Tag Archives: teaching

Checking Out

I have a novel idea for an intro to soc class – one that has been inside my head long enough that it is threatening to become brain crack.

I don’t really like the standard intro format.  I certainly understand it; when you cram a whole bunch of highly-specialized people into a department and then develop The One Course that (in the darkness) binds them, you’re going to end up with what is basically a hodgepodge of all of their interests.  But let me tell you: it sucks.  It sucked when I took it, and it blew when I taught it.  As I have seen, a good professor can make it work, but I just don’t think the structure is enough to build a really mind-blowing course.

I’m not sure why we do it this way, either.  My political science department offered an intro course for each of its specialties (your typical American Gov’t, International, Comparative, and Theory/Methods); econ has Micro and Macro, at least.  But sociology, along with psychology, offer introductory courses that are something like (to quote from the comments on a paper I turned in a couple years ago) “describing the leaves on trees from a jet at 40,000 feet and 500mph”.  All I came away with, and much of what I felt like I was teaching my students, were tidbits.

My idea, then, is to teach an intro course with a unifying theme.  Something that would be able to unify most of the specialties while being a smidge less abstract than the Big Three Perspectives.  Something classic but not dead.  Something eye-opening.

Something like… suicide.

Depressing, I know.  But every specialty has something to say about suicide, because it’s a sort of ultimate rejection of society.  The Big Three have their perspectives, of course.  I think that teaching methods would gain tremendously because there would be a single focus for each, allowing for a practical comparison of which method does what.  Then each of the usual sections – culture, deviance, family, religion, inequality, organizations, etc. – could all chip in.  An intro student from this class might not know as much about each, since the content would be suicide-focused, but they would know how to address a social (urgh) problem from beginning to end.

If prepared well enough, you could even let the students sort of “spontaneously” determine what to cover next.  This is essentially what I did on the first day of teaching intro discussion sections: I put up six charts of suicide rates (which you can see on the GRAPHIC page above), then put them into small groups to try to come up with theories to explain the variations.  From these initial theories, you could lead them through each of the possible causes, perhaps building a regression model as you go.  And you could incorporate lots of current events and up-to-date research.

There are, of course, some serious problems that could arise.  It is damn depressing, but hopefully that would become known after the first semester (and certainly after the first day), and it certainly wouldn’t be the only intro class available.  The Golden Child raised concerns about it filling out a full semester or getting boring after a month that I think are totally legitimate.

I’m curious about your experience, dear three readers who haven’t already talked to me about this.  Let me know what you think.



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Fucking Sociologists! (A rant)

Stories like this one from the NYT (“Maybe Money Does Buy Happiness”) and articles like this one from Teaching Sociology (sorry, non-university peoples) often get me thinking about what precisely the point of social science is. Or should be.

I really enjoyed the NYT one: here were two generations of researchers bringing evidence to bear on a relevant social question – what makes people happy? – and debating the results. Easterlin claims that money only goes so far, while Stevenson and Wolfers present compelling evidence that that may not be the case. I thought Easterlin’s response, at least as presented in the article, was somewhat overly defensive: “He said he liked Ms. Stevenson and Mr. Wolfers personally, but he thought they had put out “a very rough draft without sufficient evidence.” Frankly, I have no room to really make a argument about whether or not the Easterlin paradox is true, but it’s certainly an interesting debate.

But I did find this statement from the author’s article striking: “Recent research* has also found that some of the things that make people happiest — short commutes, time spent with friends — have little to do with higher incomes.” Uh – short commutes and time spent with friends have little to do with higher incomes? I’m not so sure. Stratification systems don’t just determine how much money we get – they have many other rewards and punishments. Your position in the social hierarchy determines how much you get paid and laid. And, I’m willing to wager, how short your commute is and how much free time you have. I know many high-earners work insane hours – but so do lots of working class people, and without the ability to hire help. The latter certainly don’t get to take time off to fly their family to Barbados, either.

In part, that’s what my thesis is supposed to be about (it was also supposed to be about laying the groundwork for my Fulbright, but I’m a mere alternate). I’m looking to see how job security, employment security, and economic security (if they are indeed noticeably different things) interact with on-the-job autonomy and job satisfaction. My basic hypothesis is that (some form of) security and autonomy are both requisites for happiness. I could be wrong; there are certainly people who are perfectly happy with a secure job (the slaves), and there are a lot of people who could care less about being secure as long as they get to do whatever they want (the madmen). But I suspect that autonomy and security both go to the people further up the hierarchy – the same ones who are happier and getting more money in Stevenson and Wolfers’ study. Because of that, I can see the Easterlin paradox holding in the face of S&W’s study; it may be that money only provides happiness up to a certain point, while increases in security and autonomy (and God knows what else) step in to provide happiness beyond that point. It’s just that in most Western economies, you don’t get high levels of security and autonomy without getting a big paycheck, too. The real test, I think, is among the oddballs: small business owners, government employees, professors. If professors making $60k a year are just as happy as executives making $300k, then I think there’s probably something to my hypothesis.

But what, exactly, is the point of all this? I know that for many sociologists, it’s to make the world a better place – by, say, creating policies that increase those things that have been shown to contribute to happiness. In fact, my department’s slogan is “Making the world a better place starts here.” Ugh. I am all about making the world a better place – I think about it a lot, and I actually think that my ideas are both sound and system-oriented enough to make a real difference. But I think that holding sociology out as something that makes the world a better place muddles the difference between science and technology. Physicists (yeah, I’m one of those positivists with physics envy) don’t head into the lab thinking, “Gee whiz! I can’t wait to discover a new particle that will make life better for poor people in Africa!” They do basic research. Granted, I’m sure many of them feel – as I do – that research does make the world a better place. Knowledge, even obscure and seemingly useless knowledge, makes humanity stronger. And the products of sociological research can certainly be adapted to make the world happy and shiny; but they can also be used to make it a fascist hell (criminologists, I’m looking at you!)

But a lot of sociology’s public image is basically that we’re a bunch of do-gooder liberals who were too dumb to be economists or psychologists. After attending my first conference, I’m not so sure that’s a totally false accusation – throughout the social sciences, I see people who are just there to shill for what they think would make a better world. It’s not like I don’t have those thoughts myself – and while they certainly guide my research interests, the ultimate point of social science is to explain why society exists, why it takes the forms it does, and how that impacts individuals.

But above all, my beliefs aren’t something I teach. That’s why I was profoundly disturbed to see point #8 in the Teaching Sociology article referenced above. The researchers asked a bunch of sociological “leaders” (read as:winners of ASA honors and grant-earners) what they thought was important to teach students. Most of it was nice, if boring: sociological imagination, sociology as science, critical thinking, social construction of ideas, the important social institutions in society. Super.

But what gave me pause was #8: “The importance of trying to improve the world”. What the hell? Quote from a “leader”: “I take as a starting assumption the premise from the International Declaration of Human Rights that all people have equal rights…” How the hell is that assumption even remotely sociological? If anything, that is anti-factual. The International Declaration of Human Rights is a blindingly-social construction. You can take equality as a starting assumption if you want – but that makes the arguments you build on that assumption philosophical, not sociological. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re teaching it as sociology. Here is my (sociological) starting assumption: “People exist and may on occasion interact.”

Other “leaders” used service-learning to “instill [in the students] the idea that we can be engaged as citizens and have our voices heard and use our knowledge… [to] help improve the world.” Jesus. Let’s cut the high-school civics bullshit, please. I have a degree in political science and am wrapping up a Master’s in sociology, and I think it is far more factual to tell students that their opinions don’t mean shit to the way the government is run – unless they have money or mobs. Do young people need to learn to engage in the power systems that will influence their life? Hell yes. Is that my job as a sociologist? No. My job is to demonstrate to them with empirical evidence that those power structures exist and impact their lives. If they’re smart, they’ll engage those systems; but that is not for me to tell them.

Let me put it this way: how many sociologists would be mortified if an economist told students, “Because I have clearly demonstrated to you that government interference reduces the output of economies, it is your job to go out there and advocate for reduced taxes and less regulation. 10% of your grade will come from volunteering with anti-tax citizens’ groups…” I would go batshit on that economist. If he has empirical proof to back up his claim, great (but markets don’t really exist without- okay, okay, I’ll save it for another post). It still doesn’t give him the authority to tell students what is normative for them to do with that information – and he definitely cannot grade them for doing something that he feels is normative, rather than economic… economicsological… um… something that actually has to do with real, empirical economics.

Eh, I’m being melodramatic. But I just feel like a number of sociologists (and, god knows, other social scientists) are getting their morality into my science, and the result is not delicious Reese’s peanut butter cups. If somebody uses social science to make the world a better place, groovy. If that person happens to be a sociologist, that’s peachy. But when that person is acting as a sociologist – e.g. when they’re teaching students – they need to lay off the moralizing. The point of sociology is to study society. THE END. Dammit.

Oh – hat tip to Backstage for the NYT article.  Right up my alley.


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