#professions

I'm coming to COLORADO! Catch me in DENVER on Jan 22 at The Tattered Cover<, and in COLORADO SPRINGS from Jan 23–25 where I'm the Guest of Honor at COSine. Then I'll be in OTTAWA on Jan 28 at Perfect Books and in TORONTO with Tim Wu on Jan 30.

I come from a family of teachers – both parents taught all their lives and now oversee Ed.D candidates, brother owns a school – which has left me painfully aware of the fact that I am not a great teacher.

I am, however, a good teacher. The difference is that a good teacher can teach students who want to learn, whereas a great teacher can inspire students to want to learn. I've spent most of my life teaching, here and there, and while I'm not great, I am getting better.

Last year, I started a new teaching gig: I'm one of Cornell's AD White Visiting Professors, meaning that I visit Cornell (and its NYC campus, Cornell Tech) every year or two for six years and teach, lecture, meet, and run activities.

When I was in Ithaca in September for my inaugural stint, I had a string of what can only be called "peak experiences," meeting with researchers, teachers, undergrads, grads and community members. I had so many conversations that will stick with me, and today I want to talk about one of them.

It was a faculty discussion, and one of the people at the table had been involved in a research project to investigate students' attitudes to their education. The research concluded that students come to Cornell to learn – because they love knowledge and critical thinking – but they are so haunted by the financial consequences of failure (wasting tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of dollars repeating a year or failing out altogether, and then entering the job market debt-burdened and degree-less) that they feel pressured not to take intellectual risks, and, at worst, to cheat. They care about learning, but they're afraid of bad grades, and so chasing grades triumphs over learning.

At that same discussion, I met someone who taught Cornell's version of freshman comp, the "here's how to write at a college level" course that every university offers. I've actually guest-taught some of these, starting in 2005/6, when I had a Fulbright Chair at USC.

Now, while I'm not a great teacher, I am a pretty good writing teacher. I was lucky enough to be mentored by Judith Merril (starting at the age of 9!), who taught me how to participate in a peer-based writing workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/13/better-to-have-loved/#neofuturians

In high school, I met Harriet Wolff, a gifted writing teacher, whose writing workshop (which Judith Merril had actually founded, decades earlier) was so good that I spent seven years in my four-year high-school, mostly just to keep going to Harriet's workshop:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/30/merely-clever/#rip-harriet-wolff

I graduated from the Clarion science fiction and fantasy workshop (where Judith Merril learned to workshop) in 1992, and then went on to teach Clarion and Clarion West on several occasions, as well as other workshops in the field, such as Viable Paradise (today, I volunteer for Clarion's board). I have taught and been taught, and I've learned a thing or two.

By that I mean how (and whether) certain activities or focuses are conducted in an organized, professional manner or treated as a career path or industry (often with set standards or training involved) rather than those that are treated primarily as hobbies or conducted in an ad hoc manner.

Standing armies, for example, are professionalized in a way that temporary armies or militias aren't. Being in the military is a profession that is organized and has specific standards and training and that clearly distinguishes between people who are or are not in the military. If we look at a lot of past wars, though, as well as many militias, being in the military was not a career for most people (especially most enlisted) and the time and effort between deciding to join and being on a battlefield was significantly smaller.

A professionalized military will generally be a stronger, more cohesive, more effective military--but it is also far more expensive to maintain, because as it is a profession the military servicemembers pull their salary from the military on a regular basis, and it takes away hands from other tasks such as manufacturing and farming.

Over the last few hundred years a lot of countries have seen (to varying degrees) professionalization of fields like firefighting, policing, pharmacology, emergency response, and search and rescue. In these cases, it reflects 1) a recognized need for a standing trained force that can respond quickly; 2) a recognized need for standards and credentialing; 3) the ability societally to have individuals who might otherwise be contributing to manufacturing or food production not do that indefinitely; 4) a dedicated ongoing effort to maintain standards, trainings, etc.; and 5) organizations (generally governments) that can pay for these services.

We also see the professionalization of other things, like youth sports--the push to treat youth sports as either primarily a system to develop professional athletes or a career on its own.

When you're doing worldbuilding, consider what roles would be treated in this professionalized manner, rather than those that would be viewed as temporary positions or conducted on an ad hoc basis.

Is there a standing professional military? How does the professionalization differ between officers and enlisted?

Is emergency preparedness, response, or recovery a professionalized field? Is the focus of that profession on planning? On search and rescue, triage, or other immediate response activities or coordination? On rebuilding following disasters? On managing grants, tax relief, or other monetary aspects of rebuilding?

Is pharmacology a regulated industry that requires training or credentialing? Is medicine?

Is firefighting generally conducted by individuals in the neighborhood? By private industry? By unpaid volunteers managed by a governmental or non-governmental organization? By full-time paid staff?

my ocs have a wide variety of jobs/labels... pls enjoy ^_^

A sculptor carefully measures the dimensions of a plaster or clay model of a planned sculpture. Istruzione elementare per gli studiosi della scultura. Elementary Instruction for Students of Sculpture. 1802.

Later he will transfer the measurements to a block of stone that he will transform into the intended sculpture.

Businessperson

abettor, adjutant, adviser/advisor, aid/aide, announcer, apprentice, archaeologist, assistant, auditor, authority, baker, barber, broker, businessperson, buyer, caretaker, cartoonist, chair, chef, client, colleague, conservator, consumer, correspondent, court, creator, curator, customer, dabbler, desk jockey, developer, drudge, employee, envoy, espionage, explorer, fellow, flier, flyer, fortuneteller, freshman, go-between, gourmet, guard, guru, hacker, hand, hawker, helper, hooker, inferior, informant or informer, inspector, interviewer, investigator, janitor, labor, liaison, messenger, moderator, monitor, navigator, newsman/woman, page, patron, picket, pioneer, poet, practitioner, prodigal, protégé, referee, representative, reviewer, rival, sailor, scout, seaman/woman, seller, shopper, speaker, spokesperson, spy, subordinate, tailor, traveler, virtuoso, wayfarer, writer

Educator

academic, adviser/advisor, alumnus/alumna, coach, conductor, disciplinarian, faculty, freshman, graduate, intellectual, learner, martinet, mastermind, monitor, practitioner, professor, rookie, savant, school, swami, trainer

Entertainer

acrobat, actress, aficionado, ballet dancer, character, comic, creator, director, fan, groupie, hero/heroine, humorist, inventor, luminary, magician, name, participant, personage/personality, player, protagonist, star, troubadour, virtuoso, zany

Financier

accountant, bean counter, broker, investor, spendthrift

Government officer

administrator, ambassador, authoritarian, autocracy, bureaucrat, consul, delegate, despot, diplomat, emir, empress, establishment, exile, fascist, figurehead, front runner, informant/informer, intermediary, leader, liaison, magistrate, master, mogul, mouthpiece, officer, oppressor, pacifist, patrol, personage/personality, police/police officer, prime minister, representative, snitch, spokesperson, tyrant, weasel

Legal practitioner

attorney, beneficiary, counsel, heir, judge, lawyer, officer, proponent, witness

Media person

commentator, journalist, newsman/woman, reporter, writer

Medical practitioner

analyst, druggist, nurse, patient, physician, researcher, therapist

Military person

combatant, conqueror, fighter, gladiator, lookout, militant, patrol, recruit, scout, seaman/woman, truant, warmonger, warrior

Politician

advocate, anarchist, apostle, arbitrator, conservative, dissident, extremist, firebrand, idealist, militant, mouthpiece, nonconformist, patron, picket, proponent, reactionary, sectarian

Religious person

acolyte, angel, atheist, chaplain, conformist, creator, deacon, doubter, dreamer, evangelism, father, genie, inventor, loner, minister, monk, pagan, pastor, priest, saint, skeptic, visionary, witch, wizard

NOTE

The above are concepts classified according to subject and usage. It not only helps writers and thinkers to organize their ideas but leads them from those very ideas to the words that can best express them.

It was, in part, created to turn an idea into a specific word. By linking together the main entries that share similar concepts, the index makes possible creative semantic connections between words in our language, stimulating thought and broadening vocabulary.