my shrinking water supply
Today is my final exam for Education and Society. It's 4 essays long. Two are sociological and two are historical. Part of what pisses me off is that these are not related to me being a teacher. Even when you think of "teaching" as an abstract term, they're barely related to teaching at all.
This is the class with the man that warned us all about the Chinese (you know, they have more people than we do and drive SUVs-the'yre coming for us next, undoubtedly), discussed in class how he just couldn't believe or understand how anyone could be bisexual ("When I heard that I was like, "Wow! Why would anyone do that to themselves?"..."), went through the civil rights movement and the anti-war movment and everything else that was occuring when he was a stoner anti-war protester without ONCE mentioning the Women's Movement, dismissed organic food and pondered why anyone would ever eat it because "the bananas are all brown and shrivelled up AND more expensive", and thinks that lesbians beat each other with astounding frequency because they're all very promiscious which leads to a lot of jealously which leads the butch women to hit the more feminine women.
I'm trying to study, I really am. Perhaps if I was starting this class with a great appreciation for history, it wouldn't be that hard. And I'm quite familiar with sociology, but not with the "Order and Conflict" theories that our text book is using. Well...not in a serious fashion, as everything I read on my own subscribes to the "Conflict" theory side of things.
Order and Conflict theorists (according to our book) are the two main sociological camps of theory. See, the Order approach says the reason so many people are poor is because those people live in a "culture of poor" that has taught them all to be lazy bums who live on welfare and are happy like that. No, really, I'm serious. Conflict says, no, the reason they're poor is because all of the wealth is being sucked up by 1% of the population and when wealth is that terribly distributed, some people are going to be poor regardless of how hard they might work. Order theory says gender roles from the 1950's are great things because they increase family stability which increases stability of society as a hole. (No, really, I'm serious again.) Conflict theorists say that gender is socialized into people and that there's no reason it should be that way and that yes, society could exist without it. The Order approach is all about maintaining stability (usually by blaming the victim for being inadequate in modern society). Conflict theory is about...well, revolution and why it should be occuring. They hate the status quo because they feel like it sucks to have these types of power imbalances. Which "side" do you honestly think I'd be on? I have a really hard time presenting the Order theories as anything but racist, classist, sexist propoganda.
I hate this class.
This is the class with the man that warned us all about the Chinese (you know, they have more people than we do and drive SUVs-the'yre coming for us next, undoubtedly), discussed in class how he just couldn't believe or understand how anyone could be bisexual ("When I heard that I was like, "Wow! Why would anyone do that to themselves?"..."), went through the civil rights movement and the anti-war movment and everything else that was occuring when he was a stoner anti-war protester without ONCE mentioning the Women's Movement, dismissed organic food and pondered why anyone would ever eat it because "the bananas are all brown and shrivelled up AND more expensive", and thinks that lesbians beat each other with astounding frequency because they're all very promiscious which leads to a lot of jealously which leads the butch women to hit the more feminine women.
I'm trying to study, I really am. Perhaps if I was starting this class with a great appreciation for history, it wouldn't be that hard. And I'm quite familiar with sociology, but not with the "Order and Conflict" theories that our text book is using. Well...not in a serious fashion, as everything I read on my own subscribes to the "Conflict" theory side of things.
Order and Conflict theorists (according to our book) are the two main sociological camps of theory. See, the Order approach says the reason so many people are poor is because those people live in a "culture of poor" that has taught them all to be lazy bums who live on welfare and are happy like that. No, really, I'm serious. Conflict says, no, the reason they're poor is because all of the wealth is being sucked up by 1% of the population and when wealth is that terribly distributed, some people are going to be poor regardless of how hard they might work. Order theory says gender roles from the 1950's are great things because they increase family stability which increases stability of society as a hole. (No, really, I'm serious again.) Conflict theorists say that gender is socialized into people and that there's no reason it should be that way and that yes, society could exist without it. The Order approach is all about maintaining stability (usually by blaming the victim for being inadequate in modern society). Conflict theory is about...well, revolution and why it should be occuring. They hate the status quo because they feel like it sucks to have these types of power imbalances. Which "side" do you honestly think I'd be on? I have a really hard time presenting the Order theories as anything but racist, classist, sexist propoganda.
I hate this class.