Pleasing the students: teachers' orientaton to classroom life in adult education

It is noted that existing sociological research on classrooms has focused too narrowly on compulsory schooling with the result that we have no data showing the rituals and routines of Adult Classrooms or the ways that teachers cope and resolve them. The paper presents fieldnote and interview data from a small ethnographic study of the two Adult Evening classes. The data suggest that in contrast to the teacher of school aged pupils, who seeks control and discipline, ‘pleasing students’ is the major orientation to classroom life of the evening class teacher. Do not say, the people must be educated when after all you only mean amused, refreshed, soothed put into good spirits and good humour or kept from vicious excesses. (Newman, 1873).     

Confirming and Expanding the Usefulness of the Extended Satisfaction With Life Scale (ESWLS)

The role of stress, particularly economic hindrance,in the prediction of global life-satisfaction wascontrasted between typically younger (n = 109)and more mature (n = 66) undergraduate students. Participants completed a Personal Projects AnalysisAppraisal Matrix including six stress dimensions, aswell as a single-item measure of globallife-satisfaction. Discriminant function analysesconducted on the students' Personal Project appraisalsrevealed that project challenge and economic hindranceaccounted for 25% of the variability inlife-satisfaction for the mature students, but none ofthe stress dimensions predicted life satisfaction forthe younger students. These results indicate that therole of stress in the prediction of life-satisfactionvaries as a function of age, with project challengeand economic hindrance playing a significant role inolder students' lives. The results are discussed inrelation to the developmental context of personalprojects as life tasks and the varying contexts foracademic pursuit between mature and typically youngerundergraduate students.     

Factors Affecting Birth Rates among White Women 20–24 Years of Age: A Trend Analysis (January 1972–march 1992)

Using Current Population Survey data, Vital and Health Statistics data, photoperiod data and temperature data, this article attempts to provide an interdisciplinary explanation of monthly (N = 243) variation in the dependent variable representing the birth rate (the rate of conceptions that become live births) for white women 20–24 years of age. Among the selected explanatory variables, four were found to play significant roles in accounting for the variation of the birth rate. They were rates of female absence from the labor market (nonparticipation plus unemployment), male employment rates, length-of-night variations and the days in the month of conception. Rainwater's concept of validating activities (1974) and recent quality of life research regarding domains serve as a basis for development of the concepts compensatory validation and contextual compatibility. Research and policy implications are discussed.