Categories ▸ Teaching

Tue, Aug 21, 2012

This Year's Theory Syllabus Leaves Out More Than Ever

I’m teaching our required Graduate Social Theory course again this semester. This year I decided I’d snub not just monomanical German system-builders but French Weberians as well. No Foucault for you! I should have started a “What, no x?” sidebet before posting it. In the syllabus, I present a justification for my sins. An excerpt: Like many programs in our field, Duke’s Sociology department requires its graduate students complete a one-semester survey course in social (or “sociological” theory).

Fri, Apr 1, 2011

Workflow Articles in "The Political Methodologist"

I’ve written a few times before about how to choose the software you work with, and what you should and should not care about when making those choices. I maintain a page with various resources related to this, if you’re interested, most notably the Emacs Starter Kit for the Social Sciences. A revised version of an article of mine on this topic called “Choosing Your Workflow Applications”, which I’ve had online for a while, has now been published in The Political Methodologist, the newsletter of the Society for Political Methodology.

Thu, Feb 24, 2011

Advice on Talks from Leslie Lamport

Speaking of LaTeX, its author Leslie Lamport provides a guide to How To Present A Talk. It was written in 1979, but modulo a couple of changes its advice applies equally well today. For instance: WHAT TO SAY 1. Describe simple examples rather than general results. Try to make the examples much too simple—you will not succeed. Don’t use formalism. If your results cannot be described simply and informally, then there is no reason why anyone should be interested in them.

Fri, Sep 12, 2008

Workflow Update

My periodically-updated guide to choosing your workflow applications has received one of its periodic updates. It has grown an abstract and more up-to-date stuff on backups and versioning. Plus extra jokes. Click through to read—you may have to reload it if you have an old version lurking in your browser cache. This release is officially named “Dime On You Crazy Shriner” in honor of orgtheory’s favorite pseudonymously-produced, bot-driven, stylistically-elliptical demisemisocblog.

Thu, May 22, 2008

The Great Depression

Because Eric Rauchway’s book on The Great Depression and New Deal makes inordinately heavy demands on the reader, is filled with hard-to-remember facts, and spends too much of its absurd length wistfully discussing fashions in men’s suits and hats of the period, I have been looking for a brief video to show in its place to undergrads in my social theory class. It’s good to finally have found it.

Fri, Dec 21, 2007

Workflow Update

Following on from our discussion of editing tools the other day, and in response to a couple of requests, I have updated and somewhat expanded my note about Choosing Your Workflow Applications. The revised version talks about which operating system to choose (to a first approximation, these days I’m agnostic), focuses on Emacs+R+LaTeX as an integrated set of high-quality apps available for free across all the major platforms, and then points to some alternatives (like Stata and various editors).

Tue, Jun 5, 2007

Student Evaluations

Despite being a contributor to this OrgTheory blog, my dirty little secret is that this past semester was the first time I ever taught a Sociology of Organizations course. Shocking, I know. It went OK for a first-time effort. Quantitatively my ratings were a bit below my average, but not worryingly so. Today, though, I got back the specific (anonymous) comments of the students, which always make for interesting reading. I broadly subscribe to Fabio’s view that evaluations are pretty informative.

Wed, May 9, 2007

Annals of Annoying Students

Via Unfogged, a hall of fame note from a student: Dear Prof. AWB, I was in your British Literature class in the fall of 2006, and for that class, you gave me a grade of C. I need to have a better grade for this class. As far as I know, I got an 86 on the first paper, and I didn’t complete the second assignment. I don’t know what I got on the final essay or exam.

Tue, Jan 9, 2007

This Semester's Classes

Graduate Economic Sociology seminar Undergraduate Organizations class

Thu, May 18, 2006

ACTA Report

Tim Burke reads through the ACTA report, ‘How Many Ward Churchills’, which—so far as I can see from skimming it—makes very strong claims (“professors like Churchill are systematically promoted by colleges and universities across the country at the expense of academic standards and integrity”; “Ward Churchill is Everywhere”; “professors are using their classrooms to push political agendas in the name of teaching students to think critically”) mainly on the basis of inferences from course descriptions that they’ve found on the web.