Selling Sno-Cones at the Beach

the natural order of things

Oh, the soul-sucking nature of grading. Been working on it all day, no end in sight, very little "produced." (My brother called; we don't talk very often so it was a rare pleasure to chat.)

I don't like that I am evaluating students. I would rather have a conversation and ask them about things they've written. I have been writing my comments as questions rather than judgments, because I'm really trying to avoid the "if you don't think as I do you are wrong" mentality. But there are still some (unthinking) attitudes that bother me that I think need to be challenged:

1. rich people live in nice expensive lofts and the homeless used to live there but now they've been shoo'ed out by the cops and security people, and that is the natural order of things.

2. "upper class" professionals cruise the skyways and shop on Nicollet and if I do well in college I can join them. And that is the natural order of things.

3. Downtown Mpls is the better for all this investment and gentrification. (Ooh, bright, shiny malls and hip, expensive stuff!) And that is the natural order of things.

Sense a theme? I am not some sort of rage-against-The-Man socialist (compared with my colleagues, anyway) but I am annoyed by the white-bread, black-and-white acceptance of existing socio-economic relations as "the way things are." This course is not developing any kind of alternate views - and that really bothers me. The field work is just out there for people to see what they will, and the lectures discuss theoretical models, and no one is saying, "why should it have to be this way instead of some other way?"