Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
You can call it what you like -- blue collar vs. white collar; trade vs. profession; making things vs. selling things -- but to me, the clearest way to divide occupations is this:
Do you do stuff with your hands -- like build things or fix things or smash things or screw things onto other things -- or do you do stuff with your mouth -- like sell things or say things on paper or argue things or say things on the telephone?
People who work in the skilled trades mostly do stuff with their hands. People who work in journalism or banking or other "white collar" jobs mostly do stuff with their mouths.
(Yeah, I know: writing is done by hand. But really, journalism and the like are talking professions.)
There are an awful lot of Americans, these days, who do stuff with their mouths. Not so many who do stuff with their hands. And that's a big problem. From the Wall Street Journal:
Even as the economy slumps and unemployment rises, strong demand for power plants, oil refineries and export goods has many manufacturers and construction contractors scrambling to find enough skilled workers to plug current and future holes.
With the shortage of welders, pipe fitters and other high-demand workers likely to get worse as more of them reach retirement age, unions, construction contractors and other businesses are trying to figure out how to attract more young people to those fields.
By 2012, demand in fields like welding is expected to exceed supply.Their challenge: overcoming the perception that blue-collar trades offer less status, money and chance for advancement than white-collar jobs, and that college is the best investment for everyone.
And the always bracing Camille Paglia rings in here, in the Chronicle of Higher Education:
Having taught in art schools for most of my four decades in the classroom, I am used to having students who work with their hands—ceramicists, weavers, woodworkers, metal smiths, jazz drummers. There is a calm, centered, Zen-like engagement with the physical world in their lives. In contrast, I see glib, cynical, neurotic elite-school graduates roiling everywhere in journalism and the media. They have been ill-served by their trendy, word-centered educations.
Jobs, jobs, jobs: We need a sweeping revalorization of the trades. The pressuring of middle-class young people into officebound, paper-pushing jobs is cruelly shortsighted. Concrete manual skills, once gained through the master-apprentice alliance in guilds, build a secure identity. Our present educational system defers credentialing and maturity for too long. When middle-class graduates in their mid-20s are just stepping on the bottom rung of the professional career ladder, many of their working-class peers are already self-supporting and married with young children.
And she winds up this way:
In a period of global economic turmoil, with manufacturing jobs migrating overseas and service-sector jobs diminishing in availability and prestige, educators whose salaries are paid by hopeful parents have an obligation to think in practical terms about the destinies of their charges...every four-year college or university should forge a reciprocal relationship with regional trade schools.
I'd love to see that! The Yale University School of Art & Architecture & Plumbing. The Harvard School of Business and Finish Carpentry. The College of Welding and Sociology at Princeton.
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Aug '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
Kenneth
In interviewing hundreds of college grads, I always asked two simple math questions:
Fewer than 10% of college grads could answer both questions without a pen and paper.
As a recently-educated person who majored in math, I can understand the reflexive reach for pen and paper: through high school, we were routinely marked down for "not showing work" (i.e, doing work in our head) on math homework and exams. Nor were those of us not on the math team ever drilled in mental computation.
And why would students feel confident doing mental arithmetic during an interview if it's a skill they've never practiced?
Some professional mathematicians are faster than calculators, while a few others can't add their way out of a paper bag and succeed despite this. My arithmetic is relatively abysmal, but my reasoning, spatial skills, and ingenuity (all important for writing proofs) are good, so I've almost gotten away with shoddy arithmetic. Almost. (But I'm re-drilling myself in routine computation in preparation for grad school, as computational mistakes can only hold a person back.)
May '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
How about we just add the words "...and some are decent jobs"? There are some that are interesting and awesome, like the fabrication of complex contour shapes in carbon composite materials.
Edited on Sep 1, 2010 at 8:42pmJul '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
And why would students feel confident doing mental arithmetic during an interview if it's a skill they've never practiced?
I didn't ask them to feel confident. I asked them to be competent.
Some of them came straight out with the answers. They almost always got the job and proved to be excellent employees - stellar.
One young lady asked me why I thought it was important to ask her those math questions.
I replied, "Because if you get this job, one day you will be in an office, negotiating a million-dollar deal with a guy named Irving. Irving's family has been in this trade for three generations. And Irving doesn't need a calculator."
Aug '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
Kenneth's questions sort of remind me of the first question my most annoying in-law asked me when he heard I was a math major. Annoying In-law rattled off some seven-digit number and asked me for the prime factorization. I didn't even pay attention to the number because I knew I wouldn't be able to factor it fast enough to impress him.
But then, this guy (who wouldn't know a logical argument if it bit him) showed off to me his "theorem" that multiplying successive primes starting from two and then adding one always results in a prime. Which just isn't true. (For example, 30031, which is 2*3*5*7*11*13 + 1, is composite, factoring into 59 and 509.) If he had any modicum of curiosity, he could have easily disproved his "theorem" for himself using those lightning-fast computational skills of his.
Kenneth's questions are, however, much more reasonable. I'm embarrassed to admit that I had to close my eyes and think for a minute to be sure I had the right answers. Call me one of the stupids, I guess.
Aug '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
Kenneth:
I replied, "Because if you get this job, one day you will be in an office, negotiating a million-dollar deal with a guy named Irving. Irving's family has been in this trade for three generations. And Irving doesn't need a calculator." · Sep 1 at 9:00pm
OK. So for the job they were being interviewed for, the skill did matter. Then that's good -- I'm glad you asked.
My pet peeve is only with those who use computational quizzes as a proxy for all mathematical ability -- which it's not -- even when the ability they're looking for isn't primarily computational. And at a certain point, some interviewers -- maybe not the good ones -- tend to throw out tangential "smarts" questions that appear arbitrary to the interviewee, like being asked about politics or to identify a quotation from Yeats while applying for a laboratory job. (I suppose these questions could help the boss identify who he's most likely to get along with, but they hardly identify lab skills.)
Once the girl got her answer as to why the questions were relevant, was she able to answer without pen and paper?
May '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
Mark, that job does sound cool. Deal. Good night.
Aug '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
Kenneth: Midget Faded Rattlesnake
And why would students feel confident doing mental arithmetic during an interview if it's a skill they've never practiced?
I didn't ask them to feel confident. I asked them to be competent.
What I meant is that if you're not confident about a mental calculation, you ask for pen and paper to check it, so of the people who are able to produce the right answer mentally, confidence can be the deciding factor in who chooses to check with pen and paper before saying the answer aloud.
But it also sounds like this confidence may be part of the competence that the job requires. You probably can't be competent to negotiate million-dollar deals with Irvings without also being confident.
May '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
It seems like there are jobs you don't do with your hands or your mouth, but with your mind. Mathematics, engineering, product design, and certain types of law are examples. I'm too tired and jet lagged to determine if this is relevant to the discussion though.
Jul '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
Midget Faded Rattlesnake
Kenneth:
OK. So for the job they were being interviewed for, the skill did matter. Then that's good -- I'm glad you asked.
My pet peeve is only with those who use computational quizzes as a proxy for all mathematical ability -- which it's not -- even when the ability they're looking for isn't primarily computational. And at a certain point, some interviewers -- maybe not the good ones -- tend to throw out tangential "smarts" questions that appear arbitrary to the interviewee, like being asked about politics or to identify a quotation from Yeats while applying for a laboratory job. (I suppose these questions could help the boss identify who he's most likely to get along with, but they hardly identify lab skills.)
Once the girl got her answer as to why the questions were relevant, was she able to answer without pen and paper? · Sep 1 at 9:36pm
I wouldn't let them use pen and paper. Enough could answer from the top of their heads to fill my quota.
These aren't "smarts" questions. They were questions designed to reveal if the candidates had a decent basic education.
Jun '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
This has to fit in here somewhere:
The society which scorns excellence in plumbing as a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy: neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water.
John W. Gardner
May '10
Re: Doing Stuff with Your Hands vs. Doing Stuff with Your Mouth
If you look at the Manpower article, it is primarily focused on off-shore occupations. In the US today, there are some types of highly-skilled manual work that are always in demand, but a lot is very cyclical. Look at what business Manpower is in (temporary labor). Of course they have a challenge getting a married guy with 3 kids to dump his delivery job at UPS to dash over to a construction site in Bhopal to weld 12 hours a day for six months and have the contract terminated after the factory is built. That's why he took the job at UPS in the first place- he wanted a steady income and one location.
The economic problem today is heavily a "mancession", centered on manual labor. Camille's noble workers-of-the-world-unite occupations aren't employed.
That doesn't mean that the comments above regarding liberal arts degrees and student quality are necessarily wrong. The key: think realistically about what you want to do and train yourself for it. And that means going back to learn again if necessary, because the market doesn't need what you prefer to offer.