Bob Griffitts was an ill-tempered, gravelly-voiced, Oklahoma-native, Vietnam vet-turned-middle-school-English teacher. For 30 years, he commanded the attention of small-town students by banging a wooden meter stick ruler on his old desk. He required pre-teens to diagram complex sentences on a chalkboard. He yelled. He was intolerant of tardiness. And I loved him.
Last month, Mr. Griffitts, as I knew him, died at the age of 82.
His passing sparked a wave of nostalgia-drenched social media posts from my former classmates. Just last week, someone dug up an assignment we did for our 8th grade yearbook: What career did we think we’d have in the future?
My hometown was small enough that our graduating class had fewer than 50 students, meaning our projections fit on a single page. Our responses had a perfect range. Many were what you might expect from young kids with limited life experience: We had boys who wanted to be in the NBA, NHL and MLB, even though I don’t remember any of them actually playing basketball, hockey or baseball. Two girls listed simply “superstar,” which must have been our version of Youtuber, a career path nearly a third of kids today are planning. A few of ours were impressively accurate — Sheakia wanted to be a doctor and became a nurse, Erica wanted to be a lab tech and now works at a pharma company.
A third group from that yearbook assignment stands out to me most of all: The classmates who had specific careers in mind but ended up in a different field. Teddy wanted to be an architect but is today a video game designer and Jackie projected she’d be a lawyer and instead is a pharmacist.
All of this maps perfectly to what education researchers call “alignment.”
A 2019 paper used longitudinal data matching childhood aspirations with career trajectories to find a remarkable correlation between how specific a kid’s educational and occupational plans were with their eventual outcomes. Kids exposed to the training and education necessary for an in-demand job — be it in the trades, tech, entrepreneurship or anything else — were more likely to wind up with an in-demand job, even if it was different than the one they imagined.
Money isn’t everything, but it is quantifiable, and the research shows kids with “alignment” earn 30% more than their “under-aligned” peers.
More surprisingly still: Having a clear career path is a better predictor of success than grades.
This is crucial for addressing our tech-skills shortfall. As Technical.ly has routinely reported, we need to expose more kids to these jobs, especially students from under-resourced communities who might not otherwise get the chance. Even if they wind up in a different sector, alignment boosts performance. Ya can’t be what ya can’t see, goes the old saw. Kids need exposure and influence.
That influence can come from anywhere that works — which brings me back to Mr. Griffitts.
I saw Mr. Griffits just once more after I graduated high school. I was close to finishing college and back where I grew up. I was visiting a friend who happened to live across the street from Mr. Griffitts. I got up the nerve to knock on his door. He remembered me, and I told him how much I appreciated him. I shared that I had taken an interest in journalism, and he said that sounded nice, that I was always a strong writer. It was just a couple minutes of pleasantries but it meant so much that I still recall it 15 years later.
I doubt I remembered even then what I listed in my middle school yearbook as the career I hoped to have. I saw it again just last week. By the research I know now, I had alignment, a specific dream that helped guide me as I got more experience. It’s so obvious now where I got the inspiration.
I wanted to be an English teacher.
