Talk:Irvin Faust

An Honorable Appearance

At the request of the teacher, Dr. Faust gave a short talk to my 12th-grade English class. As I recall, he said that writing a book was like bringing a fetus to term. I now know that that is mistaken. A manuscript is not like an unborn baby. It is like a teenager who refuses to get out of the house and find a job. But at the time he spoke to us, these words seemed reasonable.

Back in the office, he would have resumed his guidance-counseling duties. I do not know how those went: he was not the counselor assigned to me, and I never heard about his work from any of my classmates. It is perhaps a mercy that this article furnishes no hyperlink to the one titled "School Counselor." Never having read a published word of the guy, I cannot know what he would make of that article, but I am inclined to guess he'd smirk just as I do. There should be a black-and-white movie where frantic printing presses are shown, then a newspaper whirling under a brisk closeup, coming to a stop with the shocking headline GHANA MANDATES SCHOOL COUNSELING. I love stuff like that, just as I love "is not well developed in," "is found," "but disappeared in World War II," and (my favorite) "there is some evidence of." Be it a true profession with an established set of best practices, or just a budgetary cipher, guidance-counselorism cannot be faulted for accommodating second jobs, such as "novelist." In my opinion, those second jobs actually increase its prestige. Jahutter (talk) 13:36, 7 April 2018 (UTC)