Some days I hate my job.

But most days I love it. I realize I might have one of the best jobs in the world. Sure, every job has its downsides: in mine there are the realities of professional (professorial?) pettiness and never-ending deadlines and the humdrum of work-related administrivia to take in stride...but mostly, colleagues are supportive and stimulating and students a regular source of interest and enjoyment.

Take yesterday, for example. Despite its groundhog day-esque quality (I'm not sure how exactly to explain that feeling, but there's a certain relentless repetitiveness about Singapore that makes me think of the movie Groundhog Day) it was a good day. Parts were very predictable. I took the 156 and 74 buses to SIM (Singapore Institute of Management) on Clementi Road, where I teach. Tony was away for a couple of days diving in Menado, so his absence meant even more routine repetition about the day. To break it up, I had lunch with Kevin and Sean at next-door Ngee Ann Polytechnic (28,000 students at a campus smaller than North Campus).

After classes ended, Bob and I had dinner in the Little India neighborhood--during the height of the Deepavali festival (there really does seem to be a festival here pretty much every week). Dinner was absolutely delicious. Seeing the lights and promenading people dressed in colorful finery, celebrating the triumph of good over evil was interesting. Little India was brilliantly lit and densely packed (increasingly as time passed) with a kind of collective nervous energy in the crowds. Beyond the many Indian families celebrating Deepavali, especially noticeable were the thousands upon thousands upon thousands of south Asian men converging on Little India as we ate, and even more so as I headed home. These guest workers are in Singapore on temporary work permits, doing the physically demanding jobs eschewed by Singaporeans, like construction and menial work. The festival and public holiday provides rare time off work. By the time we left Little India around 8:30, the throngs of south Asian men were becoming oppressively large. It was a tad intimidating as I travelled alone. I didn't feel threatened at all, but it was overwhelming to be so tightly packed together and it felt quite singular to be "me" in the almost entirely gender and ethnic invariant sea of humanity. I stuck out like a sore thumb, very conscious of looking and feeling "different." But just four minutes and two MRT stops away from Little India, and presto--back into my version of "Singapore normal" state. The exotic and familiar are in close proximity in Singapore, for sure.

Familiar yesterday included emails from friends in Buffalo and elsewhere. I'm at the midpoint of my Singapore stint, with more days behind me than I have left. And just about the time I think I feel a bit homesick, friends help me over the hump. I wish I had some Rocky Mountain cookies, though. Kathleen Clouden sent a care package of her signature cookies via Tony...ahhhhh....yum yum yum yum yum yum yum. The cookies were baked for me, so I felt no compunction to share (Tony is just starting to get over that). I wish they were a familiar part of my day yesterday, but they're long gone. I've eaten many delicious foods here in Singapore, but so far, hands down, Kathleen's cookies were the best!

Yesterday was a teaching day. SOC 293, Research Methods has 40 students and SOC 101, Intro to Sociology, over a hundred. We're covering survey research in Methods, which I think students find the most "fun" part of an otherwise boring course. Of course, I'm not them, so I don't know any of that for sure. SOC 293 students are planning group projects for Sociology Day (November 24th, in the Atrium at SIM) where they will present findings from surveys they conduct soon.

In Intro, we're just getting started on social stratification. We had fun with a class exercise that involved kueh lapis (a local, VERY multilayered cake) as a graphic example for the concept of social stratification. Maybe you had to be here. But students connected with the idea that within any social stratum there are still myriad other ways to make even more distinctions about how people are ranked (like the layers within layers of the cake). Students easily ranked Queen, bank director, pop star, football player, gambler (precondition was identical levels of wealth/income) pretty consensually from highest to lowest. The discussion about labeling and assumptions about the value of certain activities was great: Gambling matters for success for both the bank director and gambler, though not usually called gambling when a bank director does it. Talent and hard work for the bank director, pop star and football player, but neither is enough. Queens might be talented and hard working, but needn't be. Gamblers might be talented and hard working--but luck mattered most. Structural advantages determined the likelihood that a person ended up a bank director or queen, but royalty truly was just an accident of birth. Adding a king bumped the queen almost unanimously to the number two spot. The exercise seemed to help students move from the tangible example of the multiple layers of a yummy Singapore dessert to the abstraction of the ways our assumptions about prestige and power layer people and roles into ranks we "admire", or not.

Best of all, because kueh lapis had been a matter of curiosity I mentioned in an earlier class, several students brought kueh lapis for me to sample. As the focal point of culture here, gifts of food are incredibly meaningful, and I'm lucky that students' feel inspired to feed me things they want me to try. It has made me entertain the idea of "dining with Debi" days which, if I implement, I'll be sure to blog about.

Anyway, Intro students are in the midst of a series of exercises about how societies distribute resources and structure life chances and lifestyles of the rich and famous versus the poor and insignificant. Singapore is a wealthy place, UB students are mainly from well-to-do families (UB's is the most expensive BA program on the island). A local tuism is that all Singaporeans strive for the five C's (or 6, depending on who makes the list): career, cash, credit cards, condo, car, country club. So groups of students used classifieds and items from the Straits Times or the New paper to create hypothetical families of four, with two working parents and a household income and budget for all the accoutrement to maintain their expected lifestyle. No surprise that most created families with two high prestige careers and big salaries, kids in private schools, a family that took annual overseas vacations, drove expensive cars, and lived in expensive condos (Singapore has a VERY expensive housing market). All families included maids (unprompted) in their household budgets. (Maids are ubiquitous, even among modest income Singapore families, costing around $400/month). These families also spent quite lavishly on imagined entertainment and gifts, needing an average income estimated at around $26,000 Singapore dollars a month. You've gotta love youthful optimism.

Next was a reality check, limiting hypothetical household income to the Singapore average (~$7000/month). Students had to figure out what to give up to live "on average" and their priorities were telling. Mostly, they surrendered luxury. They decided to trade down from Mercedes to more prosaic cars, to live in HDB flats (like I do, like 80-85 percent of Singaporeans) rather than condos, opted for public over private schools and vacations in nearby Malaysia or Indonesia rather than expensive overseas destinations. Sensible. What they did NOT surrender was their maids, an interesting signal of what is considered an essential part of "average" or middle class life in Singapore.

Many hung around afterwards to talk about the exercise. Instructors remain in the classroom for an hour of "consultation" at the end of each class, the Singapore equivalent of office hours in Buffalo. Every day--even Fridays, with its consultation hour from 5-6 pm--students seem to want to linger (unlike North Campus students who flee the instant class ends, if they wait that long). While students drifting into class late is a chronic annoyance here, leaving early is not. Wednesday, I lectured 10 minutes over in a 1.5 hour class--only realized when the clock caught my eye--not because students were noisily packing up to bolt. Sometimes students have specific questions about a class topic, sometimes they want guidance on assignments and homework. But mostly students seem to want to hang out and chat. Maybe students like reversing the roles, teaching me about Singapore, and enjoy that as much as I enjoy teaching them about sociology. It is very different from office hours back at UB. I wonder, would students in Buffalo want to stay if we had an hour available in the same room right after class? Would we be more connected and inspiring to our students, and they to us? Or is this just context specific? Maybe I enjoy the novelty of it in Singapore, but would chafe under the expectation in Buffalo.

Anyway, Intro students for next week have two assignments. First, they have to reach consensus on what principles they will use to distribute scarce resources (ten slips of paper worth 3 points of extra credit each, for a class of 100+ students). Will they choose to distribute based on principles of need, want, earnings (merit), or power (the capacity to take all the resources)? That should be interesting.

And they have to make even more choices for their hypothetical Singapore families, whose incomes are now set at the high end of the local poverty rate (income around half of the median ($4820) Singapore monthly income). Students' hypothetical family will have seen its disposable income plummet and its lavish lifestyle disappear (just as it has for many in the economic downturn). Their monthly income now drops to less than one tenth their high income expectations ($26,000/month), to just $2,410 per month to make ends meet. To live "on average" they've already given up expensive housing and cars, re-thought leisure activities, and picked public education. Choices get a lot harder now as expectations of attaining the five or six C's that Singaporeans value so evaporate at low incomes.

It will be ideal if the exercises helps students become aware of differences between what people want and what people need...and how luck and the way societies are structured and not just hard work and talent, determine so many of life's chances. There's a strong Singapore variant of the US myth that all it takes to succeed is hard work. Upward social mobility has happened so incredibly fast over the past 4 or 5 decades that young students don't really comprehend how the good luck of wealth, the enough luck of average income or the bad luck of poverty determines life chances, or just how time and context specific the luck someone gets is. Singapore has gone from third to a first world country in less than a lifetime, from a distant British colony (whose fall to the Japanese in WWII, arguably, spelled the end of the British empire), from a short-lived backwater province of newly independent Malaysia, to city-state powerhouse Asian Tiger economy. Unlike many other places, Singapore's transformation and success has translated broadly into much, much better lives for average, ordinary people rather than just a small stratum at the top. Singapore's "birthdate" as an independent nation in 1964 reflected average income of just over $500 per Singaporean; per capita income in 2008 was $30,000. No surprise that UB's Singapore students think moving up is their birthright and that Singapore's booming economy and opportunities for upward mobility will go on indefinitely. They haven't known anything else. Anyway, understanding how social stratificaiton is structured into societies in a global economy is an important sociological insight for kids who have always uncritically accepted the myths of meritocracy and Singapore's limitless potential. There are limits.

I hope that the final parts of the exercise, that require coming up with principles for resource destribution and families descending into poverty status doesn't inspire hypothetical families to do anything too desperate, like selling one of their kids (that was mentioned--apparently a theme in a Chinese soap opera shown on local TV)...or cannibalizing their maids (not yet a soap opera theme...as far as I know).