Subsections below:
The Prentice Hall
series
An OFAD entry to come
A teaser for OFAD entry #8
[Edit 7/13/15.]
The Prentice Hall
series
It’s a funny thing about this Prentice Hall story. There are
so many aspects (and sources of interest) for it, to the extent I am willing to
square with these. And my memories of it are varied.
I originally thought I would do a series on this last
summer, i.e., could plan it for the fall (of 2014). I held off. Meanwhile, this
year, in the late winter and spring, the PARCC tests (as used in New Jersey, at
least), with all the attendant controversy, were a big news item. I cut out a
ton of clips from newspapers about the PARCC; how does PH relate to this? As
you may know, Pearson Education, which in the U.S. is essentially a successor
to Prentice Hall—Pearson PLC (a British firm) bought Prentice Hall and other
properties owned by Viacom in the late 1990s, renaming Prentice Hall (and other
properties combined with it) as Pearson Education—produced the PARCC (though
it’s government and educational advisory boards/committees of some kind that
produced the rationale and state-level
directives for this test; Pearson is
just a vendor who worked for them in making the test [End note 1]). But the type of entity that Pearson Education is
now—as it has moved this year from Upper Saddle River, N.J., to Hoboken, N.J.
(after Prentice Hall was located in Upper Saddle River from about 1995 to about
2014 and in Englewood Cliffs, N.J., for many years beforehand)—could well be
different from how I knew Prentice Hall in 1997-98 and 2001-02.
But maybe not so much. The recent editorial updates I added
to my entries on PH may suggest my memories of that old experience are in part
faulty. But that’s not such a thing as should give you pause. My most dense
time with Prentice Hall, 1997-98, was a mixed bag. The HS lit project (conducted
at the division called Prentice Hall School)
was an enthusiasm-stirring freelance engagement to be in, as it was for many other
freelance workers in the HS lit project. But the project was slovenly in ways.
Prentice Hall once was a grand old publisher, of the more
traditional type, as to produce (among other things) Edwin G. Boring’s magisterial 1950 history (a second edition) of
psychology as an experimental field (yes, the book may strike some as having a
quality represented by the author’s surname), which I had as a textbook when I
was at college; and sociologist Erving Goffman’s
seminal tract Stigma: Notes on the
Management of Spoiled Identity (1963).
But by 1997, not only was PH owned by a corporate entity (Viacom)
that also owned a movie studio (Paramount), a major trade-book publisher (Simon
& Schuster), and who-knew-what-else, but PH produced a wide range of (non-trade)
books: among them, texts that were standards for grade school; college
textbooks and their paperback supplements, the latter of which were pretty
haphazardly produced…. About as many stories of work on products that we could
be proud of could come out of our time at PH as there could be stories that we
freelance editors would accompany with rolling our eyes. PH even was the
distributor (and producer, as far as I know) of college-course editions of classic
books like Immanuel Kant’s Prolegomena to
Any Future Metaphysics and/or such titles as used to be published by the
company Bobbs-Merrill (PH apparently had acquired their line of old titles). PH
was a big publisher (as a
reference-book listing of publishers might suggest, in giving number of titles
released yearly), of mainly educational products, and in a sense maybe (by the
later 1990s) it overextended itself with what it tried to offer.
By 2015, I really don’t know what it’s become (with PH now
known as Pearson) in all its facets, but certainly if people see it as a
soulless, remote corporation that produced a highly questionable (in their
estimation) test like PARCC, well, I don’t know much about PARCC beyond what
I’ve gleaned from the newspapers, but these people from their own ingenuously
consumerist perspectives may see Pearson as capable enough of erring like any
corporate mammoth, the way I as an editor might have felt a bit trampled by
Prentice Hall when it was a different kind of behemoth 15 years ago.
So there’s that as a set of factors shaping how my story
comes out (which, admittedly, has been going on on the basis of “I’ll get to it
when I get to it”).
Also, I found in probing more deeply into my journal entries
on this experience that it was like many a manic production process where, when
the corporation says “Jump!,” you jump.
There were exciting aspects, and aspects of being personally very productive
(in a way leaving you feeling satisfied related to more-genuine career aims)
and earning good money (at least, what counted as this for freelance editors). There were also reasons for grievance, big
or small. But I’d say, overall, that this was a fairly good experience (except
for how my connection with PH School ended in June 1998).
One measure of this is that, compared to other big-corporate
projects in my experience where the proceedings were rather manic and
willy-nilly (Reed Reference Publishing in 1995-96 and one or more medical
promotions places in the 2000s), the relations with most coworkers at PH School
were pretty good: no snide, hyper-competitive, creepily aloof work-peers who
seemed to have a much bigger sense of entitlement, and willingness to sneer at
coworkers beside them whom they “couldn’t identify with,” than they had talent
or dedication to the project at hand.
Another measure is interesting: Penny, my coworker, whom I
discussed in some detail in Part 3, looks to have been worse, as my journal
shows, than I recalled when writing (off the top of my head) for Part 3, which
itself might have seemed not entirely complimentary to her. You may ask, in
these big, esteemed companies, if there’s a close coworker you have long-term trouble
with, are there no judicious ways you can get help from any processes or
departments within the company? (End
note 2) Well, I am pleased to see how circumspect and rights-respecting I
was in the 1990s. My vocal quality in my current blogs is just me taking the
liberty of sounding off about the craziness in this field after putting up with
it like a patient “team mate” for about 20 years. And I tried all sorts of ways
in those days (1990s) to try to get satisfaction about difficult coworkers in
ways in which there seemed at least a chance of following gracious, even-handed
“due process” by whatever means a company would allow.
So, for instance, after putting up with Penny for about four
weeks (late July to late August), I made a deliberate complaint about her to
AnnMarie, the head of the studio. As a result, Penny had a talk with me, though
very typically for her, she was very unilateral in talking with me, not more
negotiating and “mutuality-respecting” as you might expect in such an ad hoc
situation. (And her unilateral ways, if toned down—and with her being
friendlier at times—would continue almost to the “bitter end” of this project.
Details in future entries in this series will give more nuances, hopefully.) My
seat (desk location) was also changed several times, and there was talk issuing
from AnnMarie’s direction (twice, in fact) that we proofreaders would be “split
up” (as to what groups/departments we worked with, presumably; I don’t quite
know what this meant) though this never really happened. The way I was consistently
kept in the thick of things production-wise in this project will be clearly
conveyed in time.
So some final entries in this series will come. I am sorry
this has taken so long, but as I’ve said, I never wanted to sail
full-speed-ahead into this series, but sidled up to it. My memories of it are
partial, and helped by looking at old records. And still, I will keep some
aspects of this story “by recent memory only.” This will result in an
interesting mélange of a personal/workplace history. Maybe that’s appropriate
for an experience that was so mixed. Sometimes all you can do with a hectic work
engagement that gets out of you (per the staff management) only what can be
pumped out in five months, and leaves you basically to look, by your own
forlorn devices, for something else in other venues down the road, is something
that you can only present a few snapshots from, with the whole picture more
suggestive at times than complete, that might be edifying to others. Some of
these projects are unique and can’t be duplicated. The lessons you may need for
yours of today (maybe in an
Internet-focused firm) maybe can’t easily come from mine.
An OFAD entry to come
By the way, along with finishing up the PH series, I have
another story to present, which is in process of being put together (in part
because the source experience isn’t fully done yet), that will combine the
“OFAD” and “Getting the Knack” themes. It’ll be a doozy, but fortunately it has
something of a happy ending.
A teaser for OFAD entry #8
Mr. Kodiak Grizzly, the Jersey Mountain Bear, is sitting,
looking winded, grey-muzzled and frazzled. He looks as if he’s normally a king
of his domain, but newly humiliated by being hit by a huge truck. Then he spies
another bear sitting next to him, also large but looking old, frazzled, and
injured.
“Say,” Kody manages to ask the bear next to him, “you don’t
look in the best of health. Might I ask what happened?”
“Well, you look a little peaked yourself,” manages the other
bear. “First, thumbnail sketch: what happened to you?”
“I just got rolled for about a month by the Medicaid system
in New Jersey.
My coverage was stopped for a while then restarted. What about you?”
“Well,” the other bear licks his lips as he starts, seeming
a bit daunted, “I was crossing a highway and got hit by a tractor trailer. I
went flying like a little rabbit. I landed on the road. Then I got hit by
another truck, and I was sent flying into the woods! I lay there for about an
hour, thinking I might end up dead. I felt like I couldn’t move for the longest
time. Then I finally got up and tried to head home, but inadvertently I was
back out on the road, and I was hit by another
truck! I thought I had a few too many bones broken. Then I managed to walk a
few miles to here. So what happened to you?”
Mr. Kodiak Grizzly tells about his experience with Medicaid
over the past month.
After, the other bear rubs his brow. “Sheesh, before hearing that, I felt I was almost
dead. After hearing it, I don’t feel
so bad!”
##
End note 1. The New York Times, on July 10 (p. A22),
had an article (I’m recalling from a quick scan of it yesterday) on how the
firm making the test for New York State (on the level of the PARCC, addressing
needs created by the No Child Left Behind Act, per the article) is going to be
Questar rather than Pearson. This change, according to some spokesperson, was
merely a function of the bidding process, not necessarily as a reflection on
Pearson’s work with the other states it had served with the PARCC.
End note 2. You
might ask, is four weeks (as I’ll refer to, shortly) an awfully short time to
make an assessment that you have “long-term” trouble with someone? In these
high-volume, high-pressure freelance situations, not really. And the problem
may not simply be a function of time, but (more) a function of the
characteristic quality of the
behavior of the person you’re dealing with. Penny, despite her being nice “as a
person, in terms of manners in ordinary circumstances,” was as a coworker a very one-sided, sometimes
manic-mouthed type, never mind that her practical decisions in how to respond
to the work demands were not only impractical after a while, but led
supervisors to start bypassing her when it came to whether things would be
proofread. And her “work style” was such that really disturbed your ability to
work at times, aside from how she might have created a more long-term false
impression among others (like staffers who might have influence over your being
brought in again as a freelancer, later) about how you were as a worker. What I
describe as what I did regarding her was the best someone in my position could
do in such a situation. And you can understand more, in Part 3, how I slammed a
set of papers down on a table in dealing with her one time, which happened in
October.
