Scientific Literacy

I teach Introductory Psychology as a general education course on a campus populated mainly by engineers--which is to say that few, if any, of my students in a given section are psychology majors. It is therefore my goal to teach, above all else, the practical uses of psychology in everyday life. I want them to learn how their minds work, how others' minds work--how to make better decisions, how to understand attempts to influence them by advertisers and politicians. 

To that end, after the Las Vegas shooting we had a big discussion on guns in America, using data from the American Psychological Association's report on gun violence. (It's available on their website, here, free for anyone to read.)

I originally made the decision not to carry my gun on campus based, in the end, on this one simple consideration (see previous post): To walk into the classroom with a gun on my person is a statement that I am willing to shoot a student under whatever circumstances I believe, in the heat of the moment, justify it. Which I most definitively am not. It also seemed weird to me to carry a gun to defend myself against my own students: What kind of a world. . . ? etc. And I've never thought arms races were a good idea.

However, as I read studies and considered the material in the text while preparing my lectures, I found support for this stance from entirely other than a philosophical point of view. To wit:

1. We make certain cognitive errors in locating the dangers in our world. For example, we are more likely to perceive a person of another race as a threat or to interpret their actions (especially if ambiguous) as a threat than we are a member of our own race--even if the latter is in fact more dangerous. This speaks directly to the point often insisted upon that the only answer to a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun: We don’t have a clue who the bad guys are and aren’t, nor do we always act “good” ourselves. There are several separate but related research streams that have all come to the same conclusions: The data that Harvard University researchers have collected, for one, showing how common implicit bias is and how it drives behaviors like shooting unarmed people; a study showing that white people can't accurately gauge Black people's potential for violence, for another; and shoot/don’t shoot research.

2. The media and advocacy groups like the NRA perpetuate the myth that it is The Other who is dangerous to us when in fact (especially in the case of women) it is most likely that if you are going to be assaulted, raped, or murdered, it’s going to be by a member of your own family or someone trusted like your boyfriend. This is easy to do as the media tends not to report routine everyday domestic violence, suicide, or accidental shootings: They do, however, report Stranger Danger type crimes and due to the representativeness heuristic we, the public, believe these are, well, representative. This speaks directly to the argument advanced when Campus Carry was in the legislature that students need to be able to protect themselves at school just as they are legally able to elsewhere. No, it seems, they do not. Here or elsewhere.

3. The NRA (and gun manufacturers) perpetuate the myth that a gun is a good tool for self-protection, protection of your family, or to safeguard your property. One of the ways that they do this is by reporting individual cases where someone did use a gun in self defense: We seem to be hard-wired to use heuristics that leave us thinking these incidents are representative even though they are tiny in number compared to gun violence statistics overall. In fact, owning a gun actually increases the odds of someone in the household being shot and killed whether by suicide, accident, or domestic violence.

So I decided that, like anyone else within one and a half standard deviations of the means, (1) I don’t need my gun at all, never mind on campus; (2) It is actually a risk to me or to anyone who might be visiting my household--or classroom, God forbid--especially to children and teens; (3) If trained police officers can’t exercise judgment untainted by unconscious racism in a shoot/don’t shoot scenario, I can hardly expect that I, a civilian, would. 

Bottom line, I am less likely to use a gun against a Caucasian to save my own life, and more likely to use it against an African American or Hispanic or whatever when that person is innocent of any evil intent toward me. Statistically speaking, really, I’m more likely to accidentally shoot myself or someone else in the household or use it to kill myself than I am to use it in self defense.

And so I decided, based on science, that there is no mythical "Good guy with a gun." There are only idiots with guns. 

 

Could I? Should I? Would I?

"We discuss sensitive and highly charged topics in my classroom," wrote a professor who's just resigned his tenured position, "concerning anti-religious bias, racism, sexism, classism and many other indexes of oppression and discrimination. Students need to be able to express themselves respectfully and freely, and they cannot do so about heated topics if they know that fellow students are armed. . . ."

Something I'm seriously pondering as I half-heartedly look for another job this summer. Because I do teach social justice--in fact, have joined a social justice learning community at KSU in order to hone my skills--and this is a consideration for me, too.

Is it going to be safe this fall for me to challenge students to think, to question their assumptions, to analyze their prejudices? Will it be safe for me to confront cheaters? To fail people who cannot or do not do the work? Is it going to be safe for students if I encourage them to challenge each other in classroom discussions and exercises as I have done in the past? Can they still speak up about their own experiences as racial and sexual minorities? And don't tell me that it's always been a small risk: I know that. I also know that if the single best statistical predictor of death by gun is presence of a gun, then campus carry laws can only elevate the risk.

Should I spend $5-800 on a bullet-proof vest, if only to guard against accidental discharge? (That's a month's salary--or more--for one class.) I'm only half joking here: These are kids we are talking about, after all, people of an age at which rates of accidental injury and death are higher than for any other group. And this is Georgia we're talking about, where no training at all is required for permitting.

You can't take a loaded gun into a range or a gun store or show on your hip or in your purse or any way other than in its case. You have to show that it's unloaded, and at shows they even tag it to show it's been inspected and put a plastic thing through the trigger guard to prevent it firing. Why should I not take the same precautions in my classroom? Because unfortunately, under the law, I will not be allowed, that's why. And would I want to start every class by checking guns at the door, even if I could? No. It's ludicrous. I am not Wyatt Earp.

Should I carry a gun of my own? Could I, would I, shoot a student, even in self defense? (Probably not: It is a central tenet of Buddhism, according to my admittedly limited understanding, that my life is not inherently more valuable, for any reason, than that of any other sentient being. And as the effects of my late husband's NRA-induced paranoia wear off with the passage of time, I am progressively more and more inclined to just "peace out".) Would I, could I, shoot a student to protect a whole classroom full of innocent kids? Possibly. Probably, even. Do I want to place myself in such an ethical quandary? That would not seem wise. "If you don't want a slip, stay off the ice," advise AA old-timers.

And how would my kids feel about a professor with a gun on her hip? What would it be like for them to know that I, by even bringing one onto campus, have thus publicly stated my willingness to kill one of them or one of my colleagues under whatever I judge, in the heat of the moment, to be the "right" circumstances? What the hell kind of message is that sending? Especially to Black students, given what I teach about implicit biases! Would any of them, Black or white, feel free to challenge me? To question me? To argue with me? No. I can't imagine that they would: It's already enough of a challenge, given the power differential between professors and students, under normal circumstances. As it is, most of the challenges directed at me only come from white males.

No, the idea of going into the classroom or even into office hours armed is ludicrous, appalling even. And ultimately unacceptable. Carrying one in the van for personal protection on campus is only slightly less objectionable. It's like Mutually Assured Destruction. I can ramp up my defenses, thereby increasing the danger to us all, or I can start the disarmament process. It's got to start somewhere; might as well be with me.

Question:

Do you read your student evaluations?

Do you even open the envelope?

Excuse me?!

This month’s issue of Teaching of Psychology, the official journal of the Society for the Teaching of Psychology--ToPs for short--(Division Two of the American Psychological Association) arrived Saturday. And Dear Readers, I am not a happy camper, because it contains an article touting what is to my mind a juvenile, offensive role play exercise for teaching psychodynamic personality theory in a manner “engaging” to undergrads.

In brief, students role-play the part of the professor’s psyche (including his leering id, run amok at the local mall). Roles are "randomly assigned" to id, ego, and superego groups from among student volunteers, which presumably means that some women land in the id group, the instructions for which are as follows:

Welcome to my psyche! Your group is going to be my ID! Imagine that I am at a shopping mall and have just seen an attractive woman walk by. Remember that the ID is driven by the pleasure principle and seeks to have physical needs met immediately--with no regard for consequences. Your group's task is to come up with ideas of what the ID might "say" in this situation (Segrist, 2009; p. 52).

Excuse me?! I got this far before I threw the article on the floor for the first time.

Examples of id comments: "Wow, look at THAT! She's HOT!" "THAT", mind you--not "HER". She's instantly reduced to a THING. And Segrist doesn't seem to see anything wrong with this. Defense mechanisms employed by the ego included denial, as in "she's not really that attractive" (Segrist, 2009, p. 52). What undergrad exactly does this 'engage'? Well, in case you were wondering, as I was, the author reports feedback from his students on the exercise.

Most of the students polled were majors in their junior or senior year.On a scale of one to five (the most positive rating), students rated the activity on average a 4.6 for enjoyment. Segrist did not report the range or quote any negative comments. Since 81.4% of Segrist's students are women, I have a feeling that when I post this blog entry, I will be told that these numbers prove that nobody was offended and that I should get over myself. (How much do you want to bet? I'm thinking of starting a pool.) I contend, however, that the numbers only show how oblivious young women have become to their own objectification.* Either that or how well-schooled, if you'll pardon the expression, they have become at not confronting sexism when they see it. Plus, without knowing the low end of the range, we don't know that nobody was offended. Somebody might have rated the exercise a 1--or worse.

But I digress. Back to the article. Segrist cautions his volunteers not to be "hostile" or "clearly objectionable" in their role-playing. Excuse me?! Is it not "hostile" by definition to objectify, rate, and thereby degrade female passers-by? Apparently not, since he quotes these in an article purporting to show how great his exercise is. Which leaves one therefore to wonder how he defines "objectionable" or what it takes for a comment to be "clearly" objectionable. And would it be ok to be vaguely objectionable? Or only mildly objectionable? Besides which, should not the very fact that you have to caution them be a red flag that what you are doing is not a good thing?

Segrist concedes that "comments generated by the id group in particular have the potential to be offensive to some students and disconcerting to any student who has been sexually victimized" (2009; p. 53). Does he mean the comments that are not "hostile" or "clearly objectionable"? Or is he, without realizing it, conceding that they all are likely to be just that, given the setup for the role-play?

And what does he mean by "potential"? You ask me, offense to any thinking female is guaranteed, not "potential". And "disconcerting" does not begin to cover the impact this exercise could have on a rape survivor (which I presume is what he means by the euphemism "sexually victimized". Future post: euphemisms for "rape"-- submit your favorites for inclusion therein.).

I can’t imagine being a student in his classes–oh, wait, yes I can. I’d feel objectified, threatened, insulted, discounted and disrespected. Intellectually and professionally, I’d feel like I’d just been completely erased. (Remember, this whole exercise is framed as "inside your professor's head," not "inside some dudely jerk at the mall's head".) I would, in short, feel instantly reduced to merely the means of some dude to "have physical needs met immediately--with no regard for consequences" to the "HOT", anonymized, objectified "THAT". As a woman, I would feel that way whether or not I were objectively "HOT". (I'm not--see RateMyProfessors.) Personal hotness is not the issue here: Objectifying and rating women is. I’d be mad as hell and might even walk out of class and go file a complaint.

Nor can I imagine what the editors and publishers were thinking–oh, wait, yes I can. I bet it never even occurred to them that this is not only offensive but also oppressive. Part of the way the game is played, of course, is that the oppressor gets to be in total denial of his oppressive behavior (nota bene, no ego- or super-ego-playing student seems to have pointed out to the id what a sexist pig it was being).

But wait. Maybe it did occur to someone at ToPs that publishing this article would not be a good thing. Of the 21 Consulting Editors, only six are women, but we are otherwise well-represented among the editorial board and predominate among officers of the Society. Maybe one of them did complain about this article, and was told to get over herself. Maybe she's why all those caveats appear in the Discussion section.

Not enough: The whole thing should have been shit-canned.

Dr. Segrist and esteemed members of the ToPs Editorial Board, my lecture on Freud is coming up in a few days. I wonder what the reaction of my students, and of my department Chair, would be if I used that exercise with young men as the target. Would they not see that as totally, unquestionably inappropriate? Not to mention, downright gross? Dudes, can you not see how much more inappropriate it is to target women in such an exercise? I wonder how many of my male students would be embarrassed or offended. How many of them do you think would feel free to say so, even anonymously? I would ask you to consider how much more so that is true for the members of an oppressed class. And then yank the article already.

*In the course of his article, by the way, Segrist notes, "I have a wife" (2009, p. 53)--not, "I am married." Woman as possession (as in, "I have a car, a house, and a dog, too"): I'm not even going to go there today. That is a topic for a whole 'nother post, and I have papers to grade. Maybe after I do the one on euphemisms for rape--don't forget to send your favorites to me at wood_virginia@bellsouth.net

Reference

Segrist, D. J. (2009). What's going on in your professor's head? Demonstrating the id, ego, and superego. Teaching of Psychology, 36, 51-54.

My apologies to every student upon whom I have ever inflicted these PowerPoint-isms. I promise to do better in the coming weeks.

How I spent my vacation

Claire Potter, over at Tenured Radical, turned me on to Scars of Sweet Paradise: The Life and Times of Janis Joplin, by Alice Echols when I put the word out a couple of weeks ago that I needed someone I could use as a model for my Personality students to follow in writing their papers. I'm about halfway through, and loving it. Janis's debut album, Cheap Thrills, came out when I was 16, and she had a helluva influence on me. Broke my heart when she died.

I anticipated that I would be able to mine her life for some good psychoanalytical stuff for the Theories class, but after that, I worried that there wouldn't be good material. My first surprise was what a hard worker she was: There's some good Trait Theory stuff to be mined there--not only Conscientiousness, but also Neurosis and Openness (to Experience). But the real surprise is the cultural angle: She was a Boomer, of course, so before she was in the thick of things in the Haight, she'd had that whole 50s-suburban-middle-class-nuclear-family-upbringing thing going on. And of course Big Brother was one of the original San Francisco bands, so she was turning pro just as everybody out there was going psychedelic and plugging in. The cultural angle shouldn't be a surprise, but being a late Boomer myself and having come of age in the 60s, I tend to forget what a revolutionary experience that would have been for her.

In other words, to my amazement, I am less than halfway through the book and have three sets of theories I can apply to Janis's life to teach my class

1. how to use theory to explain a real human being,
   
2. how to find relevant empirical literature, and
   
3. how to pull it together for a paper.

And it's such a fun read! Some of the history I knew of course, having lived through it, but some of it was before my time, so the book has been providing some fascinating background to my own adolescence.

Thanks, Dr. Potter!

RateMyProfessor.com

One of my students told me today that I already had a good rating on RateMyProfessor. This surprised me, as I have only been back teaching since January. But I went to look tonight, and sure enough, there I was.

There's good news, and bad.

One of the ratings was from 2002: "Awesome. Really knows her stuff, makes it interesting." I got good ratings on helpfulness. Unfortunately, I'm also rated as "easy". (I'm not easy: I flunked somebody last Spring, fer cryin' out loud!) So of course my overall ratings were good.

But the worst part, worse even than being described as "easy", was that I got zeroes on "hotness". Now I realize that at 56 I can't look very hot to most of my students. But zeroes?

Reassigned Time: On Guiding Students Through the Research Process

A few months ago (geez, has it already been that long?) I posted a whine on teaching senior undergrads to write. Dr. Crazy has tackled this task in a recent post, and does it ever so much better than I did.

For one thing, she's not whining. Read Reassigned Time: On Guiding Students Through the Research Process, and the Comments.

Since my first post, I have had students in my Ethics class turn in four Reaction Papers. The average grade on the first paper (and the mode, too, while we are at it) was the moral equivalent of an "F". (Among other problems, despite most of them having already been through the Research Sequence, they still don't know APA style.) I was horrified, and they were pretty freaked, too.

Slowly, the papers began to improve--gradually at first, then radically between the 3rd and 4th assignments. I suspect that part of this is that now they realize I'm dead serious about the grading (one student admitted to me that he hadn't even opened his style manual since the course began), but the biggest part I think is that they have heard the same things ("You need a thesis statement in your first paragraph. Really. You do.") three times. Now they're gettin' it.

This last crop has actually been fun to read.

The whine, I now believe, was the result of inexperience. I don't feel so bad after reading the posts on Dr. Crazy's blog about teaching writing. In fact, it feels to me now like an appropriate part of my task (as in, "Writing Across the Curriculum"--why not?) and no reason it can't be as fun and productive as arguing about whether psychologists should be working at Guantanamo.

Stupid questions

I always tell my students that there is no such thing as a stupid question. And they don't ask stupid questions. They come prepared, which is to say that they ask questions that expand on or fill in gaps in the assigned readings. There is always something useful to the rest of the class embedded in every question. The worst experience I have with their questions is that sometimes they are ahead of the syllabus and I have to say, "Well, we're gonna address that, so hold that thought."

Then I attend a workshop with my peers and am reminded just how stupid a question can be. I went to one such event yesterday. About halfway through the morning a woman in back piped up with a request that we hold questions 'til the end: She was kinda concerned that everyone would be mad, but a bunch of us cheered.

So apparently I'm not the only one who was seething with impatience over the sheer stupidity of some psychologists. My graduate-school experience was similar in that there were always a few people in every class who were not prepared and would ask questions for which the answers were right there in the assigned reading! I wanted to scream sometimes.

Then there's always the one participant who isn't really asking a question, but who wants to argue with the presenter. Or the one who is actually just seizing an opportunity to show everyone else how knowledgeable they are on the subject at hand. They aren't actually asking questions either, but making speeches--sometimes quite long ones. Somebody oughtta do a study on inappropriate participant behavior. There's grant money in there somewhere, I'm sure.

Yesterday's experience also reminded me about the importance of crowd control. People who present a couple of workshops a year do not learn how to manage a classroom, and yesterday's expert was no exception. As an adjunct I had to learn pretty quick. It's not pretty: Sometimes I resort to yelling, "HEY!" in my command voice. But it gets the job done.

Now THAT'S adjunct abuse!

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/09/11/adjunct

Mooning gets professor fired

Call me a Pshrinking Violet, but I think I won't try this.

You can read the whole story at Inside Higher Ed
but the gist of it is that the dude got fired for
mooning a room full of students and fellow
professors.

PV

Blonde moment, 33 copies

It never fails. I always leave for a trip knowing I've forgotten something, and it's kind of a relief when I figure out what that something is and it's a minor something, like a toothbrush, rather than some disastrous thing, like forgetting to unplug the iron.

My syllabi are something like that: There's always an error somewhere. This one says that my Ethics students' reaction papers should use their student ID numbers in place of the Running Head as their only identifier---which does me no good at all should the pages of a paper become separated, because the Running Head only appears on the front! I meant to say, "manuscript page header", which appears on every page.

E-mailed everybody and got that straightened out before the first paper is due. Heaved a big sigh of relief.

If that's my only misstatement, we'll be in good shape.

You Know It's a Monday When...

1. It's the first day of class, and you can't find your ID--which unfortunately, is also your key to your classroom.
2. You aren't even at your first class yet, and you're already getting e-mails from students saying that the book orders--for both classes, no less--are screwed up.
   

Professors From Hell

I'm really excited about school starting Monday. I love teaching.

When I went back to grad school (for my 2nd masters & my doctorate) my first professor on the first day was John P., Ph.D. John was, without question, one of the best instructors at any level on any subject that I have ever had. Watching him teach was like watching a piece of performance art--every single class, he gave his all. High energy, encyclopedic knowledge, a sense of humor, passion, style--that was John. And one day in class, I remember thinking, "That looks like fun."

My first year out of school, I was lucky if I had six clients in a week, so in order to keep body and soul together, I decided to look for part-time teaching work. As it happened, a local commuter college was looking for someone to take over a course at the last minute, and I got the job. But I had gone to a professional school, and they don't have any interest in teaching teaching, so I graduated without any experience at all. As a result, I was pretty awful. I read a joke to open my first class. But I was right about one thing: This is fun! I loved it from the get-go.

Now, as I wrap up preparations for starting another semester, I think not only about how I wish to teach, which is to say, 'like John', but also about the burden on me how not to teach. Which brings us to the first Professor From Hell. (Further installments to come.)

This gal nearly drove us all crazy. We were beginning a series of three classes about which I was pretty excited as the topic had not received much coverage in my first Masters degree program. I was looking forward to this class. Boy was I disappointed. This instructor was a student of the Dean's from her grad school days at his previous place of employment, and I believe he'd hired her because he liked her rather than for her talents she had as a teacher, since we could never detect that she possessed any.

In preparing for her lectures, she xeroxed the text, then literally cut and pasted sections of it onto legal pad pages and read it to us! Talk about tedious. Hour after hour, she would read. Watching her was more painful than watching grass grow. We asked her not to, but it made no difference. On she read, relentlessly. We complained to the Dean, but it made no difference. She kept on reading. This was back before everybody had cellphones in their pockets or laptops in their backpacks, so we were hard-pressed to find ways to entertain ourselves. Two or three people would fall asleep every class period. Our class clown tried to lighten things up, but after the first few weeks she took him aside during a break and told him if he kept it up all the professors in the department would hate him and it would affect his grades. This reduced him to gloomy silence punctuated by snoring, and left the rest of us to our own devices to stay awake.

I can't say I learned much on the topic in her class, but I did learn something about how not to teach: Every semester I vow that whatever else happens, "I will not be boring!"

Teaching

It's a sunny Saturday afternoon. There's just a few cirrus clouds floating high in the sky but I'm inside because of the bumper crop of mosquitoes produced by last week's rains.

I am alternately doing laundry and prepping for class. That's right: In a few weeks I will be back in the classroom, teaching ethics and theories of personality to undergraduates.

It's exciting. I love psychology, and I love teaching. It's fun reading the texts, tweaking my lecture notes, thinking about how I will present information and challenge students to dig into the material, integrate it, use it.

But last semester, my first time back teaching in over a decade, I found that even upperclassmen and women here are not doing college-level work, particularly when it comes to writing papers. My excitement is tempered somewhat by the need to figure out ways I can challenge the good students without leaving the majority floundering.

Some of my colleagues seem to be dealing with this problem by "dumbing it down" to the lowest common denominator. I have seen one syllabus for the personality course which has two single-spaced pages on how not to commit plagiarism. Others have students turn in papers at each stage of the writing process, from topic selection to final draft. We did that back in Mrs. Touchstone's 7th grade English class.

I am not willing to teach a middle-school-level class on how to write an essay. In the first place, I signed on here to teach college, not 7th grade. In the second place, some of these students will be starting work on their doctorates within a year: In my opinion, it's far too late to be cramming remedial English.

But what's the alternative? Wash them out? At this late date? It seems to me that the time for either remedial work or a washout is in their freshman year, not now when they are only months from graduating.

On the other hand, I once worked with a psychologist whose assessment reports were completely incomprehensible. I never received one that I didn't have to walk down the hall and around the corner to ask her to explain. And that's exactly how she got there, I'm convinced: Because her professors kept passing her along even when she couldn't do the work. What's worse, to get a license in this state you have to turn in a work sample: Which begs the question, did somebody else write up the case for her, or did the licensing board give her a social promotion too?

Somebody's got to be the one to say, hey, this kid can't cut the mustard.

I haven't had too much trouble with outright cheating, but I am mindful that it does occur--probably has in one of my courses and I just haven't caught it. Let me just say here that I find it especially mind-bending to be thinking how to prevent students from cheating, or how to catch them if they do, in an ethics class, for heaven's sake. I thought assigning lots of little reaction papers might do the trick, until I found websites offering reaction papers for sale. Is there no end to my naivete?

I knew you could buy a term paper, of course, but I have to admit that I really was flabbergasted to find that students would pay for a two-page essay. What am I supposed to do, "test" them during discussions to see if they've at least read, if not written, their own papers? I didn't sign up here to be a cop. That's what Teaching Assistants are for. I only wish we had a graduate department I could get one from!