Easy

My yoke is easy..

Matthew 11:30

Many people think it is easy to be a teacher. Those long summer holidays, right? Actually there are always classes to prep. Right now I'm planning a class on Talcott Parsons, a mostly forgotten American sociologist. He more or less founded sociology at Harvard. He is notorious for his obscure & technical prose, which is probably why I picked his book up fairly cheap. Here's an example:

"When the conformist component of the ambivalent motivational structure is given opportunity for acting out along with the alienative, the former pattern tends to shift into the pattern of illness, the latter into the criminal or delinquent gang or sub-culture."

Parsons, Deviant Behavior & Social Control, from: The Social System, 1951

I think the reason he isn't particularly remembered is that he is more Freudian than most of us are comfortable with these days, that and he is more conservative than the majority of social "scientists" these days. Plus sociology itself is less trendy than it was in the 1970s. So why do him in an English class? Because technical prose is exactly what many Japanese need to tackle, depending on their occupation. It's not all about reading menus on your vacation. So if you are a therapist or social scientist who wants English conversation practise, I hope you will come along! 😅