A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
Poll Reveals Depth and Trauma of Joblessness in the U.S.
That was the front page story in the Times yesterday.
I hadn’t seen the paper when I got into the cab at 6 a.m., but my ride to JFK was itself a look at the recession. The cabbie wasn’t what I expected – a woman, for starters, with an accent that wasn’t Asia or Africa but pure New York. And she asked me whether I wanted to go via the Triboro or the Midtown Tunnel.
She had just started her shift, picking up the cab from a fleet in the Bronx. She had three kids – a daughter recently graduated from Fordham, a son at NYU, and another son at Yale. She had worked on the trading floor for JP Morgan, not as a trader but in some auxiliary role that was nevertheless important and probably well rewarded. Family trips to London most winters.
Then she got fired, and since last spring, she’s been driving a cab. And she knows many people, former colleagues, who aren’t even doing that. (I didn’t ask her about money and how she managed two high-end tuitions. She never mentioned a husband, so I assumed she was a single mom. But I didn’t ask about that either.)
She also sold Christmas trees on the street, though that was mostly to support the Boy Scouts. Their trees were expensive – $60 and up – but sales were very slow, and even now, well before Christmas, she was knocking down prices for customers who seemed reluctant. (This is all anecdotal evidence. The Wall Street Journal reports that tree sales are strong. )
Here’s a question (not taken from a publisher’s test-bank) from the final exam I gave today:
2. One observer of culture commented, “I'll tell you what I like about Chinese people. They're hanging in there with the chopsticks. You know they've seen the fork; they're staying with the sticks. I don't know how they missed it— going out all day on the farm with a shovel. Come on: shovel — spoon. You're not plowing 50 acres with a couple of pool cues.”
To say that using chopsticks instead of a fork and spoon is like plowing land with pool cues — this idea is an example of a. particularism b. ethnocentrism c. the sociological imagination d. group polarization
I offered a bonus point to anyone who could identify the culture critic who was the source of the quote. (Answer here.)
I didn’t realize it when I was composing the exam, but I was guilty of sexism. None of the females in the class even took a guess. Most of the guys did, and sixty percent of them got it right. I might as well have asked which NFL teams Brett Favre has played for (or hasn’t played for).
I do know at least one female Montclair sociology graduate who would have nailed the bonus point. But in general, comedy, especially stand-up, seems to be a guy thing, and I’m not sure why.
Maybe I should have used a quote from Gray’s Grey’s Anatomy.
1. T / F ____ Most universities are now in the final exam period.
2. T / F ____ A negatively-phrased question is rarely less confusing than a positively-phrased question.
To answer Question #2 correctly, to say that negatively-phrased questions are more confusing, you have to go through the mental contortion of negating the negative.*
Take a look at the test-bank that accompanies a textbook, and you’ll see at least a few items like this. Those questions are not written by professional test-makers. Sociology textbook test banks are written by sociology instructors, history test banks by history instructors, and so on. Neither they nor the authors of the books themselves are schooled in writing test questions.
But what about this item?
Agree or Disagree: My home life is rarely stressful.
Maybe you recognized it. It’s from the GSS (STRSSHME). A student in my class had used it in her cross-tab exercise. She had thought that women would be much more likely than men to experience stress at home. But, she said showing me her table, 43% of women disagreed; only 28% of men.
I had to look twice at the item and think it through carefully. The item is about stress, I explained, but if you want to say that you agree that your home life is stressful, you have to disagree with the question.
I assume that the GSS questions are written by people who know what they are doing, not instructors who need to supplement their income by writing textbook supplements. I also assume that the survey experts at the GSS test drive each item before including it in the interview schedule. But STRSSHME makes me less confident about the way the GSS develops questionnaire items.
Did the GSS compare this item against the same idea phrased positively:
My home life is often stressful.
No. STRSSHME seems to be part of a 2002 module that was given only once. I wonder if the GSS will use this question again.
I went to church last weekend. Well, not really. I went to see “Up in the Air.” But the sermon was such a familiar one about American values that as the house lights went up, I expected the audience to do the handshake of brotherhood or whatever non-touching H1N1 substitute is currently in effect.
Here’s the message, sinners. Pursue not selfish career goals, especially in place of human relationships.
We’ve all heard it before. Don’t sacrifice human connection for the sake of individual mobility. It’s a staple of American fiction, movies, and TV. And maybe it is in fact like a church sermon, something we Americans like to hear over and over again each Sunday because we spend the rest of the week doing just the opposite. That seems to be the schedule: M-F, Achievement/Success; Sunday, the sermon about relationships (Saturday is more open, though shopping, fixing up the house, and kids’ soccer games are strongly encouraged).
The nice thing about “Up in the Air” is that it doesn’t stack the deck so obviously (pardon the abrupt change of metaphor). Make no mistake – the central character, Ryan Bingham, is all about mobility. He spends most of the year traveling. His main goal in life is to accumulate ten million miles and get the sacred black airlines card possessed by only a handful of other fliers. He disdains relationships. He never married – all sex is causal sex – and he’s distant from his siblings and their families. And, he repeatedly tells us, that’s the way he likes it.
And what is his job that requires so much time away from home (not that he has a home; his apartment is bare, his refrigerator empty)? He fires workers. Their own employers are too fearful or incompetent to do it well or do it at all, so they hire Bingham’s firm. Bingham loves his job, and he does it very well.
OK – a guy who like firing people, wants no real relationships, and aspires mostly to a small, black plastic rectangle because almost nobody else has one. In most movies, you’d dislike this guy from the moment he walked into the frame. You’d easily reject him and his values. But with “Up in the Air” you can’t, mostly because it’s George Clooney. I mean, you just cannot dislike George Clooney. The film makes it even easier to like him by giving him a young apprentice – a 23-year-old MBA – who wants to make firing people even less human by instituting an online version. With her austere suits, severely pulled-back hair, and impersonal style of speaking, she makes Clooney’s character look even nicer.
The movie is worth seeing – most critics gave it high marks (check it out at MRQE) – so I won’t go more into the plot except to say that the ending (possible hint of a spoiler here) doesn’t cheat. The ending also shares something with “Funny People” and very few other American films that I can think of offhand. (However, in other ways, the ending of “Funny People,” as I noted here, does cheat.)
Here’s the trailer. It says pretty much what I just said.
Triboro or the Midtown Tunnel.
