I’ve taught many courses as a graduate student, lecturing statistical and general-methodological courses (and TAing for several substantial sociological courses in political economy and demography). I generally get quite good reviews; you can see the public ones here (archived 2024-02-22). My weighted average across seven¹ courses as a lecturer is \(4.48\), and my weighted average across eight courses as a TA is \(4.63\).

My favorite comment ever written in a formal evaluation is this: “[This] is single handedly the best math class I’ve ever taken […] as transfer student […] I was already nervous taking a course like this because I was never good at math. Yet, the professor has changed my whole outlook on math.” Below are some other nice anonymous comments I have received, along with the large volume of original material I’ve produced for for those courses.

Lecture experience

I’ve principally taught three courses as a lecturer: SOC360, “Statistics for Social Scientists I”; SOC365, “Computing for Social Science”; and, SOC357, “Social Research Methods”.

My lecture notes on introductory statistics, written for SOC360, “Statistics for Social Scientists I”, can be found here (the lastc couple of weeks of content should be supplemented by slides here). I have lectured this course four times as the person actually delivering the content, in 2021fa, 2022fa, 2023sp, and 2024su (I technically lectured it twice more during the early days of the remote/lockdown epoch, where my role was basically the tutor + course admin for a course with pre-taped lectures from my advisor, Prof. Christine Schwartz). My taped lectures can be found here. A key component of this course is a basic data analysis project. My standalone guide to that project, beginning with the installation of Stata, is here (links to the relevant code are found in the Youtube description).

I have also lectured a course in computing for social science, SOC365. I wrote substantial Stata lecture notes for the course, which you can find here. These notes are based on Mitchell’s excellent Data Management Using Stata, but they include a large number of original examples and my commentary on discrete mathematics.

I’ve also lectured SOC357, a course in quantitative and qualitative research methods, a couple of times. Since the quantitative part of the course is quite short, I eschewed a textbook and simply wrote my own (very short) textbook here. The taped lectures can be found here.

Teaching assistant (TA) experience

In a (slightly) past life, I did teach substantial sociology courses in the two fields that represent my primary interests. I taught all of these courses as a TA; my lecture experience is exclusively in methodological courses, but I generally find teaching substantial sociology completely effortless.

The first is SOC125, “American Society: How It Really Works”, based on the textbook of the same name, written by the living legend Joel Rogers and the sadly-deceased legend Erik Olin Wright, my first graduate school advisor; I taught for both of them, as well as graduate student lecturer. My notes written as a teaching assistant are here. They will primarily be of interest to you if you are teaching a course using this book, but if you are simply trying to teach an ambitious undergraduate sociology course, I suspect that they will also be of use to you. The course is an introduction to conventional-liberal and social-democratic Marxish views of capitalism, with chapters devoted to some interesting special topics (the environment, health care, transportation, taxation, unions, &c.), with the back third of the book discussing theories of capitalist democracy in the Przeworskian mode.

The second is SOC170, “Population Problems”, a somewhat archaic name for what is basically “introduction to demography”. My notes for this class do not make as much sense outside of the context of the course, but I thought that I would mention that I have taught this course a couple of times as the “head TA”. These course were taught with Jenna Nobles and Michal Engelman.

Finally, I also ended up teaching “Statistics for Sociologists II” as a teaching assistant under the supervision of Prof. Theodore Gerber. That was in Fall 2024. You can see my detailed lab notes here.

Rave reviews

These are, of course, cherry-picked, and the title is tongue-in-cheek. But, I do want to share some of the nice things people have said about me in evaluations.

SOC361fa24

• “I can’t think of a better instructor of this material. A genuine pleasure being in this class”

• “I felt like I would not have been able to get through this class if it wasn’t for Griffin. He was extraordinarily responsive, clear, and helpful in lab, via email, and in office hours. Griffin is extremely fast with responses and always goes above and beyond to answer questions in depth and provide reasoning behind answers. As a student who does not have a strong quantitative background, Griffin made me feel as though I was just as capable as anyone else and encouraged my work as a growing quantitative student. So lucky I got to learn from him before he graduates:)”

• “His classes are always well-organized and clear. He excels in teaching statistics and math.”

• “Griffin is gonna be a great professor (if he chooses to)!! Took both 360 and 361 with him and he’s always super clear and helpful”

SOC360su24

• “GREAT!”

• “The lectures have helped my learning the most. I have taken other statistic classes before but this is the course that I felt I understood and learned the most from. Also, learning STATA is really useful.”

SOC360sp23

• “This was a great course and Griffin did a lot to help students learn the material in an engaging manner. I found the breakdowns of formulas and then the application on a real-world statistical problem to be very helpful.”

• “Office hours helped me learn the most. I also learned a lot through the videos that Griffin posted on the shared doc drive because I could see the Stata codes and everything.”

• “Although I was not interested in the information, the professor made the class very interesting with ripe discussion and example problems that we could do with the help of the professor and the TA’s.”

• “Explained everything that needed to be explained and beyond. Was very understanding and accommodating to all students. Drawing diagrams on the board and solving problems in class were the most useful in learning the content.”

• “Amazing class and professor”

• “This was a tough course for me but with the help of my professor and friends in the class we got through it and learned a lot. Classes were more fun than other classes I have had because there were a lot more group work and talking with neighbors which I thought was helpful. Our professor was clear and great when giving lectures.”

• “Griffin was super responsive, flexible, and understanding via email. He made me feel a lot better about the course whenever contacted […] I think I would’ve been more scared if I did not have him as my instructor. I always enjoyed his comments about what was relevant and what was not in lecture. He was also super caring and reassured students consistently if something was overwhelming. Overall, he was a very fair and excellent instructor.”

SOC360fa22

• Griffin was great! I learned more from meeting with him one-on-one than from anything else. He was happy to help me with my project and I appreciated his knowledge on the subject. I would definitely change the textbook for the class, though, because it is confusing to switch back and forth between the dumbed-down info and the detailed info without any bridge or explanation to it. A book that more consistently supports the depth of the lectures would be much better.” Note that I took this suggestion to heart!