Archive for September, 2003
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Non-monotonic development
As a college student many years, I vividly remember sitting in a meeting at a Quaker conference and heard a man (I think we as an administrator at Indiana University) describe spiritual life as a matter of learning, forgetting, relearning, forgetting again (and you get the picture). That was one of the most depressing things I could imagine hearing, in large part because it sounded true.
It’s amazing to me how much of life seems to involve learning the same thing over and over again. This is clearest, for me, in the domain of exercize and health, and is prominently in my mind as a I get ready to run this year’s marathon (the Twin Cities
Marathon on October 5—http://twincitiesmarathon.org/). Marathons serve as good indices of my physical health, and it’s interesting that my performance is as variable as it is. It certainly does get harder as I get older to get in shape and the consequences of mistakes loom larger. This year, for example, I broke my little toe walking around barefoot at home. Not a big deal, although it was surprisingly painful. But then I altered my running style enough that I was getting quite a lot of pain in other parts of my leg (something called the periformis muscle). Stretching helps—http://www.halhigdon.com/15Ktraining/Stretch.htm, but I just recently discovered that using a Nordic trak doesn’t require the movement that causes pain later on. That’s great, and it’s wonderful to be able to exercize for a long time without feeling it later on, but the really sad part is that isn’t as though I haven’t figured this all out before.
Perhaps by posting here I’ll have something to look back on later and feel even more stupid, or just recognize that there seem to be rhythms to learning and forgetting just as there to everything else in life.
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“I don’t do hypotheticals”
I heard some of an interview with Donald Rumsfeld by Jim Lehrer a few days ago (the Pentagon has the transcript online here: http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2003/tr20030911-secdef0665.html)
Rumsfeld has a distinctive way of doing interviews, where he asks most of the questions and answers them as well, but he must have a very commanding presence given the way no one seems to call him on some of the odd things he says. I was particularly struck by this interchange:
Q: Let’s cut to the crunch on this question. If in fact this team does not find any weapons of mass destruction, do you believe that would do serious harm to the credibility of the president and this administration and particularly on the—in the long run and when history looks back on this?
Rumsfeld: I mean, the intelligence that our country had has—was over a sustained period of time, it was validated by other intelligence services. I have to believe it was reasonably correct—obviously not perfect. No intelligence is ever perfect. And that as the reports come out, they will find evidence of the kinds of programs that Secretary Powell presented to the United Nations. That’s my—yes, I mean that’s what I believe.
Q: But if they don’t? Is that a problem?
Rumsfeld: I don’t do hypotheticals.
I think the fact that Rumsfeld and his crew “don’t do hypotheticals” is at the heart of the mess we’re in in Iraq. It is very clear from all that I read while this was going on, and sense, that they not only failed to consider what would happen if things didn’t go their way, but actively refused to listen, fired, or forced to retire people who were in a position to know what they were getting into.
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Corn in the Sky
This is a belated picture from the Urbana Sweet Corn festival, which includes an eerie illuminated ear of corn over Main Street.
Lots to do this week, including giving a lecture on Research Methods in Psychology 216, a big team-taught introduction to developmental psychology. One aspect of the course that I’ve found frustrating is a set of students who attend class regularly, write down everything the instructor says, and then do extremely badly on the exams. I’m convinced that the problem is that they have trouble thinking about how the information they read is going to be turned into questions that they’ll be expected to answer. If I felt that they were figuring out what the material might mean to them and their own interests and concerns, I wouldn’t feel quite as bad about the situation, but my impression is that it isn’t getting digested at all. Also, the state of Illinois is dramatically cutting aid to the university while limiting our ability to raise tuition. The upshot is that large lecture courses with multiple-choice exams are increasingly going to be the lot of our students. So this is a nut they need to crack.
With this in mind, I’m going to ask students to make up their own multiple choice exam questions from the chapter and lecture and post them on the course Blackboard web site. I’ll comment on the questions, and I’ll hope to pick a question from the set and include it on the exam. I’ll reward whoever comes up with a question I can use with a gift certificate to our local coffee shop. So it won’t affect their grades, but there will be some material reward as well as whatever educational gain comes from taking this stance on the material they read.
Of course, I expect that the same thing will happen that occurred when I gave an extra workshop on note-taking for this class a few years ago, that the students who participated were exactly the ones who appeared not to need it. But, particularly in a huge course taught in a large lecture hall where there’s a big gulf between students and instructors, there may be some merit in making clear that exam questions come from a cognitive process rather than descending from on high.
We’re also using a new book this year, Siegler, Deloache, & Rosenberg (2003), How children develop—http://www.palgrave.com/catalogue/catalogue.asp?Title_Id=1572592494, so I need to finish revising my lecture so that I can post the pdf note-taking file.