When Your Day Starts With Crying

Some days are harder than others.

It's not always a smooth operation getting out the door. I get our 7-year-old on the bus and then drive 50 minutes to work. My wife takes our 4-year-old to preschool on the way to her 15 minute ride to work. There are fundamental things to remember: are the lunches in their backpacks? Have they brushed their teeth? Does our 7-year-old have clothes for gym? My wife might ask me "How do these shoes look?" and I might ask her "Does this shirt look stupid?"

On Tuesday and Thursday mornings we try to do a twenty minute workout in our basement before we make sure the kids are ready for school. It's twenty minutes with Denise Austin or Jillian Michaels. It's a good feeling to get a workout in and everybody out the door without incident.

Today was not a smooth morning. Our 4-year-old was crying before school. Some days he's cool about going to school. But there are days he cries, and this day he cried a lot. It's horrible to wipe tears off the face of your 4-year-old before he leaves for school. It's not even 8:00 in the morning and there are tears. Lots of them. What's the rest of the day going to be like? How can you concentrate at work knowing your child was so upset before the day even really began? You know there are days like this because you had the same kind of days when your 7-year-old was a 4-year-old. But it doesn't make days like this any easier.

There have been many times when my wife has said she doesn't feel great at work or at home. It's a day like this when we both feel that way. You're torn between work and home. You're not fully "present" at either place. Your priority is your children but there are bills to pay. No shit, Sherlock, right? I have no self-help message to peddle or sage advice to offer. I'm just expressing the reality of a lousy day and the challenge of going on with your business as if your day didn't start in such a shitty way. My wife will manage to be the best social worker she can be today. I'll head into the classroom in twenty minutes and try to teach three good classes today. But on a day like this, we just want to get home, have our family together, and see our kids smiling.

Bad Habits. This is No Way to Grade.

I just finished grading a large pile of essay exams. It feels good, except I've been grading since 4:30 this morning and I have three classes to teach today. I told myself to spread out my grading. I didn't. I I graded all day yesterday and finished grading this morning. The process would have been smoother had I graded throughout the weekend but my preference and choice was to do other things during the weekend, like remembering I have two children and that it might be nice to go outside. Much of Saturday was spent with the kids at soccer, and Sunday involved a little bit of football and time spent with relatives.

The habit of working in the early hours of the morning goes back to college. I would spend normal hours studying in the library but run out of time and mental gas and shut it down to toss and turn in bed and have a pitiful night of sleep, only to get back up before the sun and resume studying. I was rewarded for doing so in the form of good grades and academic success. So, in a way, it works. But what a lousy habit. Surely there has to be some other way to find proper hours in the day to get done what needs to get done. Or maybe not.

I'll end this now that I'm probably in the realm of self-pity but really it's just a journal entry in the form of a blog that says to myself, "Get your shit together." I need to develop better habits because my habits around grading are in desperate need of improvement. Okay, I'm off to teach my three classes and they'll probably be good ones because I'm happy that the grading is done and I'll probably be loose in the classroom and manage to find my A or A minus game. Should that happen, it will further reinforce how I tend to go about my work.

The Process of Meal Planning

What we have here, aside from my poor handwriting, is meal planning in action. I usually do the grocery shopping and try to plan meals that everyone in my family will eat. This morning I was browsing recipes and came up with White Chicken Chili (recipe here) and Slow Cooker Stuffed Pepper Soup (recipe here). So I scribbled the ingredients I need on the list along with a few other life essentials (coffee and cake mix).

You can see I have Fall on the brain with these meals.

And this only covers two meals for the week.

I find it hard to plan for meals. I also notice it's not a typical topic of everyday conversation. These days I hear people talking about fantasy football, craft beer, and Pinterest, but I don't regularly come across people talking about what they make for dinner.

You can file this post under Mundane Moments of Everyday Life (click here for my roasted broccoli post as another example). Meal planning, while not exciting, is an important part of my routine in an attempt to make meals for my family that taste good and are budget friendly.

Keeping the Attention of Students

I have written before about the complicated lives of students. They are tired. They are stressed. They have a lot going on in their lives. I can't always command their attention and that's okay.

I actually complimented two of my classes yesterday for paying any attention to me, at all. Seriously. I talked briefly about video games in my Introduction to Sociology class. The best selling video game so far in 2015 is Mortal Kombat X. I showed the trailer in class to discuss the game as an element of American culture. Several students told me they play the game/like the game and said the trailer is actually a tame representation of the game. It was then that I said out loud that it's miraculous they pay any attention to me carrying on about sociology. I know that taking an interest in video games doesn't automatically mean not taking an interest in academic matters. It's just a reminder that students aren't always going to be excited about a sociologist talking about feelings and humanity and structural inequalities. It's easy for me to stay engaged. I'm constantly moving around the classroom and hustling for class participation. They are sitting in chairs with a million distractions in their heads and another million distractions on their devices.

It also occurs to me that this is a society in which Donald Trump is running for president. This is a society with people who take Donald Trump seriously as a presidential candidate. Most of my students could probably care less about Donald Trump. Still, we are part of the same society that includes Donald Trump having the time of his life tweaking the American electorate and working over the media.

So what does it all mean in this day and age to be a sociology professor? Hell if I know. I do the best I can to teach my subject matter. I always try to be a sympathetic and flexible professor. I'm appreciative that very busy students in a very strange society give me a chance to teach them sociology.

Three Words of Wisdom for New Professors

I was asked to attend the new faculty orientation and offer words of wisdom about teaching our students. I gave them three great words to use in the classroom and I'll share them here: “I don’t know.” It’s liberating to say "I don't know" in the classroom.

There are lots of times I'm caught off guard and there are many times I just don't have the answer. So I say things like "I have to think about that" and "I’d have to read up on that before I give you a clear and confident answer." None of us knows it all, so I take the pressure off myself by not pretending to be a know it all.

Kleenex Commercial Accurately Points Out That Boys Care About Feelings

This commercial caught my eye this morning. A boy gives a brief sociological speech about how boys aren't all about being loud and immature. In fact, he explains, boys care about feelings. He proves it by handing a tissue to a girl who is crying about the first day of school. Not bad. I might have written the commercial a different way. Imagine the boy handing a tissue to another boy--that would have been a welcome image. As the actual commercial plays out, it could be read as a young fella helping out a young damsel in distress. It's not a perfect commercial by any stretch, but what commercial is without its flaws and critics? This one isn't bad because it acknowledges the simple truth that boys care about feelings.

Song of the Day - "Mystery" by Boxed In

I like this song. Especially the drums and piano.

"Inspiration comes from the most unfamiliar places" - very good line.

"What will be, will just be" - also a good line, and probably true.

Click here for background about the song or here for analysis of the lyrics.

I like how this song captures the early phase of a relationship ("Back to the place where we went slow").

"Mystery" in this song can mean lots of things -- a person's vulnerabilities, their naked truth, their naked body. When you fall for someone, you want to see everything about the person. You want to be with the person, totally. If you stay together long enough, you grow together and hopefully look back to your early days as a couple with happy memories. In times of trouble, it might even help to look back to when you first met and believed you were at your best.