Date: Fri, 20 Feb 1998 10:37:15 -0700 (MST) From: Martha Gimenez To: psn-seminars@csf.colorado.edu Subject: teaching as a sociologist (fwd) ---------- Forwarded message ---------- Date: Thu, 19 Feb 1998 17:47:44 -0700 (MST) From: Brett Johnson To: PSN-Seminars@csf.colorado.edu Subject: teaching as a sociologist First off, I would like to thank Gary and Martha for putting together this seminar. I invite you to read my message and share your insights! I am a 3rd year doctoral student at CU-Boulder. I came to graduate school to get the appropriate training and the credentials to teach sociology at the college level. I am interested in teaching sociology because of the meaningful interactions that I have with students and the intellectual stimulation that I receive from being an academic. The classes that I teach have two broad and exciting goals: to make students' lives more fulfilling and to make the world a better place. Sometimes these are contradictory goals but usually they are complementary. Teaching is the most fulfilling labor activity that I have every been involved in or of any activity I can conceptualize. My students also seem to significantly grow from my interactions with them. Currently I am dealing with the issue of becoming a prolific writer so that I can write a dissertation and become a scholar that Gary describes in his paper concerning the 37 moral imperatives of a sociologist. I believe that I am a well-versed young scholar and have an ability to conceptualize abstract theoretical perspectives but I have little interest in writing about these topics. I would rather talk and teach about them. Even I though I feel that I benefit from the writing process and that I am a very able writer, writing is difficult for me because I do not receive as much fulfillment from it as from direct human interaction. I am Marcuse's ideal as my eros (creative impulse) runs wild and I don't like to defer gratification. Teaching provides that immediate gratification as I can see students appreciating my hours of work and my insights. I value the enterprise of writing but I would rather share my insights in other ways. Much of my teaching revolves around very simple ideas. I help my students see how they can build community around them, counteract alienation in their lives, and have value-rational motivations to their actions. These are very old ideas in our discipline. I see my job as finding ways to present these ideas to students so that their lives can be transformed so that they can actively fight and change the shortfalls of modernity and late capitalism. I see my actions counteracting apathy, egoism, anomie, and alienation. What more could I ask for? *** Is there a place in the discipline for a person like me who wants to devote the lion's share of her/his energies to sharing sociological knowledge instead of creating it in a written form? **** I not sure that there is a place for me (as I am now), so I am currently working on developing a routine for writing on a daily basis.