Sociology, the interesting bits
Dec. 9th, 2005 02:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethOkay, I realised yesterday the only things I've been typing here about sociology are the rants.
So, first, to be clear - I'm pretty sure the discipline of sociology has much neat stuff in it. People have been studying it for ages and many of their studies sound interesting.
But I have the lesson sociology, and in that lesson the neat stuff is hidden under much messy arguing. Including a whole first unit of group work ie talking to other people who also don't know what they're doing. My impressions are therefore skewed. So, I get home after sociology, my second day in a row of college when I had enough trouble doing only one day last year, utterly exhausted, and then I whine.
So today I sat down with the intention to not-whine. It came out instead a mixture of pros and cons, which actually is how we get taught stuff, so that works too.
I think the things we're supposed to be learning are
broad categories of research methodology (scientific & interpretative)
different types of research (qualitative & quantitative, plus all the stuff that goes in there like questionnaires and covert participant observation, like the guy in the public toilets watching the gay guys)
how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses, what they're good at and not so good at, which tool for which job.
the way we were taught it was one (maybe 2) four hour talk(s) and one very long doing of things. that doesn't suit me at all. I felt all at sea for the whole unit. Even if I did know enough to do what we were supposed to be doing, I didn't feel like I had anywhere to stand on to start, so that was no fun at all.
so, this unit, we get on to specifics. theories of family.
and I'd find it much more fun if it was taught just a little differently. because so far its been one really long argument. *Everyone* has an opinion about family, and no one seems to be thinking that maybe their opinions on the naturalness of unconditional love and the instinctive nature of mother love could, maybe, wait for a time they weren't holding up the whole class.
Me, I have this tendency to want to listen to what the teacher has to say beginning to end before I argue with it. Which usually means it getting to the end of the lesson and me being too tired to argue. Which actually works out, because I acquire knowledge. Some of the other students want to argue every sentence as we go along, or so it seems to my tired brain that can't follow when more than a couple of people are talking.
also, we get taught a theory, and then in the textbook they go on to strengths and weaknesses. and in class we went theory, evidence, weaknesses. Only by the end of the class we'd apparently learned that the things we studied in the first two hours were not, in fact, true, because the evidence in the second two hours didn't support them. For why therefore did we study them? This we are not told.
But I can, once I sit and think of it, think of reasons why it would be useful. If the teacher framed things a bit differently and said 'okay, lets study this theory to give us a framework to hang stuff on, and then the evidence to show how evidence does and doesn't support theories' that would work for me. Its a nice orderly logical theory, so it makes a good climbing frame, even if reality is much messier. You can reach a lot of other ideas from there. So, useful.
But in among all the arguing and contradictoring it just kind of felt like we'd wasted the day.
Sociology has a lot of good questions. And some methodologies and methods for finding things out. And a whole lot of theories. And at every level, you have to ask yourself, strengths and weaknesses, what is it good for, what is it missing, where is the bias? And if you do that you can start putting things in relation to other things and understanding how this theory here describes this bit of life there but not that bit, or whatever.
But theories are not facts. In fact sometimes facts aren't facts, because you have to get on to questioning the existence of the apparently objective, wondering if stuff has just been labelled. Socially constructed reality. Which is cool, but not tidy.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
We're learning to take ideas for a stroll.
Which I can get behind, really.
But the other problem is that the teach tends to spend a lot of time deconstructing the dominant paradigm, challenging the ideology of the majority, and frankly, been there, done that. A lot. In fact some times what I learn from lessons is what the dominant ideology *is*, because I don't tend to live in mainstream culture, and have missed or forgotten it.
I mean there were people in class going on about how little girls get ironing boards and shopping trolleys and, well, all that pink and frilly stuff. And I'm sitting there kind of *blink, blink, huh*. Because *this* girl got computer access and wooden swords and catapults, on account of demanding them.
I learned to read from Analog. I can't remember a time when I hadn't read The Hobbit. I've never been a mundane, and I don't know how.
These lessons seem aimed at mundanes, and since I have to study them as a new and strange culture, it rather misses me. Preach to the choir, you know?
The parts of yesterday's lesson that interested me were the parts where we got data on how families *are* constructed. Not the parts where everyone argued about how they think they should be. The detour through origins-of-ideology would have been interesting except for the part where it wasn't answered properly.
I like knowing that only 20% of families are nuclear families. It makes it even more interesting that the nuclear family has such a central role in the dominant ideology. One theory reckons that in a lifecycle sense the vast majority of people *have been* in a nuclear family, and intend to be at some point. Husband+wife=children. But then people wander off and hook up in different configurations, so that most people aren't, right now, in that kind of household.
That bit was interesting.
That bit was also about ten minutes out of four hours.
Is very frustrating.
Then there was the conjugal roles bit. Many hours arguing about if husbands and wives both do as much housework, or should be expected to.
Didn't we just learn that husbands and wives and childrens all together are a tiny minority? Surely there are more configurations of household? How do flat sharing students share the necessary chores? Is it not so interesting to study, somehow?
So even the interesting questions get frustrating, because the lesson doesn't go there yet.
Right now I'm feeling that the hours spent in the library reading the textbook are more useful than the hours spent in class, and that's a very frustrating feeling.
But the stuff in the textbook is often interesting. Even if it is a long ongoing argument. I mean it goes theory, pros, cons, new theory, for several inches of book. And rather a lot of those theories are marxist or radical feminist or some other ist that is REALLY SHOUTY and thinks everything is all wrong. But as long as you read them all and figure out where they go and what they cover then you end up with lots of interesting.
Its a bit like every topic area has a full chaos star of theories. If you get theories going off in every direction then as long as you know them all you can balance the star in the middle. Or you can follow one way out to a conclusion. Or do anything with it, really.
So, interesting and useful.
As long as I stop trying to use the tidy orderly binary science paradigm my brain defaults to and remember to add the chaos side. Get some balance. Add possibilities.
And remember that learning to deal with a room full of shouty people is also a valuable skill.
Life is full of wondrous variety. Life, in general, is characterised by diversity, and change over time. So, we concluded from the evidence, are families. This is cool, and implies a necessity for diverse theories to describe and/or account for them all, and the way they change, and the way we think about them.
So, we are studying rainbows and trees and chaos stars, and of course things look contradictory because some of them arrows go off in quite opposite directions.
And this I can grasp and appreciate, once I get to the sitting in the quiet parts of life. It's just the shouty parts that are offputting.
And the way theories are argued. Often one theory will try and say that is *the* way to understand, *the* true thing, and instead it is only *a* *useful* thing.
I guess other people are thinking in yes/no too. But that doesn't work very well. All these social things, you turn them around a bit and have a whole different face on them. That doesn't mean one is the 'true' face. Reality is the invisible bit in between, we just see faces.
So, yes, I'm trying to rearrange my understanding of reality by meditation on chaos stars, possibility trees, and Janus. Long term and ongoing project. So far, turning out very useful.
I feel like I've wandered around to not saying anything much up there, but I'll post it anyway, and go have breakfast.
So, first, to be clear - I'm pretty sure the discipline of sociology has much neat stuff in it. People have been studying it for ages and many of their studies sound interesting.
But I have the lesson sociology, and in that lesson the neat stuff is hidden under much messy arguing. Including a whole first unit of group work ie talking to other people who also don't know what they're doing. My impressions are therefore skewed. So, I get home after sociology, my second day in a row of college when I had enough trouble doing only one day last year, utterly exhausted, and then I whine.
So today I sat down with the intention to not-whine. It came out instead a mixture of pros and cons, which actually is how we get taught stuff, so that works too.
I think the things we're supposed to be learning are
broad categories of research methodology (scientific & interpretative)
different types of research (qualitative & quantitative, plus all the stuff that goes in there like questionnaires and covert participant observation, like the guy in the public toilets watching the gay guys)
how to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses, what they're good at and not so good at, which tool for which job.
the way we were taught it was one (maybe 2) four hour talk(s) and one very long doing of things. that doesn't suit me at all. I felt all at sea for the whole unit. Even if I did know enough to do what we were supposed to be doing, I didn't feel like I had anywhere to stand on to start, so that was no fun at all.
so, this unit, we get on to specifics. theories of family.
and I'd find it much more fun if it was taught just a little differently. because so far its been one really long argument. *Everyone* has an opinion about family, and no one seems to be thinking that maybe their opinions on the naturalness of unconditional love and the instinctive nature of mother love could, maybe, wait for a time they weren't holding up the whole class.
Me, I have this tendency to want to listen to what the teacher has to say beginning to end before I argue with it. Which usually means it getting to the end of the lesson and me being too tired to argue. Which actually works out, because I acquire knowledge. Some of the other students want to argue every sentence as we go along, or so it seems to my tired brain that can't follow when more than a couple of people are talking.
also, we get taught a theory, and then in the textbook they go on to strengths and weaknesses. and in class we went theory, evidence, weaknesses. Only by the end of the class we'd apparently learned that the things we studied in the first two hours were not, in fact, true, because the evidence in the second two hours didn't support them. For why therefore did we study them? This we are not told.
But I can, once I sit and think of it, think of reasons why it would be useful. If the teacher framed things a bit differently and said 'okay, lets study this theory to give us a framework to hang stuff on, and then the evidence to show how evidence does and doesn't support theories' that would work for me. Its a nice orderly logical theory, so it makes a good climbing frame, even if reality is much messier. You can reach a lot of other ideas from there. So, useful.
But in among all the arguing and contradictoring it just kind of felt like we'd wasted the day.
Sociology has a lot of good questions. And some methodologies and methods for finding things out. And a whole lot of theories. And at every level, you have to ask yourself, strengths and weaknesses, what is it good for, what is it missing, where is the bias? And if you do that you can start putting things in relation to other things and understanding how this theory here describes this bit of life there but not that bit, or whatever.
But theories are not facts. In fact sometimes facts aren't facts, because you have to get on to questioning the existence of the apparently objective, wondering if stuff has just been labelled. Socially constructed reality. Which is cool, but not tidy.
Nothing is true, everything is permitted.
We're learning to take ideas for a stroll.
Which I can get behind, really.
But the other problem is that the teach tends to spend a lot of time deconstructing the dominant paradigm, challenging the ideology of the majority, and frankly, been there, done that. A lot. In fact some times what I learn from lessons is what the dominant ideology *is*, because I don't tend to live in mainstream culture, and have missed or forgotten it.
I mean there were people in class going on about how little girls get ironing boards and shopping trolleys and, well, all that pink and frilly stuff. And I'm sitting there kind of *blink, blink, huh*. Because *this* girl got computer access and wooden swords and catapults, on account of demanding them.
I learned to read from Analog. I can't remember a time when I hadn't read The Hobbit. I've never been a mundane, and I don't know how.
These lessons seem aimed at mundanes, and since I have to study them as a new and strange culture, it rather misses me. Preach to the choir, you know?
The parts of yesterday's lesson that interested me were the parts where we got data on how families *are* constructed. Not the parts where everyone argued about how they think they should be. The detour through origins-of-ideology would have been interesting except for the part where it wasn't answered properly.
I like knowing that only 20% of families are nuclear families. It makes it even more interesting that the nuclear family has such a central role in the dominant ideology. One theory reckons that in a lifecycle sense the vast majority of people *have been* in a nuclear family, and intend to be at some point. Husband+wife=children. But then people wander off and hook up in different configurations, so that most people aren't, right now, in that kind of household.
That bit was interesting.
That bit was also about ten minutes out of four hours.
Is very frustrating.
Then there was the conjugal roles bit. Many hours arguing about if husbands and wives both do as much housework, or should be expected to.
Didn't we just learn that husbands and wives and childrens all together are a tiny minority? Surely there are more configurations of household? How do flat sharing students share the necessary chores? Is it not so interesting to study, somehow?
So even the interesting questions get frustrating, because the lesson doesn't go there yet.
Right now I'm feeling that the hours spent in the library reading the textbook are more useful than the hours spent in class, and that's a very frustrating feeling.
But the stuff in the textbook is often interesting. Even if it is a long ongoing argument. I mean it goes theory, pros, cons, new theory, for several inches of book. And rather a lot of those theories are marxist or radical feminist or some other ist that is REALLY SHOUTY and thinks everything is all wrong. But as long as you read them all and figure out where they go and what they cover then you end up with lots of interesting.
Its a bit like every topic area has a full chaos star of theories. If you get theories going off in every direction then as long as you know them all you can balance the star in the middle. Or you can follow one way out to a conclusion. Or do anything with it, really.
So, interesting and useful.
As long as I stop trying to use the tidy orderly binary science paradigm my brain defaults to and remember to add the chaos side. Get some balance. Add possibilities.
And remember that learning to deal with a room full of shouty people is also a valuable skill.
Life is full of wondrous variety. Life, in general, is characterised by diversity, and change over time. So, we concluded from the evidence, are families. This is cool, and implies a necessity for diverse theories to describe and/or account for them all, and the way they change, and the way we think about them.
So, we are studying rainbows and trees and chaos stars, and of course things look contradictory because some of them arrows go off in quite opposite directions.
And this I can grasp and appreciate, once I get to the sitting in the quiet parts of life. It's just the shouty parts that are offputting.
And the way theories are argued. Often one theory will try and say that is *the* way to understand, *the* true thing, and instead it is only *a* *useful* thing.
I guess other people are thinking in yes/no too. But that doesn't work very well. All these social things, you turn them around a bit and have a whole different face on them. That doesn't mean one is the 'true' face. Reality is the invisible bit in between, we just see faces.
So, yes, I'm trying to rearrange my understanding of reality by meditation on chaos stars, possibility trees, and Janus. Long term and ongoing project. So far, turning out very useful.
I feel like I've wandered around to not saying anything much up there, but I'll post it anyway, and go have breakfast.
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no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 04:29 pm (UTC)The thing to remember is that there are a LOT of social facts. However, because there are a multiplicity of people, and because of all the possible variables and intervening variables, there are many INTERPRETATIONS of fact.
We call those interpretations THEORIES. There are really only 3 basic theoretical schools:
1. Conflict (Marx, Dahrendorf, Coser, Simmel) (Feminist, Partnership are the branches of that theoretical "tree");
2. Consensus (Durkheim, Parsons, Kingsley Davis, Levi-Strauss, Malinowski)- also called: Order, Structuralism, Functionalism, Structural-Functionalism, Systems Theory;
3. Interactionist (Mead, Weber, Cooley, Goffman)- which is VERY much a combination of psychology and sociology, very MICRO-level of analysis. Sometimes called Symbolic Interactionism; one major branch: Dramaturgy.
All the rest of the theories spin off from there --- like Social Exchange/
Utilitarianism, which is eclectic, and is a combination of the three I've just listed. (the name is Homans, for this one.)
Don't let the arguing get you down; sounds as if that's the prof's way of teaching --- socratic-style, it's called.
It's all about the way you interpret the social facts; that's why the emphasis on theory, and each theory's weakness and strength. Thing is, if you want to know the truth about a social fact, you really have to do a multi-theory interpretation....to cover for all the weaknesses.
Did I make sociology more obscure? I hope not; trying to help you, here. ;-)
no subject
Date: 2005-12-09 05:46 pm (UTC)more data, yaay
didn't make more obscure. exactly. just... full of words...
this is why the book I've actually bought is the A-Z. Too many words! I kept the library copy as long as they'd let me and had fines when it went back. Now my own one is ordered but not here yet.
/detour
I think I need to read more. Or possibly just to start at the beginning. again.
All those words look familiar but I don't think they stuck properly when I read them. Too many in a row and nothing to stick them to.
Also, starting unit 2, teach mentioned 'functionalism' and then went on to say something like 'but you won't know what that is yet, because I didn't know social theory was on the list for unit 1'
which is, um, slightly unhelpful.
(the structure of all the Access courses has been completely redone this year, and everyone is a bit lost. including lack of knowing what units we'll be doing next, because no one has invented them yet. we're having to go with the flow a lot.)
Socratic? Like Socrates, Mr 'I drank what?'
arguing leads to hemlock?
;)
its a learning styles meets teaching styles problem, is all.
eventually, if I turn my notes around enough, knowledge fits into my head.
Bill: Socrates - "The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing".
Ted: That's us, dude.
Bill & Ted - timeless truths ;)
I reckon by the end of the course I'll have a toolbox of methods, a vocabulary of words, and a whole bunch of theories with all kinds of useful. All good. But the getting there frequently leaves me confuzzled.
thanks :)
and, um, hope I'm not being too annoying.
no subject
Date: 2005-12-13 03:23 pm (UTC)Okay --- functionalism is the easiest theory to learn and is a basic, first two weeks of sociology intro here in the states.
It means that everything in society has a function -- there's a reason for every social fact and every sociological phenomenon. Sometimes it's a positive function, sometimes it's disfunctional --- but there's still a function. There's more to it, but I know how you are with words, so let's just leave it that all social phenomena are interrelated, organic (Willow: Everything is connected.).
Socratic style means that your professor engages his/her students in arguments, with the idea that from the arguing will come clearer thinking and an openness to others' ideas.
And, yes: Bill and Ted do promote timeless truths.... and a mean game of Twister. :-)