Winning the Vote

In class today we were talking about the suffrigest movement in the UK. My prof was saying that her grandmother always used to say she would never forget the first day she went out to vote, refusing to allow her husband’s opinion to sway her.

“Before she died, she was around 100, she wasn’t going to mass anymore on Sundays, but by God she was out to vote in every election.”

Oh, the days of commitment to democratic responsibility.

Also Professor Ann Dooley rocks.

On Being Proud of What I Do.

I’ve noticed something recently. When people ask me what I study, I get bashful. I say “Cognitive Science”, and immediately clarify that I mean “psychology and philosophy”. Then, without looking them in the eye, I mutter and stutter something about not being able to get a job when I graduate because I’m unqualified for anything. Tonight I even said in a meek voice, as if asking a question “I think I’m looking to teach?”

I don’t know if it’s something I’ve just started to do, or something I’ve done for a while. I don’t know if it’s because I’ve lived in Japan where you have to be incredibly humble and self-deprecating, or if it’s because my sense of self-worth has taken a blow while I’ve been suffering from depression. …What I do know is that I thought long and hard about what I wanted to study and am very proud of the courses I have taken. I’m happy about what I study… and I’m excited and proud about the idea of being involved in education.

I need to stop waffling when people ask me what I do.

An Essay Complete

I just finished the most difficult essay of my academic career thus far.  It wasn’t really that hard.  It was just a second year paper on a Celtic myth.  In fact the prof even gave us a list of questions we could choose from to answer–and as a cognitive science student I haven’t had it that ‘easy’ as long as I can remember.  But it was not something I could deal with.

I never understood myths.  When I was very young I could never understand the parables in the Bible. I learned in Sunday school that one of the most amazing things about Jesus was that he spoke to the people in a way they could understand—but that always confused me, because he seemed impossible to understand: “Why did he not just say what he meant?” I used to wonder.  All this about seeds on paths and in thorns and in good soil, why not just talk about people who were or were not open to hearing and accepting the word of God? The Trinity was not a difficult concept for me even as a child, but Jesus’ sermons were impossible. 

Then as I got older my mother used to try to share her love for Roman and Greek mythology with my brother and I.  Again I was baffled.  All these stories about all these people doing all these different things and I just could not understand what any of it was supposed to mean.  Addition, subtraction, eventually algebra, biology and physics I could do, even philosophy and philosophy of religion—but myths, and legends no way.

Last year I took a psychology course in personality that opened my mind to a whole new world of understanding.  Relatively unconventionally Jordan Peterson taught us personality from a historical perspective.  In a field where many have stopped actively teaching the thoughts of Freud and Jung, Peterson took us even further back.  He showed us slides of artifacts from Egypt and medieval Europe exposing us to fundamental notions underlying the religions and myths of various cultures and how they could be related to Freud and Jung and modern personality theory.  He made us watch Pinocchio analytically, pausing it every few minutes to discuss archetypal characters.  Peterson helped us to understand that evolutionarily speaking the mind has not changed much in the past 250,000 years—and that we have a lot more in common with the ancients or those living in the middle ages than we may have previously thought.  We began to look at myths as people’s attempts to explain their experiences in life.  Just like the art of today, we began to understand myths as people’s insistence to struggle to put the ineffable into words.  He uncovered for us the wealth of information myths communicated to people within the societies they became popular in, as well as the wealth of information they have the potential of communicating to us if we look deep enough into them.

And it got me all intersted and stuff.  So I’m trying–my damndest.  And I’m learning alot.  But I think Peterson’s courses on the psychology of all of this will always remain my strong suit.

Exams

This one time I was burried in books for a solid week because I had an exam schedule tighter than I’ve had since highschool. The upside? I’m done now.

Also when I came out of my cuccoon there were timers on pedestrian crosswalks throughout the city. Next haitus I predict flying cars.

Problem Solving

There is a vast disconnect between the type of thinking that we are trained for in the public school system and the type of thinking that is expected of us in real life. In problem solving research in psychology the distinction is explained by the terms ‘well-defined problems’ and ‘ill-defined problems’.

In school we are given very well defined problems. Even the most complicated question about a train departing Chicago at 6am travelling at 80km per hour while another train departs New York at….(you get the idea), is very well defined. It may be difficult, but you have all the information you need, and once you’ve gone through the relevant math course you know the steps you need to apply. The difficult part is staying focused, and applying the steps without making any mistakes.

Real life is full of a differant kind of problem. Real life is full of very ill defined problems. “Get a good job”. “Find a life partner”. “Be a good person”. “Put together a report on XYZ”. These are problems we haven’t been trained for. They are problems that don’t have prescribable answers. They are the big real, important kinds of problems.

And yet when we sat down in class for problem solving, over and over again, what did we do?

“Class Susie has 5 oranges, and she gives 3 oranges to Sam. How many…”

I have encountered these ideas repeatedly in my courses with Dr. John Vervaeke. John is the academic director at a private highschool where he’s trying to apply knowledge gained in psychology research in teaching methods

On Thinking in Our Age

Michael Baigent on why the conclusions he, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln came to in ‘The Holy Blood and The Holy Grail’ hadn’t been uncovered before”

The answers to [this question], we realised, lay in our own age and the modes or habits of thought which characterize it. Since the so-called ‘Enlightenment’ of the eighteenth century, the orientation of Western culture and consciousness had been towards analysis, rather than synthesis. As a result, our age is one of ever-increasing specialisation. In accordance with this tendancey, modern scholarship lays inordinate emphasis on specialisation – which, as the modern university attests, implies and entails the segregation of knowledge into distinct ‘disciplines’. In consequence, the diverse spheres covered by our inquiry have traditionally been segmented into quite separate compartments. In each compartment the relevant material has been duly explored and evaluated by specialists, or ‘experts’ in the field. But few, if any, of these ‘experts’ have endeavoured to etablish a connection between their particular field and otheres that may overlap it. Indeed such ‘experts’ tend generally to regard fields other than their own with considerable suspicious – spurious at worst, at best irrelevant. And eclectic or ‘interdisciplinary’ research is often actively disocuraged as being, among other things, too speculative

I very seriously hope we are ready to start speculating again. All of this analysis is killing us.

Cutting Off My Nose to Spite My Face

Why do I always have to be so fucking stubborn? Why can’t I ever let a rational needs-based analysis focused on my longterm goals win out over my arrogance and opinions?

Why am I at a serious risk of failing a course that is based on incredably straight forward and simple material?

Fucking hell.

The contract between a student and a teacher

I feel like there is a contract implied between a student and her teacher. The teacher will do their best to communicate information to the students and to facilitate their learning, and the students will attend class and do their best to engage with the material the teacher is putting in front of them.

For this reason I often feel very guilty when I’m not on time for class, or when I don’t pay attention during lecture. But I resent when I know that my tardiness or boredom result from what I consider to be a breech of contract on the part of the lecturer…

When I am paying up to $500 for a class I feel like part of what I am paying for is an interesting, if not captivating lecturer–any less is a breech of contract. Considering I pay money for the text book above and beyond that which I pay for the course I feel like I should be exposed to material in lecture that I could not simply have gotten from the textbook at home by myself–not exposing me to such material is a breech of contract. Finally I feel as though I should not be treated like a highschool student. There should not be more than 5 minutes (tops!) dedicated to talking to me about preparing for tests or essay writing. To spend time on this is a breech of contract: You teach me the material–I’ll worry about the test.

I’ve had two really incredable professers who taught well and gave fair tests. Two. $500 a course. …ridiculous.

nature vs. nurture, boys vs. girls

“If a society puts half its children in dresses and skirts but warns them not to move in ways that reveal their underpants, while putting the other half in jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees and play ball and other oudoor games: if later, during adolescence, the half that has worn trousers is exhorted to “eat like a growing boy,” while the half in skirts is warned to watch its weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans trots around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially differant. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, spatial perception, and so on…there is no way to sort out the biological and social components that produce these differences, therefore no way to sort nature from nurture”
-Ruth Hubbard (1990) The Politics of Women’s Biology. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. 115-116

Just a Wednesday night

I want to write about how feminists are perpetuating patriarchy. I want to write about how by pushing for gender equality they themselves are actually quenching women. I want to write about how when they argue that women have been opressed by being kept out of managerial and high-paying jobs they are falling victim to the idea that those jobs are actually the good ones. I want to write about how feminists are being dooped by the patriarchal-capitalist system even as they try to fight it.

I want to explain all these ideas because I think it will help women, and because I think it will help our (very sick) society.

But I don’t now how yet.

p.s. Today a raindrop fell directly on to the tip of my nose, and it made me smile.