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Same Old De-feat

Wednesday, 28 July 2010, 14:51 | Category : Introduction to Sociology
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Today, after two days stuck on my couch with my daughter’s stomach flu from last week, I returned to the classroom.  My energies are still at half-mast, but how many days of a summer class can you really miss when you’re the instructor?  Le sigh.  I returned just in time to take up the gender chapter.  It remains one of my favorites despite having never (that I remember) walked out of the classroom feeling like I did a satisfying job with it.  I debriefed with my cubemate about it after the class.   I appreciate him as a sounding board:  What went wrong? What did you talk about? How did they respond?  What was it about X that made you think/feel Y?  It’s like instructional therapy.

I explained that I had covered all of the usual suspects for the gender section, focusing on gender roles and stereotypes, edging toward structural sexism (e.g. the gender wage gap), and that I could feel the room tightening up when I briefly broached same-sex marriage, attitudes toward women as homemakers/men as achievers, and the fact that the values we tend to endorse culturally are more strongly identifiable with masculinity than femininity.

I’m not sure about the constructive value of this, but continuing with the instructional therapy motif where it would fly, my reflections on the class are perhaps best encapsulated in a top 4 list <I tried for 5, but today I’m feeling the weight of 4>.

Classroom Grievances, unranked:

1. There are <10 minutes left in the class period.  Noting this, a precocious student returns his/her notebook and various materials to backpack commencing domino effect whereby the rest of the students follow suit and collectively disengage from discussion and learning.

2. My appearance dictates the group’s receptivity to my message given the subject matter and the typically conservative context of the campus’ culture.  The same message coming out of a different mouth would be better received.  Consider a working mother <Ahem> standing at the front of the classroom attempting neutrality on the subject of whether “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family” (The GSS question referenced above).
3. The success of classroom discussion hinges on directing attention to certain points by asking the right questions.  How do you know learn which questions those are and how best to ask them?  Typical classroom scenario: “Class, check out this really cool clip that illustrates sociologicalconcept.” Class watches clip. “What do you think, class?” Crickets.

4. Apathy is part of student culture, or less pessimistically, feigning apathy is.  The problem with the former is that interest in active participation in one’s learning is minimal.  The problem with the latter is that if it’s different from the former, I as the instructor can’t tell the difference and am being drained of my “pathy” to keep up the charade.

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