Mom and Pop

Over the last week or so I asked all of my students what jobs they wanted to have, and while I wrote here already about the pretty low expectations of most of them I was most curious to see what my smaller class would say. After all these weren't the normal students. In a country where all of them say they want to travel but they also know just how difficult that would be for them, these are students who are going to England before too long. I imagined to begin with that the group must be self selecting for those who have, or their parents have money, and I was definitly right. While given their limited English my understanding of their situations is still not completely clear I did learn some interesting things. One of the students, the only guy in the class, also the one who was just previously in Germany, has a father who must be pretty well to do. For a job he mentioned maybe starting his own business, not an uncommon theme, but then mentioned that he might work for and inherit some sort of business that his father runs. Another student, my only student who I'm pretty sure is older then me, has worked for a number of years so I'm pretty sure she has saved up some money to do all this. She gave an interesting response about a job basically saying that she had no idea, actually she was the only one who suggested that there was a value in a job besides money like free time. In fact only I think one student in the class had any real idea how going to England would actually help at all in their future. The most interesting response came from probably my best student who basically said she was going because her parents wanted her to study international business, which she had no interest in, and she was basically just planning to do something different eventually or just get married. In fact several of the students basically admitted that the only reason they were going was because there parents made them. In all my classes it became obvious how much influence the parents had over basically picking what they would study. They asked me if my parents wanted me to go to China, and I actually had a hard time explain supporting without forcing. Even the guy in my small class who father owns some sort of business admitted that if it was totally up to him he'd be some sort of academic.