Let’s be friends

In graduate school, my policy on Facebook friend requests from students was that I would only accept them as friends after the semester was over. Since the likelihood of them having another class with me was very low I didn’t worry about them seeing ridiculous pictures of me and subsequently losing all respect for my [...]

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Perspectives on professor-student interactions

Overthinking it all around!

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Teaching gender with Ponies and Bronies

Nathan Palmer at the Sociology Source (which still shows up in my RSS reader as the much less definitively titled “Blog”) posted an interesting video the other day that can be used to review for an Intro to Sociology exam because it is full of sociological ideas. Was it a review of sociological theories? A [...]

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Evaluating frustration

Last semester was possibly my most frustrating as an instructor, given that two of my courses had lower-than-normal levels of class participation. Having finally received my student evaluations from the fall, it appears that my frustration was felt by at least a few of my students. Numerically, my evaluations were similar to other semesters. Qualitatively, [...]

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The “purity” spectrum

On one end of the “purity” spectrum we have the Purity Bear, who pops up at the end of a date to save some young people from the dangers of kissing (see Drek’s dissection, and also note that since the bear is black it may be a magical negro): At the other end of the [...]

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What I learned by applying for a different job

Although I said after I received a job that I never wanted to go on the job market again, I applied for one job in the years since beginning in my current position. The job was at a higher-ranked and better-funded school near my current institution. Since the job was in my teaching area but [...]

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On Valentine’s Day

“Romantic” vs. “Practical” depictions of love from Ann Swidler’s research via Sociological Images. And my typical Valentine’s Day shopping experience via xkcd: Of course, Easter candy and a jar of hammers is still probably better than $182.

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Facebook means you don’t get a backstage

The video above, in which a parent reads a letter his daughter had posted on Facebook, criticizes her, and then shoots her laptop nine times, reinforces my previous statement that while public information on the internet is not private, private information is not necessarily private, either. The video has gone viral, receiving over 18 million [...]

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More about relationships

Following my recent manifesto about relationships, I noticed an article by Casey Johnston at Ars Technica focused on online dating. Dating websites are apparently now the second most common way for couples to meet (behind, I assume, the meet cute), more than doubling in the past ten years. The authors of the meta analysis Johnston [...]

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Discussion questions that work

Over the past few years I’ve had a variety of experiences with discussion-based courses. In a few cases, students have come to class prepared and I was fairly successful at engaging most of them in class discussions. In a number of recent courses, however, students have either not done the reading , not engaged with [...]

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