{"id":198,"date":"2006-06-14T11:59:09","date_gmt":"2006-06-14T16:59:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/index.php\/2006\/06\/14\/pro-forma-pro\/"},"modified":"2007-09-25T13:47:04","modified_gmt":"2007-09-25T18:47:04","slug":"pro-forma-pro","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2006\/06\/pro-forma-pro\/","title":{"rendered":"Pro Forma Pro"},"content":{"rendered":"

Professionals — as opposed to, what, amateurs — and professions, as opposed to, what, trades, already were on my mind when a Fayetteville High School English teacher decided to set the record straight in a carefully written op-ed piece<\/a> that just appeared in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.<\/i><\/p>\n

Milton Burke, the teacher, began by explaining the hours required each year by the school district for “professional development.” Other professions, trades and crafts call this continuing education. Burke had several points: It’s a lot of hours for his group. His group is just as much a profession as medicine or law. His group is underpaid, especially when compared to other professions.<\/p>\n

Burke quotes Plato. Rather, he quotes a scholar who quotes Plato who quotes Socrates.<\/p>\n

Pay unfortunately is not related to working in a profession. Teaching at any level (kindergarten to college and including vo-tech, I mean) is certainly a profession and more important than even journalism or architecture. It is so important in this country it is part of government, to ensure its universal access. Government work is cheap. Sorry. You’ll just have to keep fighting for pay raises, just like so many of your fellow Americans.<\/p>\n

Electricians are interesting as a group. You stay for some time as an apprentice<\/em> then work your way up to journeyman<\/em> and after years — years! — you may get to be a master<\/em> electrician. (There’s also helper and limited electricians, junior and senior levels.) This is a trade, not a profession. It can be profitable but it is manual labor. Mainly, though, such a trade is well defined.<\/p>\n

A craftsman versus an artist? It’s up to the individual, and it may be up to the consumer. I like to think that an artist tends (telling verb here) to create unique objects and a craftsman tends to fashion series of objects. Lots of overlap here. Maybe all that it comes to is marketing. Artists can sell their goods for more, unless craftsmen point to the quality that comes from skill that comes from repetition.<\/p>\n

Journalism is a profession. Standards are loose, compared to accountants, as there is no governing body or uniformly accepted set of policies, but we’re not tradespeople or craftsmen except in limited (or ironic) senses. Yet, we must be well educated and highly principled to succeed. So that narrows down the qualifiers.<\/p>\n

Architecture is a profession. It’s got governing bodies and standards and everything. Architects even have a heightened arrogance. If nothing else proves any sort of professional, it’s condescension.<\/p>\n

There’s the matter of having a thin skin. I worry Mr. Burke as a professional has a thin skin.<\/p>\n

In a discussion last week with a prominent University of Arkansas architecture<\/a> professor — which is why I already was considering standards — I was trying to make a point of reducing principles to their widest terms. “In a broad sense all you do is put rectangles on paper.”<\/p>\n

Boy, did he get mad. For once, I came up with and delivered a retort: “Architects in that case not only put rectangles on paper but they also fill them in with colored pencils.”<\/p>\n

That was some steam coming from his ears. But I finished: “All I do in the writing profession is put words on paper. Like architecture, we are judged in our professions by the quality of the drawing or of the paragraphs on paper.”<\/p>\n

People defending their skill sets have grown awfully tiresome. -30-<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Professionals — as opposed to, what, amateurs — and professions, as opposed to, what, trades, already were on my mind when a Fayetteville High School English teacher decided to set the record straight in a carefully written op-ed piece that just appeared in the Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Milton Burke, the teacher, began by explaining the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-198","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education-coarsely"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":30,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2005\/12\/education-tests-everyone\/","url_meta":{"origin":198,"position":0},"title":"Education tests everyone","author":"Ben S. 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Pollock","date":"July 12, 2020","format":false,"excerpt":"Of all the things I might remember about fifth grade \u2014 that would be age 11 plus-minus \u2014 why does the state-mandated Arkansas history semester stay in my noggin? Before today, I thought it was because this was the first and last time I cheated on a test. Not because\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "News, Spin"","block_context":{"text":"News, Spin","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/news-spin\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"Arkansas map showing county boundaries","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/Arkansas_Locator_Map.png?resize=350%2C200","width":350,"height":200},"classes":[]},{"id":6355,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2019\/06\/transcription-transgressions\/","url_meta":{"origin":198,"position":3},"title":"Transcription Transgressions","author":"Ben S. Pollock","date":"June 1, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"While August 2012 still feels like fall before last on remembering my second and final layoff from the newspaper profession, June 2013 seems longer than the six years it maths out when I recall that month's part-time job, transcriptionist at the University of Arkansas Pryor Center for Oral and Visual\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Life Lessons"","block_context":{"text":"Life Lessons","link":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/category\/life-lessons\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/pryor-center-logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1","width":350,"height":200,"srcset":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/pryor-center-logo.jpg?resize=350%2C200&ssl=1 1x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/pryor-center-logo.jpg?resize=525%2C300&ssl=1 1.5x, https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/benpollock.com\/brick\/wp-content\/uploads\/pryor-center-logo.jpg?resize=700%2C400&ssl=1 2x"},"classes":[]},{"id":261,"url":"https:\/\/benpollock.com\/brick\/2007\/01\/fish-in-a-pork-barrel\/","url_meta":{"origin":198,"position":4},"title":"Fish in a Pork Barrel","author":"Ben S. 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