We see social class

Even after teaching for over twenty years, I’m not always very good at predicting how different assignments or activities will work. The activity I think students will love goes over like a lead brick. Or the assignment I’m only lukewarm about turns out amazing.

This semester in my introduction to sociology class, I had students take pictures that they felt represented social class and/or poverty. Like all good activities, it’s one I stole from an online sociology textbook, A Sociology Experiment. Their version had a lot of specific instructions but I pared it down. Just take at least three pictures that have to do with social class and/or poverty and tell me why.

“Should we take pictures of people?” one of the students asked as I described the activity.

“No, no,” I said. “Only take pictures of people if you have their permission.” This was part of what made me nervous about the assignment, imagining my students snapping photos of people who are underhoused or people at the Wal-Mart who would get mad and punch them in their faces. That’s where my mind went, at least.

“You can take pictures of places,” I told them. “Stores or restaurants or houses or neighborhoods. Or objects. Use your imagination.”

Students in the United States often don’t have a lot of imagination where social class is concerned. We live in a country that works very hard to convince them that social class doesn’t exist. Or that if social class does exist, it’s not very important, which ends up being the same as saying it doesn’t exist in the first place.

We’d already gone around the classroom and had everyone say what they believe their social class is. Every single one of them included “middle” in their description. Some of them said upper middle. Some included middle with working class, as they go back and forth from one household to the other, moving across social class boundaries. In the U.S., everyone believes they’re middle class. We’d just listened to a podcast where a woman whose household income is $250 million described herself as middle class.

For a long time, I struggled with how to get a group of students so deeply programmed to believe that social class doesn’t exist to really see social class. There was a great video series from PBS, People Like Us, that I used for years. Just the introduction where they showed people photos and asked them to identify their class background helped.

Because, of course, the strange thing is that even as we pretend social class doesn’t exist in the U.S., we’re very, very good at reading social class off the people and places around us. We have an intuitive sense for what a “bad” neighborhood looks like. In elementary school and middle school and high school, we all knew who the poor kids were and who the rich kids were. We are social class experts. We just have to admit to that expertise.

So I sent my kids out into the world to take pictures without much sense of what I’d get back and the results were pretty amazing. One student took pictures of the upscale restaurant where they work, describing the details like the uniforms wait staff wore and the kind of lighting that told people this place was upscale. Others took pictures of the college campus itself, working toward the way in which the architecture and design of college campuses like ours are connected to certain social class aesthetics.

Another student took pictures of a maintenance closet on campus and the kitchen where people cook meals in the campus cafeteria for the students. “People don’t’ see the cleaners and the cooks as people like them,” the student wrote. “But they are.”

Students took pictures of the fancy neighborhoods they drove through sometimes, wondering what it would be like to live there. They took pictures of their own homes. Of holes in their ceiling and a window where the blinds were broken. They took pictures of their friends and their siblings. They took pictures of their lives and it was like a little window opened up into their worlds.

The activity easily hit one of the goals for any assignment I give—that I actually enjoy looking at the work the students have done. One of the things I’ve figured out over the years of teaching is that there’s no point in creating assignments that I hate grading.

Maybe this sounds selfish or lazy. The point is not my enjoyment but their learning, right? I guess, except I believe that the two things are connected. If I don’t enjoy looking at what they’ve done, there’s a pretty good chance they didn’t enjoy doing it. And I’m a strong believer in removing as much misery as possible from education.

Having them take pictures of social class hit another goal in that as an assignment, it helped me see my students’ humanity in all its complexity. I won’t lie that looking at some of those pictures and reading their descriptions broke my heart a little bit for them. Some of the pictures were so vulnerable. So brave. So honest.

One of the most amazing things about my job is being in conversation with students in this way. Reading about their lives sometimes makes me want to gather them all together and protect them from all the ways in which the world will hurt them, even though I know that’s not possible or even particularly a good idea.

This is my twenty-first year at the college where I currently teach. My twenty-second year teaching full-time. If you count all the teaching I did in graduate school, the total gets to twenty-five. It’s not that long, really. If I were a high school teacher, I’d be close to eligible for retirement, but I have no doubt that what I do isn’t as exhausting as what high school teachers to. Or middle school or elementary school. That is serious work.

Day to day, I’m bogged down in the general malaise that is the current state of higher education and the more specific misery that is our particular campus. In the midst of that sometime drudgery, I forget that it’s still possible to be surprised. Good surprises are still possible. An assignment that works better than I thought it would. A moment of joy and humanity I didn’t expect. That still happens. That’s still possible every time I walk in the classroom doors.