general ages of those involved (TA people being mostly younger) and in the main purposes of the institutions (TA's being to coach and develop the learners, [the company's] being to make money for its proficient adult workers). In a sense, the differences are attributable to matters of places we occupy in our life cycles and in our specific accountabilities. • Like everything else, the nature of PR is changing. This is perhaps the most disturbing aspect of what I learned, not because change bothers me but that the increasing complexity of this profession poses greater challenge and possibly difficulty for students. It certainly makes it clear that English and social studies teachers need to look at curriculum and "basic competencies" we need to teach students in terms of the complaints articulated in the article R gave me and the ones I found on further research. In the current phase, it will be impractical to return to a Warriner-style grammar teaching; it took years and hundreds of hours to inculcate the rules I grew up learning. Indeed, now, many of them have been modified or abandoned. (For example, has my prose lost clarity or acceptability because I ended this paragraph's topic sentence with an -ing verb? or because I have used so many non-sentences (fragments) in this journal? Deciding which rules to abandon is almost a study in itself. It's simply not that easy an argument to resolve! Cyber-realities, diversity of demography, and mobility of individuals and groups have caused language to be more, not less, fluid.) • Tribalism in the corporate world--and even in our school: how do we maintain the feeling as our tribe expands to include diverse strangers? The need for schools to include more children as the Upper Valley grows in population has already changed the intimate atmosphere of many of them. The growth of [the company] will challenge that company similarly. Unless an improved economy inspires new schools to spring up (or ancillary units of existing ones) in an answer to the need for smaller, more manageable schools; likewise, unless [the company] can diversify or establish alternative structures that allow retention of productive employees in ways that ensure the profits' continuing to flow in, the same problem will bedevil both groups.
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