More career development musings

I occasionally wonder whether it might be worthwhile to pursue a PhD to follow my drive for knowledge? I’m not sure. One can write without credentials. But what of the dialog? Where do I test my foil? Most importantly, who wants to hear from me? In an academic program, you’re paying someone to listen and answer back. As a professional academic, you earn a situation where you’re paid to be published, and are expected to defend your ideas. I enjoy this kind of activity.
What would my focus be? Sociology seems obvious, as it is permeative - it applies to many different situations. But who are sociologists? Of what use are they? “Quick! Get me a sociologist!” makes no sense. As before, I’m not attracted to the idea of self sustained knowledge.

In fact, I long to create. Not a work of art, but some kind of systematic construct. I suppose an ideal job would be director of publications and conferences for some kind of think tank or institute. The other side is that I'd like to be more involved in business development. I’ve often said that I am one good idea away from starting my own business. The conference industry is a good place to be at the moment, but I guess now my reflections serve the purpose of defining the endgame.

I think I pulled the trigger too fast when I decided to go into Journalism. I hadn’t been trained in what makes a ‘good’ news story. The sensationalism that permeates the media is the driver of success in the news industry. My skill has been to see beyond that sort of nonsense – to the drives that direct human behavior. Innate drives for attention, money, servitude of various sorts. This is not to say that people are not driven by positive reasons, but their story is not often the story in the news. It is obviously more newsworthy for an entertainer to take an interest in New Orleans for a few months than it is for the Red Cross volunteers who serve disaster victims weekly. But in all honesty, their story isn’t that large. It’s a story of individual lives – often pathetic lives. Little about the higher concepts that excite the populace.
In all honesty, there is not that much that happens on a day to day basis that is particularly interesting or important. But a newspaper can’t wait for newsworthy events. And the politicians and marketers who are hungry for publicity don’t wait either.
I suppose it takes at least a modest level of discretion for a casual reader to recognize a trumped up ‘slow news day’ story. But you quickly gain discretion when journalism is your chosen profession.

Becoming jaded by the press is an old story – not particularly newsworthy – but it helped derail my career pursuits. I enjoy investigating and writing, but straight journalism wasn’t for me. Honestly - have you ever read a newspaper cover to cover? Imagine having to seek out, research, and write whatever story is on page B-27? Ugh.

My first job out of graduate school was as a case worker in the New York foster care system. The city hires independent contract agencies to manage the children and foster homes
It was often my role to represent the agency in court. It was up to the judge and ACS to determine the fate of the children, whether they would be sent home, remain in foster care, or whether some other intervention was necessary. I never really understood what my goals were. I think it was more objective than I really understood. At the agency, I used to flinch when called upon for my opinion.
The first client I had, Baby Boy Lastname (what babies are called when they’re taken from the hospital before being names) was born to a drug addicted prostitute. I met her once or twice, but she really wasn’t looking to get this child back.
Within my first few weeks of work, I met with the father. He was a short young black guy. I mention that he was black because one of the only things I remember was him telling me something to the effect that he was defiant because of the guy who had been dragged to death in Texas. At some point he told me has a gun. I think it was more of a posture than a threat – that was how I felt about it at the time.
I had a hard time thinking past myself. I felt like I was handling the situation wrong. It wasn’t until years later that I became able to realize that angry or difficult people had their own issues. Especially those who have displayed behavior that has their children taken away. At the time, I felt like I had brought his anger upon myself, or that by handling the situation differently, I could have avoided the antagonism.
It is the default preference for the system to search out a relative who can care for a foster child, called kinship care. The purpose is to avoid separating the child from the family.
There was a grandmother who was willing to take the child. She lived in Brooklyn, by Prospect Park. It was a railroad apartment, and tight quarters. The crib would have been in the middle room.
I was acutely aware that I was used to a middle class upbringing, and that acceptable living conditions differed for those less fortunate – when it comes to keeping a family together. Something didn’t feel right about the home, that was for sure, but I wasn’t sure how to objectively assess the home.
So, I was ill prepared for my first case meeting, where the program director asked if it was an acceptable placement for the child. My chest fluttered. I didn’t know what to say. What stood out in my mind wasn’t the home, as much as the grandmother. She seemed very tentative. She smiled nervously like someone who is desperate to be accepted. Outside of the home, the mother was in and out of the picture. I seem to recollect something about the father skipping town. I don’t think he really did, but either way, he was pulling himself out of the picture. I couldn’t be sure that the mother or father weren’t going to show up at the grandmother’s house. Neither were allowed unsupervised visits. With the grandmother’s uncertainty, I couldn’t be sure that this placement was what it was supposed to be. But I could be fairly certain that this infant would never be raised in his own family if he didn’t stay there. As an infant, perhaps he could be out of the system before he knew anything.
None of this made me sure of what was right. In retrospect, my decision seems more sound than it did then. I went with my gut and said, “No” the baby’s grandmother wasn’t a suitable placement.
I felt awful because I didn’t feel like I had gotten the appropriate guidance to make that decision. I didn’t quite understand my role, that my opinion was only one factor. Again, the problem of not thinking beyond myself.
It was months and cases later that I first had to appear in court about a client. I was there to represent the agency. I remember the judge asking me how many children were in the foster home in question.
“Four,” I answered. It was a pretty matter of fact question. (The legal limit, I believe was for a home to have no more than six foster children)
“What is this, a business?” The judge asked angrily and accusingly.
Again I had the desire to shrink into my skin. Did she think I personally had decided on how placements work? Did she realize that it is difficult to find a family willing to take in an additional child was a constant search? I think she may have strong opinions about the system and decided to blurt it out from the bench. I didn’t even understand at the time what I think she meant now – that the foster mother, not the agency, was treating it like a business, getting paid for having more children. But the law was the law, so I don’t understand what snapping at me was meant to accomplish. I was fairly new and not comfortable making decisions about what kind of placement was acceptable beyond safety and basic needs. I hadn’t seen enough placements to know what was typical, good, or bad. I hadn’t seen enough movement within the system, or worked with enough peers to have an idea of the reasonableness of any placement. By this point, I knew that actions weren’t taken solely based on my own recommendations, and I had no choice to trust the other members of my team, and more importantly my supervisor and other more experienced workers involved in the decision.
Still, I’m not comfortable passing responsibility onto another – especially, since if something went wrong, I would be first in line for accountabiljavascript:void(0)ity, rightly so.
I wonder. Is it correct for a system to rely so heavily on the judgments of minimally experienced 25 year olds for decisions about the lives of children? I always thought my role was more appropriately one of information gathering, with the decisions being made by the leadership – the judges and program directors of the world. I had thought that my presenting them with facts should have been sufficient. I still do. I still look to older, more experienced people for insight.