~ a group blog on a variety of topics related to anthropology, sociology, and ordinary people ~
It’s the holidays and I’m feeling nostalgic, thinking about this time 14 years ago when I was just finishing up my first semester at CSU, Chico. I was a 34-year old college junior and a first generation college student. Today I was looking for a beef stew recipe in the Joy of Cooking and I came across a relic of some old school notes for a final exam that first semester I was back in school.…
The end of the semester is always bittersweet for a college lecturer. Unlike elementary and high school teachers, college instructors go through a cycle of 16-week long relationships with different classes. I teach, on average, 4 to 5 classes each semester, with a total of 220 to 250 students per semester. It’s a lot of students to keep track of, a lot of grading, a lot of lecturing.
Twelve to fifteen hours a week, I’m in front of the classroom, trying to figure out the most effective way to impart lessons that range from Durkheim and Functionalism to how to perform sociological research to how different populations affect the environment; it’s a bit like being a stage actor, I suspect.…
The crisis in college teaching is old hat on blogs like this. The professoriate is divided into a two tiered system, in which one group-the tenure track-has the good fortune to have job security and a decent salary, while an often-time larger groups has only semester-to-semester job security, and a part-time teaching gig which may or may not pay the bills of a middle class lifestyle.
I was lucky—I only had to do two years of adjuncting before being gifted with the luxury of tenure track security.…
The Synthesis is a local weekly newspaper in small-town Chico, California, generally specialized in Entertainment news—stories of local bands, the bar scene, and arts.
Recently, the small paper is branching into more critical hard-hitting news analysis. Emilano Garcia-Sarnoff published “Heart on Fire: The Murder of Marc Thompson” on September 29, which is about the recent death of a Chico State Sociology major found in a burning car in a remote area.…
Today, I hosted an “end of semester” celebration for ten students and their peer mentor at my house. I cooked and baked and put on Christmas music but honestly, wasn’t looking forward to it this morning. Yesterday was a rough day, I didn’t sleep well last night, and I’m generally just not feeling well, but I went ahead with the party at my house anyway.
The first hour was a bit awkward; only a few students had arrived, I was still catching up, trying to get everything prepared, cleaning the house at the last minute…anyway…but then the students arrived, all ten of them, and their mentor, and they started snacking on appetizers, baking their own creations in my kitchen, and chatting, like all 18 year old fantastic kids do.…
Razib Khan published an interesting article “Our Cats, Ourselves” about the evolution of the domestic cat. The article describes how domestication of felines over the last 10,000 years has resulted in a critter that is both biologically and socially adapted to live with humans. The genetic element has resulted in smaller cranial sizes, and so forth. The social part at the same time includes adaptation to human-created environments that came with the invention of agriculture, and the emergence of “domestic” rodents.…