turtles

This week has been ridiculously busy. Dr. Bakkal offered to vouch for me for the semester in Canada opportunity again; this time I had to turn him down straight off because I'll be spending next year working on my honors thesis.

Meeting tomorrow with the China group to clean up this whole mess with our paper. Professor Chen added a section and wants us to 'edit' it for him (i.e. rewrite it, probably). Also apparently we are supposed to be presenting at some thing somewhere. He has not told anybody where, when or how we are getting there. Being as thus far he has illuminated his thought process to be 'I assume the school will pay for everything and I have to do nothing', I think actually whatever it is he wants us to go to...will not happen. None of us are paying our own way to go present these results; they have all the rigor of a wet paper bag.

Picked up another student to tutor for Macro Ec. Woke up today to ten or so emails from him, all reading the same thing, just rephrased. Is email becoming the new text message? I mean, I know most people can get them on their phones now, but...really? At least the other guy I'm tutoring is doing really well now. And apparently we're all friends now too, IDEK, we stood around after class today and chatted, it was so weird. By which I mean I was not awkward at all. That was the weird part.

Today's lecture in Psychology of Learning was on positive punishment (ex. physical or verbal punishment, as opposed to negative punishment which would be removing privileges). Mass stupidity ensued. A good 50% of the class refused to understand the teacher repeatedly telling them that punishment is the least effective way to teach any person or creature. It got to the point where students would raise their hand and start off with "I understand punishment isn't the most effective way, but you're saying if I spank my son immediately without warning him first it would be more effective?". And then another one took over class to hold forth on how you should never spank while angry.

It's quite interesting because I've found adult students are the most unbearable in psych courses, despite being the wiser ones everywhere else (in business courses, for example, it's generally the kiddies just out of high school that hijack the lecture to complain about how equal opportunity employment has led to white people not being able to get jobs). I wonder if this is a function of generation, or if people become more fixed in their opinions of how the mind works as they get older but are still willing to accept they don't know about other things.

Oh, also, got irritated about my results on my first presentation for this semester's speaking-intensive course. I got an A. In the 'work on for next time:' slot I only got 'keep up the good work!'. I did far from my best on that presentation. I guess it's only just hit me that I'm not going to get much guidance on improving my public speaking here, not when the guy who just put paragraphs of text on his slides and read them directly off the slides got a C. I would have flunked him. But it's hard for me to tell sometimes when I am having reasonable expectations and when I am being elitist. Anyways, I'll just have to work on my improvement myself; ocelotofdoom pointed out to me that I know what I did badly on in that presentation, so I can work on it. I'm still not sure how to improve beyond what I already know unless I want to start picking up communications courses.

Okay, enough of my whining. Musicshare!