My friends took me out to dinner to celebrate after I finished grad school. The server asked us what we were celebrating, and after I told her, she said that she finished grad school a year ago and was still looking for other work. I felt sorry for and afraid for me.
It's not that I thought the server was stupid or anything, but a service job was NOT what I went to grad school for. I guess I just wanted something better than that.
Am I a snob? I'm not sure. Do I dismiss the skills of servers? No. Honestly, I see this as very hard work. I've worked in service industry jobs before, and I don't want to work in those jobs again. But it does sort of seems like going backward, away from what I wanted to do.
Do I see the service industry as less prestigious than working for a university? Maybe. I'm not sure. Now that I work at SDSU, I don't see my job as prestigious in any way. And I do know servers in high-end restaurants who make more money than I do.
But I digress, as I often do. In "Learning to Serve," Tony Mirabelli rejects the common assumption that service worker jobs are low-skilled professions that contribute very little to society and sets out to show that while the language used in a diner is DIFFERENT than language used in a classroom or one of Swales' fancy discourse communities, that doesn't mean that it is less complex. And like Gee, who talks about identity kits, he shows that language isn't just limited to words, either written or spoken. He illustrates these ideas by describing how he had to learn to read menus AND people in his work as a server at Lou's Italian Restaurant while he worked on his own grad school degree.
In this blog, you can respond to Peter Drucker's assertion that "interactive service workers lack the necessary education to be 'knowledge workers'" (145) or to others who consider service work to be "'mindless,' involving routine and repetitive tasks that require little education" (145) because these jobs don't require identification of problems, ability to solve those problems, or other complex abilities. In fact, the National Skills Standards Board has determined that it only takes a ninth grade education to be a server (Mirabelli 145).
Or you can compare Mirabelli's ideas about literacy to something you have experienced in your own life.
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