Psychology: June 2004 Archive Page

Let's say a mother finds an application to Duke University's Ph.D. program in English under her daughter's mattress. Obviously the mother is devastated. If she does nothing, in a year her daughter will be dressed in black and sneering in obscure jargon at the Thanksgiving turkey and Aunt Sally's cranberry Jell-O mold. Where can a concerned parent turn for help?

To serve this need, former academics could reinvent themselves as counselors; they could coordinate interventions with the friends and loved ones of people who are flirting with graduate school, or who have been enrolled for several years but lack the will to leave, or who are trapped in dead-end adjunct positions. These "academic exit counselors" could foster the kind of loving, supportive environments that "academic captives" need to return to a normal life. --"Thomas H. Benton"

--Is Graduate School a Cult? (Chronicle)

I had a pretty good experience in grad school, though it was research assistantships on humanities computing projects that made me want to get out of bed each morning, not really the classes or the solitary work on my dissertation (a literary and theatre-history examination of the theme of technology in American drama).

A Canadian man, driving a car packed with weapons and ammunition, was intent on killing as many people as possible in a Toronto neighbourhood but gave up the plan at the last minute when he encountered a friendly dog, police say.

--Puppy prevents Canadian killing spree (ABC (Australia))

There... do you see how nice Canadians are? And the puppy didn't even need a little keg of Molson strapped around its neck.

The way that desks and chairs are arranged in a professor's office send subtle signals. If you use your desk to block your doorway with a confrontational barrier like they do at, say, a police station, well then you're not only being uninviting, you're also responsible for all those nervous tics the students make when they do come talk to you. Think of the angles of the furniture: are they more "open" than "closed"? Do they invite conversation and informality, or do they put too many barriers between you and the student. While it's true that you may not want to be completely open and intimite with your students -- like, say, sitting beside them on a big puffy couch -- you might find that rearranging the furniture liberates some of the angst students have when they come to your office. So will little details like having family pictures on the desk, putting art on the walls that reflects your personality, having knick nacks or other things that students can look at when they want to avoid eye contact, or conversation pieces to get the shy ones talking...etc., etc. Be professional, yet open. --Mike Arnzen --Tips for Office Hours (Pedablogue)

A good collection of musings on office hours.

I've always arranged my office so that there isn't a barrier (such as a desk or bookcase) between me and the door, so that students who stop by won't feel they are imposing.

I generally work with the office door open. I will shut the door partway or completely in order to signal various degrees of isolation that I desire. When I really want to concentrate, of course, I take a stack of papers or a book and I find a quiet corner on campus.

Slow-motion Nightmare (Jerz's Literacy Weblog)

I had a busy day yesterday, with adventures that included diving fully-clothed into a large kiddie pool to retrieve my 2-year-old daughter, who had slipped and was floating face down, unable to straighten herself out.

An older girl had taken my daughter's hands and lured her to the center of the pool, where I doubt she would have gone on her own.

It was a very big, in-ground kiddie pool, maybe 20 feet across... and by the time I scrambled over to her, I had slipped several times and was soaking wet all over.

Carolyn was fine, fortunately -- she couldn't have been face-down for more than four or five seconds, but the horrible impotent feeling one gets when trying to run in a nightmare is remarkably similar to the feeling one gets when trying to run through water.

When I showed up at my wife's deck chair, dripping wet, Carolyn chirped, "Daddy took me out of the pool."

Fortuantely I had handed my fanny pack (containing my PDA and a digital camera) to my wife before taking my daughter to the pool, but the contents of my wallet were soaked. Small price to pay.

It must be the painkillers, we thought. Or maybe hypoxia, the oxygen deprivation in the blood that often contributes to delirium in sick people. Or that the cancer now was destroying his mind, just as it had racked his body.

But then our cousin Lynne mentioned that her parents had done a lot of similar traveling in the last days of their cancer battles. Uncle Larry (Lynne's father) had insisted that his passport and fanny pack be kept by his bedside; he was intent on keeping an imaginary 3 p.m. appointment with the emperor of Japan, where I was living then and where he had hoped to visit. He too had asked for a map — of Japan. Aunt Lois, who had died four years before, had talked about needing to catch a train, asking Lynne to buy her a ticket.

There seemed to be a pattern. --Valerie Reitman --Taking Life's Final Exit (Yahoo!|LA Times)

I don't usually blog articles that will expire soon, but this one really caught my interest. Very intersting.

The grading system for courses offered by CCS is focused on accomplishment, a combination of Pass/No Record grading and variable unit credit. For each course taken in the College, the student enrolls for a specific number of units of work that he or she plans to do during the quarter, from 1 - 6 units. (See Course Descriptions and ask your instructors regarding unit level guidelines in various courses). At the end of the quarter, the instructor of each course determines the number of units each student'swork merits (based on the quantity of work done at high quality level). If you earn no units of credit, the course does not appear on your transcript. You should request specific information from your instructors at the beginning of each quarter on what is expected in order to earn the number of units you desire. Though there are no letter grades in CCS classes, students are expected to maintain a high level of quality in all the work they do to fulfill academic requirements. --CCS Grading System (UCSB College of Creative Studies)

Fascinating. Students still need 180 credits to graduate, but a bright student could theoretically graduate in half the time.

I have done something like this on a small scale at my previous job, giving students some flexibility in setting their own deadlines. I did have some problems with students turning in no work for a month, then doing all-nighters to turn in three papers in the last week of class -- expecting me to get them back in enough time for them to revise and resubmit the next week. So I had to set some limits -- e.g. students couldn't submit paper 2 until I've approved paper 1; they couldn't submit first drafts of paper 2 and paper 3 in the same week (since the point of paper 2 is to give the student practice that will help them produce paper 3).

I spent a lot of time explaining this method, and I think it really did help me spend most of my time with those students who were most motivated to learn, but I'm not sure it helped those students who overestimated their abilities and only got serious about the course in the last month. Some of the same students who hated being nagged early in the term complained that I gave them too much freedom... and the more I tried to emphasize the importance of sticking to deadlines, the more negative my "welcome to the class" lecture got to be.

I really think the sequenced assignments were a beautiful thing, because they established a direct link between a student's academic habits and their consequences. Students who chose to take a little vacation ended up running out of time before they got to the major assignments -- and the class was designed to reward those who kept up... which is a polite way of saying it was designed to make sure that student procrastination didn't create extra work for me.

My thought is, in a writing class, I'd rather a student write and re-write two papers until they are A-level quality, even if it means they run out of time and can't even start the next two papers, than get Cs on all four papers without revising any of them. I greatly simplified my system when I came to Seton Hill, but I'd like perhaps to bring it back on a smaller scale.

Link found via Jocalo.

Some interviewers have been known to call job seekers at home and pose as telemarketers to gauge how those candidates react. Are they rude? Do they yell? Or are they polite but insistent that they don't want to purchase anything?

How a candidate deals with an annoying telemarketing call tells the company something about how you would deal with an annoying client.

One of Lance's favorite behavior tests is to drop her pen at some point during the interview and see how the candidate reacts. She makes sure to drop it an equal distance from herself and the job seeker.

"When they are telling you that they are customer-oriented and you drop your pen and they don't notice or they don't pick it up, it's a disconnect between how they are and what they are saying," she said. --J. D. Burrough --Interview twists, turns (AZ Central)

Interesting... in Death of a Salesman, when Willy is coaching his son Biff about what he imagines will be a life-changing business appointment, Willy says if something drops off the boss's desk, don't pick it up -- they have office boys for that sort of thing. Willy probably would have failed many other tests, too.