1Soc Perspective 2: Coontz's Teen-Parent Conflicts

As students arrive, please look over the reading for today, Stephanie Coontz's "Putting Teen-Parent Conflicts in Perspective". 

Syllabus questions?

Fired Up?

Listen for the Silence

Answer questions 1-5 on the Google Form for this lesson.

1. Be honest - did you read the whole article?

2. What reading strategies did you use? (mark all that apply)

PRO TIP: The best reading strategies are:

Look for claim/thesis and evidence

Annotate - forces active reading, marks info for finding quickly

Have a "conversation" with the author/reading 

3. What do you think Coontz’s claim/thesis is? Find a passage from the text that summarizes her claim or write your own thesis that summarizes her claim. 

4. What is some evidence she provides that supports her claim? 

5. How confident are you that you understood Coontz's claim and evidence?

Discussion of Coontz's Claim and Evidence

Below is a graph of the median age of first marriage in American history from the US Census Bureau:

6. After we discuss the reading, was your evaluation in number 5 accurate?

7. What do you think worked/didn't work for number 6? What should you continue to do or improve on?

The idea of a teenager has only been around since the 1940s.  Before that, individuals went more from childhood to adulthood very quickly and distinctly.  Now, the process of childhood has a long, drawn-out middle period.  This encompasses the "teenage years" but it also includes what sociologists call "young adulthood."  Sociologists estimate the average age of independence in the United States to be 27.  That is when (on average) individuals can be self-sustaining financially and emotionally and socially enough to have a family and residence of their own.  So this leaves a long middle period between the age of puberty (10) and independence (27).  And throughout that time, there are many mixed messages being given to young adults.  This results in "rolelessness," or a feeling of not knowing what is expected of you during those years.  One example was the lack of meaningful work.  Teens generally have jobs that society deems as unworthy or meaningless.  This can leave teens feeling like they don't matter.  Can you see how Coontz makes that point?  Do you see how that can be true?  

Large Group: Make a timeline of the milestones throughout an average American's life - What are the milestones?  

BIRTH ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- 80

Small Group Discussion:

Which milestones are natural?  Which are social? How do these differ?

When is an American independent?  

What are the most important events that consider someone an adult?

For more on the difficulties of determining adulthood:

This 2004 article from Contexts magazine about research showing different routes to adulthood depending on one's race, social class and other factors. 

 

This 2016 brief, called Grownups, from Contexts magazine highlights,   

A new paper by Scott Eliason, Jeylan Mortimer, and Mike Vuolo in Social Psychology Quarterly that seeks to better understand individuals’ perceptions of having finally become grownups. 

Growing Up is Harder to Do.2 - After the Great Recession (Contexts November 2016 is a nice follow-up, highlighting both how sociology explores the ways that inequality shows up n society and how society is dynamic so follow-up research is necessary.

Discontinuous Society?

Small group discussion:  Think about the timeline of events as Americans grow up.  What are the ways that Americans are viewed opposite from childhood to adulthood?

Another way to look at the conflicts sociologically is what Ruth Benedict called continuous and discontinuous societies in her seminal work, Patterns of Culture.  Benedict said that some societies are continuous citing her own studies of indigenous cultures and Margaret Mead's Coming of Age in Samoa.  (The relationship and research of Mead and Benedict are detailed in this 2019 article in the Atlantic.)

However, Benedict argued, culture in the U.S. is discontinuous because culturally, children have such different/opposing expectations from adults, especially: 

• irresponsible   -   responsible
• asexual            -   sexual
• submissive      -   dominant
• dependent       -    independent

Kids Up Parents Down is a funny take from Jerry Seinfeld on the discontinuous nature of childhood and adulthood in the U.S.:

Hine's 13

Not the ketchup - that's Heinz 57.  This is Thomas Hine's examination of age 13 and the difficulties that come with being a teenager.

Thomas Hine's book, The Rise and Fall of the American Teenager examines how society has created teens and how it affects them. You can hear the author discussing his ideas here. According to Hine,

Our beliefs, about teenagers are deeply contradictory: They should be free to become themselves. They need many years of training and study. They know more about the future than adults do. They know hardly anything at all. They ought to know the value of a dollar. They should be protected from the world of work. They are frail, vulnerable creatures. They are children. They are sex fiends. They are the death of culture. They are the hope of us all.

Do you see these contradictions in your own life or in the teens around you?

1 A Sociological Introduction

Introducing...
YOU! (and Sociology!)

As students enter, please follow the instructions below:

1.  iPad and Blog

Take out your iPad, open  http://sociologysal.blogspot.com/ and bookmark it.  I will post lessons on the blog each day.  If you miss a class or, if you are simply not sure what the lesson was about, go to my blog page to review the lesson from that day.  

HW:  There are three items for homework posted at the bottom of this page.  The Teen-Parent conflict article is an important touchstone that we will use throughout this unit.  Please read it carefully!

2.  Student Demographics Survey 

I want to get to know each of you better as an individual, so please answer this demographic survey.  It is only for me.  Please share as much info as you are comfortable sharing.  

3. Syllabus

If you finished 1 and 2 above, please begin reading the syllabus which is one of your homework assignments.

----------PAUSE----------

Fired Up?

Bell

I had you fill out the survey above because I wanted to get to know you as an individual.  My question now is, are you, in fact, an individual?  What makes you an individual?  Please answer individually for all of the numbered boldface questions below.  I will do this for each lesson of ours.  Click on the link below and open the Google Form in a new window.  Then read along with the blog and answer questions in the order that they come up.  

Here is the Google Form for today's lesson.  Please open it in a new window.  Answer numbers 1 and 2 and then return to this blog page.

1.  Do you think you are an individual?  Why or why not?

2.  What do you think it means to be an individual?

Sociology

Background:  The Creation of Sociology as an Academic Discipline

 

Sociology was created as a reaction to the profound changes during the late 16th and 17th centuries, especially: The Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution.  

The Scientific Revolution established the scientific method as a standard for understanding the world.

The Enlightenment put forth the concept of individuality and the nature of human beings.

And, The Industrial Revolution brought about changes from:

      Pre-industrial                                                             to  Post-industrial

• an agricultural                                                          to an industrial economy
• rural                                                                          to urban living
• a cottage system                                                       to a factory system method of production
• group identity (tribe, religion, nation, family)         to a belief in individualism

The conglomeration of these changes took hold during the 1800s in Europe.  Three important scholars used the scientific method to study the changes of the industrial revolution and challenge the assumptions about individuality and the Enlightenment.  This inspired the beginning of sociology as a social science discipline.  Each of the three scholars' theories led to the foundational structure that sociology still uses today.

The Western world in general, particularly Americans, like to believe that they are individual and unique.  This idea stemmed from the Enlightenment.   Many scholars at the time doted on the idea that each person is unique and each person is free to choose whoever they want to be.  

However, shortly after the Enlightenment, the industrial revolution changed the way people lived and it showed that individuals are shaped a great deal by their social circumstances and not just by their own free choice.  We will learn more about this in the lessons to come, but for today, see this idea exemplified in the student demographic sheet you filled out. 

People are shaped by structures of society and their place within the structure.   The place you were born and the culture you were born into will shape how you think, talk, and what opportunities you have.  Families, schools, jobs, politics and media all influence how you see the world and what you value and how you think.  Additionally, your race, gender, social class all shape how you see yourself and how others see you.  Sometimes that can result in others treating you differently based on those identities.  All of this is sociological.  Sociology is scientifically studying how these groups in society affect the individuals within them and the obstacles and opportunities they will face because of their group identities.

3.  Any questions about what sociology is?

Syllabus

Here is a link to the syllabus.  

4.  Any questions about the syllabus?

Teen-Parent Conflicts 

5.  Identify some conflicts you have with your parents.  What are they about?

Discuss as a group:

• Do you think these conflicts are personal?
• What is difficult about being a teen?

HW1:  IMPORTANT  Read Parent-teen Conflicts by Stephanie Coontz.  

This is an important reading for this first unit.  Please be sure to read and understand it thoroughly.  It will help make the rest of the lessons this unit easier.

Before you read, think about your answer to number 5 above.  As you read, think about what Coontz attributes the conflicts to.  What is her overall thesis? Can you apply Coontz's theory to your own parent conflicts?

HW2:  Read the full syllabus.

PRO TIP:  ALWAYS read your syllabus for college.  When asking your professors a question about the class, be sure to mention (and demonstrate) that you read the syllabus before asking them.

HW3:   Name Survey

For homework, please survey your family about why you were named the legal name that you have.  If you have a nickname, please ask about that as well.  How and why did you get these names?  Is there a symbolic meaning to your name or why you were named that?

1v1 with MJ

 Here is a video of the time I played 1v1 with MJ.

Environmental Sociology

 Here is the ASA's section on Environmental Sociology.

Here is the Journal of Environmental Sociology

Chicago Gang Members: Complex Identities

 From Inquiries Journal:

Double Lives: A Qualitative Analysis of Identity Navigation in Chicago's South and West Sides

By Ava V. Levin
2021, VOL. 13 NO. 05
Abstract:

This paper draws on qualitative interviews to address internal and external identity navigation among gang members and how nonprofits address this navigation. Gang members ultimately lead double lives as they weave between gang and community life. At the same time, community members also engage with gang culture in daily life, as gang membership may be clear while gang and community life are blurred. This dual existence can breed cognitive dissonance, which gang members address through a variety of neutralization techniques that allow them to nevertheless view themselves as moral individuals. Finally, nonprofits working against gun violence should acknowledge this duality and leverage it to create more successful programs for the community.

Being (Tim)Wise about race in the US

 White Like Me.  

A documentary by Tim Wise You can watch it here on media cast..

Here is a transcript of the documentary.

About Tim Wise

Wise’s antiracism work traces back to his days as a college activist in the 1980s, fighting for divestment from (and economic sanctions against) apartheid South Africa. After graduation, he threw himself into social justice efforts full-time, as a Youth Coordinator and Associate Director of the Louisiana Coalition Against Racism and Nazism: the largest of the many groups organized in the early 1990s to defeat the political candidacies of white supremacist and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. From there, he became a community organizer in New Orleans’ public housing, and a policy analyst for a children’s advocacy group focused on combatting poverty and economic inequity. He has served as an adjunct professor at the Smith College School of Social Work, in Northampton, MA., and from 1999-2003 was an advisor to the Fisk University Race Relations Institute in Nashville, TN.

Wise attempts to answer the questions below.  What answer does he give?  What evidence does he give?

WHAT IS WHITE PRIVILEGE?

ISN’T RACISM A THING OF THE PAST?

BUT WHAT ABOUT US?  IS THERE RACISM AGAINST WHITES?

SHOULDN’T WE BE COLORBLIND?

Sources and Evidence in the video:

Tim Wise 

Author of Between Barack and a Hard Place.

Martin Gilens, Princeton University, 

Author of Why Americans Hate Welfare.

John Bracy, UMass-Amherst.
Professor John H. Bracey, Jr., has taught in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst since 1972. He is now serving a second stint as department chair, and is co-director of the department’s graduate certificate in African Diaspora Studies. His major academic interests are in African American social history, radical ideologies and movements, and the history of African American Women and more recently the interactions between Native Americans and African Americans, and Afro-Latinos in the United States.

Imani Perry, Princeton University.
The Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies and faculty associate in the Program in Law and Public Affairs and Gender and Sexuality Studies at Princeton, Perry has written and taught on a number of topics regarding race and African American culture.

Michelle Alexander, The Ohio State University.  Michelle Alexander is a highly acclaimed civil rights lawyer, advocate, and legal scholar. In recent years, she has taught at a number of universities, including Stanford Law School, where she was an associate professor of law and directed the Civil Rights Clinics. In 2005, she won a Soros Justice Fellowship, which supported the writing of The New Jim Crow, and that same year she accepted a joint appointment at the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity and the Moritz College of Law at The Ohio State University.  Author of The New Jim Crow; Mass Incarceration in an Age of Color Blindness 

Nilanjana Dasgupta, UMass-Amherst
Research in our lab shines a light on unspoken assumptions about social groups, often called implicit stereotypes or biases, and the ways in which they impact people’s evaluations of, and actions toward, others. We also examine how implicit biases influence people's self-perceptions, performance, and academic and career choices. We are particularly interested in the plasticity of implicit bias—the ways in which changes in social contexts change implicit attitudes, beliefs, and behavior.

Charles Ogletree, Harvard University.
Harvard Law School Jesse Climenko Professor of Law, and Founding and Executive Director of the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice, is a prominent legal theorist who has made an international reputation by taking a hard look at complex issues of law and by working to secure the rights guaranteed by the Constitution for everyone equally under the law.

America has always been a work in progress.  Our history is not just a story of oppression but also a story of triumph - the story of Americans making a better society for all citizens, even those in their outgroup.  Each success did not end racism or sexism but it brought us one step closer to realizing our founding goal;  

to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity

 The history of the U.S. is as much anti-racist history as it is racist history.  

Here are some of the white allies he mentions in the documentary: 

Will Campbell - Baptist minister who walked with Little Rock nine

Jeremiah Evarts - Christian missionary who opposed Indian removal

Helen Hunt Jackson - author who wrote about and opposed the treatment of American Indians

John Fee - abolitionist minister from Kentucky

Matilda Gage

Lydia Child

Robert Flournoy?

Grimke Sisters

Joan Mullholland - sat at the counter in Woolworth in Mississippi 

Anne Braden

Virginia Foster Durr

J. Watisse Wearing

Constance Curry

Bob and Dottie Zellner

Mab Segrest

Prom

From Sabrina Madeaux in the National Post (2018):

While teens might think they're fighting tradition and consumerism, today's proms are as conforming and expensive as ever.  As teens become more economically and politically influential, proms have come to offer an accurate reflection of their generation as it grows up.

The Surprisingly Sexist History of the Prom  from Leah Cuen of Mic (2016)

"Prom was [introduced to schools] to communicate a conservative, class-based gender script to a larger population," sociology professor Amy Best, the chair of George Mason University's Sociology and Anthropology department and the author of the book Prom Night: Youth, Schools, and Popular Culture, said in a phone interview. "To communicate what it means to be a "proper" middle-class girl, just like the debutante balls, both had narrow [gender role] expectations."

From Sociology in Focus (2013) Stratification on the Dance Floor: Prom Night in America

Prom may be a right of passage, but it is also a place where stratification is observed. In this post, Stephanie Medley-Rath explains how stratification related to race and sexual identity are reproduced on prom night... In the book, Prom Night (2000) by sociologist Amy Best, she points out how racial divides are recreated at the dance through decisions made regarding the music played during the dance and in more extreme cases, holding racially segregated proms. More recently, Morgan Freeman paid for a Mississippi high school’s first racially integrated prom as documented in the film Prom Night in Mississippi (watch the movie’s trailer below), while other communities continue to hold racially segregated proms.

Prom segregation in Georgia from 2009 NY Times.

Racially segregated proms have been held in Montgomery County — where about two-thirds of the population is white — almost every year since its schools were integrated in 1971. Such proms are, by many accounts, longstanding traditions in towns across the rural South, though in recent years a number of communities have successfully pushed for change. 

From Psychology Today, Gender, Class, & Proms: High school rites of exclusion:
Does it matter if the prom excludes certain students from participating? (2010)



In the end, my advice to students is that the day high school ends, it will become irrelevant to your life's experience, the same way that middle school feels now.  Prom will feel "so high school".  So, don't worry if something goes wrong - if your group is not getting along, or someone wears the same dress as you, or something spills on your tux, or the limo is late, don't worry about it.  It won't be a big deal in the long run.  And because of that, my advice is to not put too much pressure on what prom represents.  Just let it be a celebration of high school.



When I was younger I used to chaperone prom and I always dressed according to the theme.  Here are some pics:

Gender Lesson 5: masculinity and replicating Mahler's research

If you did not get to finish the reading,  here is an annotated version of the Mahler article.  Please read it now.

After reading the article, answer question 1 below.  Here is the Google Form for answering the questions this lesson.
1.  What is Mahler (and Kimmel)'s overall claim?



After understanding Mahler and Kimmel's claim and evidence,  we will attempt to replicate and update their qualitative research.   Their qualitative analysis of existing data on school shooters examined random school shootings in major print media outlets (Time, Newsweek, US News, USA Today, NY Times, LA Times). Below are two lists of school shootings to get started.

First, choose at least one of the random school shooters after 2001.

• Wikipedia list of school shootings since 2000 
• MotherJones data set of all mass shootings (under the "location" column, see schools) 

Second, after choosing a shooter to research, use major news outlets to gather data about some of the school shooters from 2001-present.
Make a note of the shooter's:

• gender 
• race
• state (red or blue in 2001) 
• community: urban, suburban, rural
• other qualitative info about them such as music, video games, movies, parent status, mental illness, social status/teased, et al...

You may want to use the ILC newspaper search to find info about the shooters, or Google their names.  Here are a few other websites to help you find info:
GunViolence.org
Everytown research
Mass Shooting Tracker
TheTrace compiles articles and data related to shootings at thetrace.org
NRA gun law tracker

Maps for comparing red/blue states:

Results of 2000 election.

The map above shows current laws for carrying firearms.

2.  What shooter(s) did you research?

3.  What was the shooter's race?

4.  What was the shooter's gender?

5.  What community setting did the shooting occur in?

6.  Was the shooting in a red state or blue state?

7.  What other details about the shooter were revealed?

After you have entered the data above for at least one school shooter, hypothesize whether Mahler and Kimmel's research still holds up.

8.  Do you think that since 2001, Mahler and Kimmel's claim is still true about who shoots up schools and why?


9.  Answer any of the following questions about this lesson.

• Does your data correlate with what the rest of the class found?
• What do you think of the findings?
• Is this data interesting/insightful?  Why/why not?
• Can you see the connection between masculinity and violence?
• Do you think that the average American would have trouble understanding the connection?  Why?
• What questions do you still have?

Finally,  try to apply the research to other random shootings besides schools.  Search the websites that you used earlier.  Again, you may want to use the ILC newspaper search to find info about the shooters, or Google their names.  Here are a few other websites to help you find info:
GunViolence.org
Everytown research
Mass Shooting Tracker
TheTrace compiles articles and data related to shootings at thetrace.org
NRA gun law tracker

Find one example of a random shooting that did not occur at a school.

10.  Does Mahler and Kimmel's research apply to NON-SCHOOL random shootings?

Tough Guise Day 2

 Today we continued watching Tough Guise about how our society socializes boys in a narrow and limited way.  

Yesterday we saw that masculinity has been portrayed in Western movies only for around the last 75 years or so.  But examining the older tropes of masculinity, it is evident that the portrayal of masculinity in movies, sports, toys and other areas have all become more extreme.

Today we will see that one reason the masculinity has become more extreme is a reaction to increasing equality for minorities - especially women and non-heterosexuals.

Begin from 37:31 A Culture in Retreat Watch Tough Guise 2 on mediacast by clicking here.

• Along with the change of society came changes in the acceptance of women as equal and changes in gay rights.  Fear of the changes in society is filtered throughout society via politics and media.  Guns are a symptom of the fear of the changes. There is a siege mentality that promotes rugged individualism and gun ownership as a way of fighting back both literally and figuratively.  Guys today are taught that violence is the only way to be really considered a man and to hold onto their manhood. 
• Because our construction of masculinity includes the idea that anything feminine is inherently NOT masculine, as the box of what is acceptible for women has gotten larger, the box for males has gotten smaller.  This includes denigrating anything that is female or gay.  And, this creates a dangerous anti-female attitude.
• Finally, he ends with the idea that we can all make little changes in how we talk and act and think. We can support movies that show honest portrayals of guys and movies that help broaden the box that guys fit into.

Race lesson 4B: the social construction of race in the US continued

Because race is a social construction, we can use our sociological imagination to see that race changes depending on where you live and also when you live.  As we saw in yesterday's lesson,  race has changed throughout the history of the United States including who is considered "white".  

Choose one of the readings below and read it to see how the definition of race and whiteness has changed.

Here are some sociology readings about how different groups have changed over time:

• My post on How Jews became white, which draws on Karen Brodkin's research.
• Arab Americans and racial identity by Kristine J. Ajrouch and Amaney Jamal
• How Italians became white; Vicious Bigotry and Reluctant Acceptance (NY Times)
• How Armenians became white.
• When the Irish weren't white.
• Hispanic Identity and Race in Chicago by Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas
• Are Asian Americans Becoming White? by Min Zhou 

All of these are examples of how race has changed over the years in America.  Who is considered white changes because there is no empirical or objective way to define race.  Race doesn't exist in any biological or empirical sense, it only exists as a social construction.



7A How does this article explain that whiteness has changed over time?

B What are the factors that have changed it?

C Is it surprising that the idea of who is white has changed so much over the years?  Which group is most surprising to hear about?