Teaching

All of my work is related to teaching. But only some of it ends up on the teaching page. These are syllabi, videos, and essays to help you with your teaching.

Courses

Population and Society (graduate seminar). syllabus

Family Demography (graduate seminar). syllabus

Social Problems: Pandemic Edition (Sociology 105) syllabus

Families and Modern Social Theory (graduate seminar). syllabus

Social Stratification (Sociology 661). syllabus

Gender, Work and Family (Sociology 644). syllabus

Family and Society (Sociology 243). syllabus

A collection of teaching links and resources from the blog and my courses.

Video lectures

What is life expectancy? (6 minutes)
Abortion and abortion rights (45 minutes)
COVID-19 and health disparities (23 minutes)
Race and racism in America (35 minutes)
COVID-19 economic crisis (25 minutes)
Introduction to Social Problems (41 minutes)
Measuring inequality (15 minutes)
COVID-19 Pandemic Overview, for an intro-level class (40 minutes)
Families, inequality, and sociology in pandemic times (12 min)
Family violence and abuse in COVID context (24 min)
COVID-19, preprints, and the information ecosystem (16 min)
Total fertility rate (what it is and how to do it) (10 min)

The Story Behind the Numbers

The wonderful animators at Kiss Me I’m Polish, who did the design and graphics for my book The Family, have also produced a series of short videos based on infographics from the text, under the title The Story Behind the Numbers. These are less than 2 minutes long and use just a few numbers, intended to spur reflection and discussion in conjunction with the details in the book — and I got to be the narrator:

Chapter 1, A Sociology of the Family: The family is not an isolated entity
Chapter 2, The Family in History: Decline in birthrates, increase in women workers
Chapter 3, Race, Ethnicity, and Immigration: Why are there so many single Black women?
Chapter 4, Families and Social Class: Which families are in poverty?
Chapter 5, Gender: How does gender affect the workplace?
Chapter 6, Sexuality: Sexuality between the genders
Chapter 7, Love and Romantic Relationships: Race and ethnicity divides college students’ dating lives
Chapter 8, Marriage and Cohabitation: Are people getting married later, or not at all?
Chapter 9, Families and Children: The high, and highly unequal, cost of raising children
Chapter 10, Divorce, Remarriage and Blended Families: Differences in divorce rates help uncover the causes
Chapter 11, Work and Families: Division of labor within married couples
Chapter 12, Family Violence and Abuse: Why has intimate partner violence declined so much?
Chapter 13, The Future of the Family: Increased diversity in American family life

Good teaching pieces

For years I’ve assembled blog posts to according to teaching topics. Now I have a book of essays — updated, improved, consolidated — that does a lot of that for you. It’s Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else that Makes Families Great and Terrible (from University of California Press, or Amazon). The first chapter, on modernity and parenting, is up as a sample. If you’re teaching with The Family, you might like this list of blog pieces that go with each chapter of the book.

Perspective

Why I called it The Family, and what that has to do with Cosby: Why I think of “the family” as an institutional arena, a place of good and bad practices and outcomes.
Not all trigger warnings are the same: My approach to dealing with disturbing, traumatic, or offensive material in class.

Research methods

Deciphering a well-told data story, cars are good for kids edition: Now we’re told that marriage prevents rape. Before we consider that, let’s consider the claim that cars contribute to children’s wellbeing.
Hello, you (shall we walk in a sample’s shoes?): My ongoing complaint about second-person interpretations of research. One problem is it makes individual predictions seem more powerful.

Graphics and statistics