Category Archives: Teaching

Horatio Alger lives on!

Posted in Teaching by

Have you every actually looked at the books written by Horatio Alger?  They’re hilarious!  They have titles like “Jerry the Backwoods Boy,” “From Farm to Fortune” and “From Canal Boy to President.”  Their common theme is boys from humble beginnings who achieve greatness, and what’s not to like about that?  According to sociologists, plenty.

As far as I can tell, one of the main purposes of Sociology is to convince people that there are things beyond individual effort that effect your successes in life.  Let me tell you, this a hard sell, even in Santa Cruz!  As a teaching assistant for Sociology 1, I saw that on an abstract level we could convince our students that things like your race and the income level of your parents impact how likely you are to go to college, earn a living wage and generally achieve the American Dream.  But when it came to analyzing how both individual effort and things beyond it impacted the life of a family member, forget it.  Most of the students were convinced that their grandfather/mother/uncle/godparent had succeeded in life entirely because of their own hard work.  Sociologists find this troubling not just because we are killjoys who want to diminish all of your cherished family stories, but because this belief often comes paired with its opposite, that people fallen on hard times must have failed entirely due to faults of their own.

All this is merely an introduction to the powerful chart that showed up in my inbox this week courtesy of the Sociological Images blog.  I’ll be using it next time I work as a teaching assistant for Sociology 1.

Here’s the fine print from the study:

  • About 62% of Americans think that “people get rewarded for their effort,” compared to about 35% of citizens in our national comparison group.
  • About 70% of Americans think that “people get rewarded for their intelligence and skills,” compared to about 40% of citizens in our national comparison group.
  • About 19% of Americans think that “coming from a wealthy family is essential/very important to getting ahead,” compared to about 29% of citizens in our national comparison group.
  • About 62% of Americans think that “differences in income in their country are too large,” compared to about 87% of citizens in our national comparison group.
  • And about 33% of Americans think that “it is the responsibility of the government to reduce the differences in income,” compared to about 69% of citizens in our national comparison group.

 

How well do you know your university?

Posted in Teaching, University life by

I’m working as a teaching assistant this quarter for a class in UCSC’s Latino and Latin American Studies department.  Right now we’re covering Latinos in education: graduation rates from high school and college, cultural differences with their teachers, etc.  Yesterday Prof. Jonathan Fox showed us a print-out of some of our school’s demographic data for this year’s freshman class. Hidden amongst the wall of numbers on the spreadsheet were these little nuggets:

Among this year’s freshman class:

  • 25.3% are Latino
  • 43.2% come from homes that speak a language other than English, or that speak both English and another language
  • 43.7% are part of the first generation of people in their family to go to college.

I was surprised by the numbers, and the students even more so.  One student raised her hand and asked if the rest of the faculty knew about these numbers, because if they did, maybe they would treat the students differently.  I tend to agree.  It doesn’t happen often, but there have certainly been times when I’ve seen faculty try to personalize their lectures with vignettes which could be taken right out of Leave it To Beaver.  It’s hard to imagine many of the students being able to relate. For my own part, knowing how few of our students grew up with parents who went to college makes me want to pay more attention to what kind of things I mistakenly assume my students already know.  Finding out what they do and don’t know before they step into the classroom seems like half the battle of good teaching, and something I’d love to learn to do better.