Honestly, I wish my job was writing books about Disneyland.

By Meg Walter

I don’t know what came over me when I signed up to be a presenter at Career Day in my kid’s school. I guess it was a moment of delusion wherein I believed that children ages 6-11 might find my job impressive. My job which, for the most part, involves me hunching in a chair, typing sentences, deleting the sentences I just typed and occasionally emitting groans of frustration. This is not impressive to anyone, let alone children. But once the moment of delusion had passed, it was too late. I had signed up for Career Day and there was no backing out.

I put together a slideshow and grabbed a few copies of the newspaper, but nothing could truly have prepared me for what to expect when I walked into the first classroom.

My fellow volunteers and I — many of whom looked as though they had more interesting jobs than mine — were given a schedule and a list of four classrooms to rotate through in an hour. My first class was a second grade room with a substitute teacher who had no idea what any of the computer passwords were, which meant there was no hope of getting my presentation mirrored on the projector. So I had to wing it and present all my bullet points off the top of my head. It didn’t go great.

I had prepared a slide about travel and the places my job as a journalist had taken me for stories. One of those places was Disneyland. Which I revealed way too early. And the conversation never really moved beyond that because suddenly every kid had a comment or question or something to say that was neither a comment nor a question but instead some random statement that had little to nothing to do with the discussion at hand, which was supposed to be my job. Those questions/comments/statements included:

“Did you see Patrick Mahomes at Disneyland?”

“Did you see my sister at Disneyland? She was there.”

https://www.deseret.com/2024/02/28/elementary-school-career-day-disaster/