The course I’m TA-ing this fall is required for undergraduates majoring in sociology. It is thus heinously oversubscribed. For the first three weeks of class, we circulated a sign-in sheet in lecture. Actually, we circulated several. Some students signed every single one—one person literally signed-in four times in one day and then came up to… Continue reading The Add/Drop Dance
Dick Walker talks like he knew Karl Marx personally. “Man, Marx just couldn’t figure out what was going on with all this finance shit. You can tell he just fucking hated it”, he tells us, as we are puzzling over our weekly assignment for his Das Kapital reading group. He offers a bit of comfort… Continue reading Reading Marx
A few Mondays ago, I saw my future. No, not a vision of being arrested and thrown in jail—this was a more long-term vision. It was a premonition of my future as a college professor: standing in the front of a lecture hall filled with bored-looking undergraduates, their tired faces half hidden by laptops (open… Continue reading Apathetic Apologetic
Here’s an exciting topic for a blog post: bathrooms. News of the imminent arrival of seventeen shiny new graduate students to the sociology department somehow got lost in the University of California bureaucracy, so for the first five weeks of school, none of us had keys to the departmental bathroom. As a result, we had… Continue reading Flushing Public Education
Alex V. Barnard - Sociology 