psychology
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The Uses of Boredom
I became a reader because I was bored. I learned to read when I was about four years old, but, like most children, I read only picture books until I was seven. My parents brought me to the library every two weeks, and I filled up on library books at school as well, but picture Continue reading
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What’s to Like about School?
Did you like school? (Or, if you’re a student now, do you?) I’m reading Daniel T. Willingham’s Why Don’t Students Like School? It’s totally readable and very interesting, and I’ll post a review when I’m done. (I’ve also joined a reading group to discuss it, over at Dangerously Irrelevant; if you’ve been wanting to pick Continue reading
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Who Are Your Gurus?
This week has been an exercise in detachment. I’ve been grading very long and sometimes very difficult final papers, and in a moment of hair-tearing frustration, wrote the post 10 Reasons I Hate Grading Your Assignment. When it went up here and, especially, on my Open Salon blog, there was an outpouring of hilarity, with Continue reading
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will more school make us better people?
I’m concerned about President Obama’s assertion that children should spend more time in school. I absolutely disagree; I think children should spend a lot of time learning – in fact, I think they should spend all day, every day, learning, as should adults – but that “school” is only one, and not always the most Continue reading
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Formal-Operational vs. Post-Formal Thinking: Brains Grow Up
Formal-operational thinking is absolute, and involves making decisions based on personal experience and logic. Post-formal thinking is more complex, and involves making decisions based on situational constraints and circumstances, and integrating emotion with logic to form context-dependent principles. The distinction is a useful thing to understand when dealing with emerging adults. For example, adolescents have Continue reading
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Primary and Secondary Intellectual Abilities in Adolescence
Primary intellectual abilities include number skills, word fluency, verbal understanding, inductive reasoning, and spatial orientation. These abilities improve until early middle age, and then begin to decline. There are cohort patterns where strength of primary abilities are concerned – for example, our grandparents were better at math than we are because they had less access Continue reading
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Ethnic Identity Formation in Adolescents
According to one theory, there are three important phases of ethnic identity formation: a phase where ethnic identity is not explored or considered important; a phase where individuals begin to explore their ethnic roots; and a phase where ethnicity takes an important place in the individual’s self-concept. The theory argues that a strong sense of Continue reading
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Characteristics of Adolescent Thinking
There are four important characteristics that distinguish adolescent thinking from more mature thinking: adolescent egocentrism (intense preoccupation with one’s own feelings and lack of connection to feelings of others), imaginary audience (the belief that one is the focus of others’ thinking and attention), personal fable (the belief that no one else can possibly understand one’s Continue reading
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Identity Achievement and Emerging Adulthood
Emerging adults need to be recognized for who and where they are. They also need to be encouraged to recognize themselves for who and where they are, and not be too hard on themselves. Many CEGEP students seem to feel that they need to be more focused and committed than would be adaptive at this Continue reading
About Me
My job is to teach people to read and write; aside from that, I like to learn things.
Classroom as Microcosm 