Do you guys read Penelope Trunk? If not, you should. Someone told me about her a few years ago and I’ve been surprised at how much I’ve learned and discovered. She writes about careers and her experience in a bazillion different industries. (Plus she has Asperger’s and writes about living every day with that, which mainly interests me because of the many, many Asperger’s students I’ve had over the years.)

I only mention this because I’m interested in what her ideas are about education and her opinions about when and how to change jobs. Over the holidays, Brian – through a series of frightening days – was hired in a different department. He is working for the same company, but on a completely different side of the business. He likes it so far but has an incredible learning curve to overcome and feels like a fish out of water in this new place. Penelope Trunk says risk-taking is important, if not necessary, and that we’re better people for jumping into the deep in. I’m not so sure about that.

I did not get the job I applied for this fall. I wanted to be a full-time professor but the cookie crumbled a different way and now I’m doing the same job I’ve done for the last year and a half, plus teaching on the side. This time, though, I’m teaching a full-fledged, straight up, real live English class – not a remedial one. I don’t talk about my job here very much because, well, I read the Internet. I’m not that stupid. But I’ve been teaching this particular class for a week now and it’s refreshing to have students who already know some of what they’re learning in my class.

For the last 10 years I’ve faced classrooms full of students who have that same learning curve Brian does. It’s hard to show them that there’s a light at the end of the long tunnel, because many times I don’t even know that there is a light in the first place. It’s even harder to convince them that they’re capable of being good college students and that it’s worth their time.

But is it? Penelope Trunk says a graduate degree is essentially a waste of time. What does an MBA really get you now? If you’re competing with a 45 year-old senior manager with 20 years of experience, can you really beat him out with just your education? I don’t know the answer to this, but I do know that my master’s degree alone wasn’t enough to get me the job I wanted. Were there other factors? Absolutely. I feel sure of it.

So this semester will be a busy one, not unusual, but it will require more homework on my part and more thinking on my feet. Good practice for the future, since apparently my education didn’t teach me that.