Archive for August, 2007
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Hash House Harriers in the news…
Two people who sprinkled flour in a parking lot to mark a trail for
their offbeat running club inadvertently caused a bioterrorism scare
and now face a felony charge.
What is America coming to?
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The absence of stress is stress
I got some very, very good news this week, hearing that I’ll get a grant to fund some research that I’ve long wanted to do, which I imagine I’ll be discussing in this space more in the months ahead. To get it, I needed to convince a Federal agency to fund work that doesn’t fit their set of goals, by arguing that it was important and that no one else would view it as their responsibility. Luckily they have a mechanism for thinking about such “unsolicited grants” once a year, using money they might have left at the end of the year.
What stimulated this post is the experience of waking up the next morning with the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life, feeling sick enough that I vomited and generally felt incredibly miserable. My doctor wife tells me it was a migraine, and I know have a deep new respect for everyone who suffers from those on a regular basis. She also said that it’s not uncommon for people to get headaches when a source of stress lifts. Interesting, and odd.
Of course, it could just be a sympathetic anticipation of having to actually do what I’ve committed to do. I’m pretty familiar with those kinds of (metaphorical) headaches, though, and it’s still a few days too early for that.
back to work…
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Kids today — a failure of perspective taking.
Yet another discussion of today’s “entitled” youth.
Personally, I don’t buy it. I was a bit worried in moving from the University of Illinois to the University of Michigan that I’d see more of this phenomenon, and I really haven’t noticed it.
Teachers and students have fundamentally different perspectives on the performance of an individual student in a classroom, a dynamic that Mr. Rogers has nothing to do with. When students receive a poor grade for a paper or exam, they note that they have often received better grades for work that required less effort or thought from their perspective, and they’re probably right. Hence it seems unfair. The instructor notes that other students in the class did better work, and so the grade seems fair.
My guess is that any instructor who believes as the author of that newspaper article appears to, that students who feel their work was graded unfairly have no basis other than “entitlement” for doing so, was probably once the same kind of student who couldn’t acknowledge that his instructor had different evidence and, hence, a different perspective.
This issue received a lot of research attention in the social psychological literature back in the late 1960s and early 1970s, although I’m out of town and can’t think of a citation now. Perhaps someone could add one to the comments.
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