Good for Me, I Stopped Watching Cable News

Where does one turn if intensely interested in politics? For me, it was convenient to fall into a habit of watching cable news. So much cable news. Years of listening to pundits and bullshit. Knowing all of the contributors and seeing what directions channels took to secure viewers. Noticing endless hours spent on some topics with next to no time spent on other topics. But still, I tuned in, because I follow politics, and cable news is where you can catch some coverage of some aspects of politics and society. 

We all know that each station caters to different views, and taps into particular politics, and each channel drives home a narrative for days and weeks at a time. You follow politics like sports and choose a team and come to dislike or even hate your opponent. 

In late 2020 following the presidential election I tapped out. I couldn't take it anymore. I had watched too much cable news and was sick of it. I decided to stop caring about talking heads and to not care about who said what and stopped paying attention to daily controversies. I still care about politics and I'll never stop wanting to know about politics and society. I don't need cable news as part of my information gathering. It was never the case that I was entirely dependent on cable news, but it did take up too much of my diet. 

I'm not a better person since I stopped watching. I don't sleep any better. I just stopped watching something that wasn't worth watching anymore. I wish I had stopped sooner. The sun still looks the same, I still like trees, but I didn't gain extra appreciation for nature or life or my loved ones. I did cut out a lot of bullshit and I'm not told by a TV station what to think about or how long to think about it and that's good for me. 

Sociological Readings on Dollar Stores

 

Much has been written about the proliferation of dollar stores. Here's a starter pack:

How Dollar Stores Became Magnets for Crime and Killing - Alec MacGillis

‘Everything Going the Wrong Way’: Dollar Stores Hit a Pandemic Downturn - Michael Corkery

Food Options in Dollar Store Nation - Yours Truly

Exhausted

We're all exhausted, right?

Last fall I was teaching class in my bedroom using Google Meet, with my kids in their bedrooms doing school remotely.

This fall we're back in the routine of going to school.

I didn't miss the commute. 

I'm an early bird so I teach M/W/F. I teach three classes beginning at 9:00 and ending at 12:05. I leave the house by 7:20 a.m. 

Yesterday after finishing class I was in my office for office hours until 2:15. I then went to the grocery store on my way home. The kids came home on the bus. 

My wife got home at 4:45 from work. I was making dinner having just finished taking in a meeting on Zoom, camera off. 

Our 13-year-old had a soccer game at 7:30 at a school thirty minutes away. It's required he take the bus with his team to the game, but then he can be driven home. I dropped him off at school by 6:00 and went early to where the game was, sitting in my car, doing class prep, trying to get ahead a bit. My wife ran errands with our 10-year-old and mowed the lawn.

The game ended at 9:00 p.m. I don't think my son's team managed a shot on goal. I lost track of the score but the other team scored close to 10 goals. They've lost every game except one this season. I stopped counting the losses but it's been a lot of them. It hurts to see your kid's team lose so much.

We drove home and chatted and listened to a Sirius XMU session with José González. We got home at 9:30. I had a beer and popcorn while talking with my wife until 11:00, then crashed. I was up around 3:00 after a weird dream in which I was forced to be involved in a drug deal. I took to the couch, looked at my phone, and read "The Myth of Asian American Identity" by Jay Caspian Kang. It was probably around 4:00 that I fell back asleep until 6:00. 

My head hurts and I don't know whether I'm under or over caffeinated. In any case, I'm going to make more coffee and see what I can make of this way, and see what this day becomes.

Class Prep

Back in graduate school when I was a teaching assistant, I remember asking a professor how long it took him to prepare for class. "About 10 minutes," he said. I didn't understand. I was in the process of learning how to put classes together myself, and each session for an Intro course would take me several hours to prepare. Sometimes it would take all day. How in the world could someone stand up there for an hour in front of students with only 10 minutes prep? It helped that he'd been teaching the course forever, so he would take his already prepared notes and review them before class. Observing him as his assistant, I could see him go off the cuff and comfortably field questions from students. He'd taught this material 100 times before. 

I get bored easily. I can't teach the same material over and over. I retool and update my courses constantly. So I'm not in the practice of reusing one set of notes each time I teach a course I've taught before. But I do have lots of notes that I can work from when doing class prep. I still start from scratch, often, but I also can count on a library of examples and notes that have worked well before. 

The main thing for me these days, when possible, is to finish my class prep as early in the day as I can. When teaching on a M/W/F schedule, as I'm doing this semester, I try to have my class prepped the prior day as early as possible. That way I can spend portions of the rest of the day thinking about how I'm going to teach the material and thinking about new questions to ask. It's less about the feeling of being overprepared with more notes than I need. It's more about thinking how I can present the material in a way that will engage students. And it's always about composing questions in my head that I think students will be interested in answering. 

I'm thankful to my students for always inspiring me with questions of their own, and for supplying me with new examples to consider. Even while teaching these days masked up with a sweaty face and struggling to hear students in the back of the room, it's a joy to establish connection with students and to see them thinking through the material. 

Recent Articles and Videos about American Society

Sometimes I'm asked by friends, colleagues, and reporters for my thoughts on "current events" and as part of my response I like to share with them what I'm reading. I'll be adding to this list.

It Really Is Different This Time - various authors, including Tressie McMillan Cottom, and Clayborne Carson

I'm a professor who studies protests and activism. Here's why the George Floyd protests are different. - Dana Fisher

Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness - kihana miraya ross

How Western media would cover Minneapolis if it happened in another country - Karen Attiah

Remember, No One Is Coming to Save Us - Roxane Gay

3 Viral Videos Spark A Debate About Discrimination Black Men Face In Public Spaces - interview with Jelani Cobb and Karen Attiah

Stony Brook sociologist Crystal Fleming does a great job in this segment on CBS Sunday Morning.

How Do We Change America? - Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

I’m a Black American. I Had to Get Out. - Tiffanie Drayton

Sociologist Rashawn Ray appears in a segment on Andrea Mitchell's show on MSNBC.
Related article: Bad apples come from rotten trees in policing

How Black Lives Matter Reached Every Corner of America - Audra D. S. Burch, Weiyi Cai, Gabriel Gianordoli, Morrigan McCarthy and Jugal K. Patel

When the lions have cameras, we finally get to see how our society devalues black lives - Tyrone Forman

The First Step Is Figuring Out What Police Are For - TRACEY L. MEARES  and TOM R. TYLER

Who Gets to Be Afraid in America? - Ibram X. Kendi

What Is Owed: Without Economic Justice, There Can Be No True Equality - Nikole Hannah-Jones

Why the term “BIPOC” is so complicated, explained by linguists - Constance Grady

A Final Word On Karen - Tressie McMillan Cottom

Could Baby Bonds Help Reduce Wealth Inequality In America? - interview with Darrick Hamilton, Wendy Jones, and Sen. Cory Booker, with related reading list.

Immersed in Suburbia (Birthday Drive By Edition)

It still surprises me how quickly behavior catches on. Birthday parties come to a halt because of Coronavirus, but birthday celebrations get reinvented. I'm seeing a lot of caravans through neighborhoods with honking, signs, balloons, and hollering. It's a creative way to say Happy Birthday. I've participated in two of these so far. It's both nice and sad to me. Nice because you want a kid to have some feeling of a happy birthday, and sad because you know the kid would rather have a party and that a regular party with friends and family would be a thousand times more fun. But at least the kid gets to see friends and loved ones drive past their house with a show of love and support.

This birthday drive through phenomenon strikes me as hard to accomplish in a city. It's been years since I've lived in a city, but I imagine it's hard to pull off in a place with a lot of traffic, and without subdivisions. Here in suburbia it's easy to execute where car culture is king and big parking lots rule. You all gather in a parking lot until someone leads the way past the person's house to beep and yell out the window. It's been interesting to observe social interaction during the time that cars gather and wait for the procession to begin. A lot of people stay in their cars, windows up. Others are out in front of their cars chatting with other people. Sometimes it's with 6 feet distance, other times it appears to be fake social distancing where people aren't super close to each other but are clearly less than 6 feet apart. It sort of acknowledges the new norm of social distancing, yet skirts around the edges of it. It's a workaround.

Understandably, people are impatient and aren't enthusiastic about hunkering down. People want to talk and schmooze and laugh and be together. And if you've got a kid with a birthday you might like to get rowdy with your people for 30 minutes. When I'm driving around running errands, it's common now to see these caravans in progress. It's pretty easy to tell who the hosts are and you can see them wearing masks, being somewhat careful. On the other hand you can see people in close proximity to each other. In a way, it reminds me of a cheat day for someone who's dieting. "I've been watching what I eat most of the time, but on Sunday I'm going to have a sundae. That's my cheat day!" But there's a major difference. What you choose to eat can be a private issue, but when you take a day off from social distancing it becomes a public health matter.

People are craving social interaction. It's why a lot of people are practicing selective social distancing. It's hard to be away from each other, and I'm afraid it's not going to get easier. 

Music Break: Chicano Batman - Color my life

The groove, the dance moves, the style.

Is the backwards jump onto the car real????

"With the feels I’m on, with the feels I’m on yeah,,,,,,"