Posts filed under 'University (Studies and Classes)'
I heard a rumour today that the main reason the University of Toronto converted their full-year introduction to psychology course to a half-year course was that students were doing too well in the second year psychology courses. That’s right. They were simply too well-prepared, thus why not take the (apparently well-performing) foundational course and condense it so that people do worse.
Now, I don’t really know if it’s true. But I know it’s not impossible. After all that’s what bell-curving tests is all about isn’t it? — about maintaining that bell-curve distribution.
And the friend who was telling me this today said, “I mean I know they need to do this kinda thing because you want your mark for UofT to mean something”…and I know what he meant…but I got to thinking…
What if all the foundational courses were brilliant? What if all the intelligent people who were accepted into the University of Toronto were presented with what they needed to achieve at the greatest potential possible? Then maybe sure, everyone who went here would get good marks, but that would just mean that everyone went to a school that was so dedicated to the development of knowledge and education that everyone performed outstandingly.
Instead of what high marks from this kind of place mean now, which is something like: you’ve done well despite our attempts to hold you back; you are one of the elite few on the top end of the bell curve. Well done.
November 8th, 2007
Tonight I am studying for a test in my course on the Psychology of Language, and I’m not convinced it will go well, but what can ya do.
The text book is really bad. It contains information about studies that demonstrate the types of sentences that are most difficult for people to read (convoluted with usage of the passive voice), and uses them everywhere. It’s also full of false claims, bad assumptions, and has the odd spelling error.
I also have complaints about Chomsky. Which is odd, cause generally when I interact with him it’s in books on American policy etc., and I love him. But from time to time I have to deal with his linguistics and I just get all irritated and frustrated and ranty. Yes you beat Skinner and the behaviourists–and for that I love you…but goddamn, what’s the use of a linguistic model with no basis in psychological reality? How can you not even aspire to have your model be tested, potentially falsified and built on? Are you really content just building big towers of hypothetical linguistic theories that depend on everyone going “shhhhhh…don’t listen to the psychologists….they just don’t understand..”???? ARGH! I would love linguistics to be a science, I would. But it’s not anywhere close right now.
My textbook juxtaposes linguistics and psychology by saying that linguistics comes from the tradition of rationalism, while psychology is rooted in the tradition of empiricism and that this is at the root of their disagreements. …as if psychology could really get by without philosophical frameworks (not that it doesn’t try sometimes), and as if anything (including linguistics) can aspire to being a science if it doesn’t function empirically.
Other things that are atrocious:
1. This whole thing about waterboarding…It’s everywhere I look right now. Protesters in the states. Matt Good is writing about it. Jon Stewart is talking about it. The CBC is reporting on it. Seriously people (read: certain American politicians) there’s nothing to debate. There’s no semantic ambiguity. Waterboarding is torture and you are actively using it. That is disgusting. Seriously, it makes me feel rotten and disgusting in the pit of my stomach. Liberty? Human Rights? …fucking hell. BESIDES WHICH, it has been proven that torture does not yeild accurate information. It just yeilds whatever it takes to get the torture to stop. So do you just do it for the kicks? My god we can be sick, sick animals.
2. Canada now allows Drug companies to advertise. Lovely eh? Isn’t that just what you want? We don’t have enough commercialization as it stands, I think it would be fantastic to have drugs advertising directly to people. Cause really you want people to choose their own drugs. Med school doesn’t really make you any more aware of how the body works and how illnesses ought to be remedied. Besides it’s important that a large portion of the income drug companies have get directed into marketing and advertising (over 50% for some companies in the US), because, after all–you wouldn’t want them to redirect that money into research and development….
So, while I’m linguistically ticked off at him, in the spirit of my last two complaints I’d like to direct you to Chomsky’s new book: Failed States. It’s really brilliant. The main premise is that using the standards that America uses to assess states to declare them “failed” and thus justify their involvement in their administration, America itself is a failed state. Well written. Lots of interesting information–like did you know that of all the countries which sent doctors to the region affected by the Tsunami Cuba sent the most government sponsered ones? And that of those something like 47.9% were female? …anyway. I think it’s his strength.
November 7th, 2007
Those of us living in Ontario (and possibly a bigger radius, frankly) are probably familiar with the age(/decade)-old Staples Business Depot ads equating back-to-school with “the most wonderful time of the year”. When I was a young’un I remember finding the TV ads of mothers skipping down the isles of the store vaguely offensive, but today I went to the U of T Bookstore (heinously overpriced, for the record) and collected my books for the upcoming year, and as I carried my parcel over to the basket on my bike that old Christmas song was playing happily in my head.
I love piles of new books. I love Tables of Contentses. I love looking at the closed covers on books with uncreased spines and imagining what knowledge will be imparted to me throughout the year as I happily work my way through their pages.
In summary: I am a nerd. And I’m loving it.
August 29th, 2007
Lately I have been becoming more firm in my disillusionment with science. It has existed in varying forms since about 5 years ago when I encountered Jung’s comparison between scientific norms and personal myths. This last month or two I have been sensing that science, as it is practiced or revered by the majority of people (i.e. undergraduate students/degree holders and the general public) is a relatively awe-crushing pursuit. It is true that it is not like that by necessity–so much as by chance, or as a result of the nature of humans to be more in awe of that which they don’t understand.
I think the key is that a true scientist, or especially a true philosopher of science, is aware of the limitations of his field and how little we have actually come to ‘know’. Where as most of us out in the world tend to treat science as cold hard fact.
I turn to John Maynard Keynes:
…there is no direct relation between the truth of a proposition an its probability. Probability begins and ends with probability. That a scientific investigation pursued on account of its probability will generally lead to truth, rather than falsehood, is at best only probable.
July 23rd, 2007
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.
April 4th, 2007
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.
March 11th, 2007
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.
January 10th, 2007
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.
December 12th, 2006
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
September 21st, 2006
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.
August 30th, 2006
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