Psychology: December 2003 Archive Page

I thought I was busy as a graduate student, and I was.... As long as I showed up at the right place -- the library, the classroom, the data-entry warehouse -- I got through. Being a faculty member lumps the hours and the tasks all together, and there is little immediate feedback on what's important to complete. Yes, you have to prepare for class, but how well? No, you don't have to write the article right away; there's no deadline on it. As for skipping the weekly meeting of a pointless committee well, who really knows it will matter? | Managing time as an assistant professor is something for which few new faculty members are fully prepared, but it's crucial to your long-term success. -- Lee Tobin McClain --Lessons in Time Management (Chronicle)

Note to self: print out this article and read it a week or two before every semester.

I tend to over-prepare for workshop classes, often coming in with stacks of handouts that I never pass out and overheads that I never use.

Teaching a literature course requires much less prep time on a week-to-week basis (reading a dozen short poems or a hundred pages in a novel) than teaching a writing course (where you have to mark student exercises, checking their revisions against what you wrote in the margins of their earlier drafts, taking note of recurring problems and constructing new handouts for next week or next year, etc.). As long as I've refreshed my memory on the assigned texts, I can "wing it" and lead a pretty good discussion of readings in a literature class. A few students did request more structure when discussing readings in my journalism and "Seminar in Thinking in Writing" class, so I'll have to keep that in mind as I plan my courses. (I haven't had the formal meeting to discuss official course evaluations with my division chair -- I'm referring now to what I learned from short end-of-term reflection papers.)

I've got a five-column spreadsheet, on which I'm listing all the assigned readings and due dates for the four courses I'm teaching and the production schedule of The Setonian. I should probably add a sixth column and add my research/professional goals.

And by the way, I started blogging this article before I noticed who wrote it! (Lee's office is two doors down from mine.)

'The fakir drew from under his knee a ball of grey twine. Taking the loose end between his teeth, he, with a quick upward motion, tossed the ball into the air. Instead of coming back to him, it kept on going up and up until out of sight and there remained only the long swaying end... [A] boy about six-years-old... walked over to the twine and began climbing up it... the boy disappeared when he had reached a point 30 or 40ft from the ground... a moment later, the twine disappeared.'

This purported to be an eye-witness account of the trick given by a couple of American travellers returning from the mysterious Orient. Within a few months, however, the editor of the Tribune was forced to come clean and admit that not only was the account bogus but that the travellers did not even exist.

Too late. -- Michael Holland reviews Peter Lamont's The Rise of the Indian Rope Trick --Give 'em Enough Rope (Guardian)

Thanks to the fact that I write, my life is satisfactory: I can inhabit gloom and live in joy. When something unpleasant happens to me, provided only that is potentially of literary use, my first thought is ?How best can I describe this?? I thereby distance myself from my own displeasure or irritation. As I tell my patients, much to their surprise -- for it is not a fashionable view -- it is far more important to be able to lose yourself than to find yourself. --Theodore Dalrymple --Reasons to be cheerful (Spectator)

Dalrymple is an erudite, literate medical doctor who specializes in prison services. He is also a wonderful writer.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, Nov. 28 (UPI) -- Thousands of Iraqis took to Baghdad's streets Friday condemning terrorism and urging a halt to political violence. '

[OK... so far, so good.]

The demonstrators shouted "death to terrorists"...

[Gaak! This sounds like a bad MadTV skit. Were these demonstrators paying attention to the supposed purpose of their event? Or are Iraqi political demonstrations just naturally dripping with ironic metacommentary?] --Iraqis Demonstrate Against Violence (UPI/Washington Times)

Found via Drudge.

Think about it -- do you really believe that person who says they couldn't do something because "something came up?" That they couldn't do their homework because the printer broke? Lame.... These lies will work as excuses because no one believes excuses anyway! And to think, if they are outrageous lies, they will become more believable because they are just that inventive!

Some examples:

• "A plane crashed off the coast of Madagascar."
  
• "I was stranded on a desert island."
  
• "I had an unfortunate run-in with an overhead projector, and now must wear goggles until my wound heals."
  
• "The sun didn't come up this morning at my house, and I rely on roosters to wake me."

--Julie Young --Spam and excuses (Work in Progress)

Julie's comments about Spam are fine, but it's the excuses that made me want to blog this. I'm not sure the two observations really go together, but it's still blogworthy. I like particularly the goggles and the roosters.

OK, that's enough fun for today. I've really got to get to my grading now.

One only needs to have had a weblog for about five minutes to see the relevance to blogging of Cialdini's ideas about how we are persuaded and how we reach decisions -- particularly concerning whom one links to or adds to one's blogroll. If you're honest, you'll recognize that at least some of Cialdini's principles have determined your linking/blogrolling preferences:

• Reciprocity (If I put you on my blogroll, you'll feel obliged to put me on yours.)
• Commitment/Consistency (Now that you're on my blogroll I'm unlikely to remove you.)
• Social Proof (If all those other people have X on their blogrolls, then he definitely should be on my blogroll.)
• Liking (The people I link to and have on my blogroll are similar to me, have praised me, are associated with events or projects I'd like to be a part of? at the very least, since I'm never going to reach the A-list, I can bask in the A-lister'sreflected glory.)
• Authority (Anyone on the Technorati Top 100 must automatically be knowledgeable, wise, and powerful.)
• Scarcity (Since the A-list has so few members relative to the total blogging population, what A-listers write must necessarily be of high quality. Similarly, a link from an A-lister is enormously valuable?regardless of the quality of the item at the end of that link.)

--Jonathan Delacour --I'll Link to Whoever He's Linking To (The Heart of Things)

This is a much more thorough examination of an issue I was muddling through a few days ago. Dammit, I wish I had time to pursue this further, but my plate is already full. I'll just have to read what others write (which is a heck of a lot easier than trying to figure it all out myself).

Update, 10 Dec: I don't think Delacour's assessment of "scarcity" is right. Because the A-list bloggers have so many inbound links, their opinions online are anything but scarce. But I agree with him in his application of scarcity to an outbound link from an A-lister. Even if the Alpha blogger has pages and pages out outbound links, each outbound link can be very valuable to the recipient (if, that is, the recipient cares about the currency of the blogosphere).

"Good job!" doesn’t reassure children; ultimately, it makes them feel less secure. It may even create a vicious circle such that the more we slather on the praise, the more kids seem to need it, so we praise them some more. Sadly, some of these kids will grow into adults who continue to need someone else to pat them on the head and tell them whether what they did was OK.... This doesn’t mean that all compliments, all thank-you’s, all expressions of delight are harmful. We need to consider our motives for what we say (a genuine expression of enthusiasm is better than a desire to manipulate the child’s future behavior) as well as the actual effects of doing so. Are our reactions helping the child to feel a sense of control over her life -- or to constantly look to us for approval? Are they helping her to become more excited about what she’s doing in its own right – or turning it into something she just wants to get through in order to receive a pat on the head? --Alfie Kohn --Five Reasons to Stop Saying 'Good Job!' (AlfieKohn.org)

Kohn suggests that, instead of praising a child for drawing a picture ("Good drawing!") we instead respond more neutrally, focusing our attention on what the child accomplished. ("You drew a big mountain! You sure used a lot of purple!")

This makes a lot of sense to me, though I'd have to read more of Kohn's work to decide how I feel it applies to my own teaching. Students who are used to being praised for effort can be flustered in college, where (most of the time, or at least in my classes anyway) simply expending effort is not good enough.

Found via Pedablogue. (Good job, Mike!)

I'm not sure I'm artciulating anything new here, but for me, reading some of the "high-profile" blogs feels a little bit like listening to talk radio: a charismatic figure stirs up people's frustrations and fears by linking to a news article or bit of information. Then a feeding frenzy takes place, with dozens of other bloggers quickly linking to this story or adding their comments, creating the noise effect I was talking about yesterday. --Chuck Tyron --Ten Blogs that Shook the World (The Chutry Experiment)

I confess that I probably feel too much validation when I happen to blog something that I later see climbing the charts on Popdex or Blogdex. Often, of course, I have seen the link on Slashdot, Wired, Metafilter, A & L Daily, or some other well-read site, so there is little wonder that other bloggers will pick up an interesting link. It's really far more satisfying when I find a gracious link on thinking with my fingers or MGK; these are people I've met in person (Torill was recently in Greensburg, and although Matthew probaby doesn't remember me, long before I started blogging I met him briefly at a conference -- probably the MLA, though I can't honestly remember).

This blog entry is a bit more of a hodgepodge than usual, but just now as I was scanning the blog entry I wrote for Torill's visit, I was reminded of Torill's reasons for not permitting comments on her blog. My sister Rosemary (whose eagle eye often catches typos in my blog entries -- thanks sis) told me that a comment spammer had struck my pointless Rainbow Hector Weblog. My journalism students are turning in blog portfolios, and one of the components asks them to reflect upon an entry that they wrote that generated good comments. Some students who haven't been blogging regularly probably won't get many comments on the blog entries they are feverishly writing the day before their portfolios are due. The artificiality of expecting students to write entries that generate comments leads to the following well-written, poignant plea from my student Shannon Gerstel, who uses images of nudity and shame to describe the way she feels about her blog in the hours before it is due.

I'll be very interested to see how many of my student bloggers continue to blog over the break, and what they write about when they are no longer thinking about fulfilling the requirements of an assignment.

His voice was calm, but I could tell by his furrowed brow that what he truly wanted to say was, "Graduate school is a slow and unrelenting descent into hell. Save yourself while you still can." | I felt the earth move under my feet. Grad school had been my last great hope. For most of my life, I tried to hide the fact that I liked to learn because it cut down on the amount of after-school beatings from my less enthusiastic classmates. Even in college, where students pay to learn, I discovered to my dismay that many of my peers cared more about beer bongs and frat parties than Shakespeare and Yeats. But despite my disappointment, I remained optimistic because I was holding out for grad school -- the nerd Utopia -- a place where thoughtful people gathered to discuss ideas that really mattered. --Jane Bast --Ignoring Good Advice (Chronicle)

The author compares learning the truth about grad school to learning the truth about Santa Claus. I personally didn't find grad school all that terrible, especially compared to my experience as a buttoned-down scholarly nerd at party-friendly U.Va. And, in response to the article's last point, grad students at the University of Toronto did very little teaching; it was difficult getting experience in front of a classroom.