A good youtube video for cognitive miser:
I also show a Where’s Waldo and talk about how we think — categorize, discard. I get them to describe how they go through the image trying to find Waldo.
And, to make things more interesting, I talk about “Hot” and “Cold” cognitions. Check out this research. Students found it interesting. There is also this Washington Post article I use for one of the paper options.
For Schemas, I ask them to list what characteristics make a dog. How do these differentiate from a cat? What is dogginess? I also ask them to close their eyes and picture a dog and ask them to tell me what they pictured. That is their doggiest dog (mine is a golden retriever).
If you were in any doubt, the job market sucks. Hard. Imagine waking up and not feeling so wonderful about yourself, as many ABD (and other grad students, and probably new faculty, and older faculty, and all people) tend to do now and again. You didn’t get enough work done this past weekend. Your not physically feeling the best. You are waiting to hear about a paper that you were told should have a decision any day now (over a week ago), and are now sure that you are being rejected because it seems that everything in your life is a fail. So you go and teach your class. And it goes okay, but not great, because you are in a negative place and can’t seem to get the energy up to normal level. And then, you go back to your departmental mailbox and discover two rejection letters from a University. Talk about kicking you when you are down.
The job market is psychological warfare. It is cruel. It’s enough to make you seriously consider another line of work.
But then you realize that you are qualified to do absolutely nothing else. And, even what you are qualified to do (data analysis, consulting, something like that) has been made into some special kind of hell because you would have to answer to someone else and do what they are asking you to do rather than your own work.
You see why I stopped blogging? I’ll be over it tomorrow, I’m sure.
Meanwhile, something actually worth reading can be found here.
Filed under: Random
Once Seasame Street picks up a meme, I think it’s time to abandon it. Can we replace Rick Astley with this:
Who do I call to make this happen?
In honor of the Scatterplot Mario Kart Wii tournament tonight (you going down, suckas), I thought I’d explain how I used Mario Kart Wii in the classroom. I hope to publish on this and present at ASA, but you get a short view of it here.
My wonderful co-author (Killa!) and I set up two MK Wii tournaments for my social psych students — 0ne control and one experimental. Basically, you lecture on minimal group dynamics (stress Sherif’s Robber’s Cave) and Tajfel’s experiments with under & over estimators and Klee v. Kandinsky. Then you have them do the dot estimation task (you can get slides here). When they arrive the day of the tournament(s), split them into teams based on over or under-estimators (really, it’s random, but you tell them that it’s based on score). You can also have a control tournament where you tell them that teams are random.
Then you play Wii. You have fun, encourage smack talk, and the like.
After the tournament, you have them fill out some kind of survey depending on what you want to stress (we used personality traits — likable, smart, etc. — but you could do resource distrubution if you wanted to use this for an inequality class). After that, you just do some simple data entry and analysis to compare different types of results. Show these and lead a discussion about them. What differences do you see? How does that vary between the “experimental group” or “random group?” Does it matter who wins? Then discuss how it’s different from minimal group paradigms (actually saw each other, knew who each other was, etc.). You can also ask how to increase differences (a game that calls for direct co-operation, like basketball, instead of taking turns) and eliminate them (through co-opperating with each other to beat the instructor. I did have one student play me, he kicked my butt).
Great news! This is actually a justifiable method. In a pre-test & post-test quiz, students who actively participated in the tournaments improved their grades MORE than those who were simply in attendance to listen to both lectures (the pre-test and post-test lecture days). I won’t present the statistics here, but there is clear evidence that playing Mario Kart Wii IMPROVES GRADES!!! (Jury’s still out on whether it improves evaluations.)
Filed under: in the news
Olberman will have him on again tonight. I had a feeling in my bones this was going on. Blue was really depressed. He was still holding on to hope that we had some kind of civil rights. Ha. Perhaps we’ll get them back now. Watch.
Filed under: Random
Spam:
Don’t mind if I do.
My President is Black too
Kristina B.’s gems
In other news, posted over at Racism Review today. No cross-posting as I’m still trying to keep this blog hidden from my students (got to try to keep it some kinda backstage).
My students didn’t really enjoy it, but it allowed me to look like a dork for them. So, that was funny at least, even if this wasn’t:
I like giving explanations in flowchart or picture form. Here is SSI:
And Stryker’s Identity Theory:
For exchange theory, I showed a variety of different network shapes. I then asked for volunteers and put them in these following networks:
I then asked them to exchange note cards, in the way exchange theory does (limited number of exchanges, want other people’s paper) and showed who in the network had power. I also talked about network breaks in the Y shape. They seemed to enjoy this. I’m sure some has written up how to do this for Teaching Soc or something, but I just put it together for myself.
Filed under: Race & Ethnicity
Religion & Ethics Newsweekly has this video (8 min, 24 secs) about the victory of Obama and MLK, Jr. The message? It’s a great time for America, but that “the road ahead will be long.” The politics of hope and how hope was redefined from a wish to a possibility with Obama.
See the link for the video and transcript.
On the site there are links to the full interviews with the people in the video.From this interview, with Harold Dean Trulear, assoc. prof of applied theology at Howard, we have:
Q: Is there a danger for all communities, for all different racial groups, that people do think something is over now? We’ve ended a chapter and so the work is all done?
A: I think that’s right, and what I tell people is not so much that when we get a black president things will be different, but when I don’t have to teach my sons as a part of their driving lesson how to be pulled over by the police, when I don’t have to warn them about the dangers of driving while black, then I think we’ll be somewhere. But the presidency is—it’s in a big place, it’s in a high place, it’s in a somewhat distant place. There are still places in this country where the nuts and bolts are still fundamentally racist, where the warp and roof of the lifestyle is still exclusivist and supremacist, and those parts of this country, quite frankly, in some cases seem totally untouched by this movement, or they see it as dangerous: oh, my gosh, what is this country coming to, and what’s going to happen to us now, we’re all going to hell in a hand basket. There’s enough of that in this country on the eve of this historic occasion for me to still give pause.
I’m starting to wonder if the real purpose of applying for jobs and post docs is not actually to get one, but instead to learn how to talk about your research in the “right” way. To frame it in terms of how sociologists talk. You write, rewrite, have others read and critique, read the way others write, and that gives you the type of words you are supposed to discuss your work in. How you are supposed to frame it.
And, I wonder more if this learning how to talk is one of the gulfs between teachers and students, academics and nonacademics, that Kristina B. was just talking about in the comments here.
I remember, and joked with my students, about learning the appropriate way to pronounce “status.” I had a few of them all confused for a while because I said status differently then they did. Just something so simple, but really speaks to professional socialization (of course, it was a teachable moment in a class where we discussed professional socialization). This change is so slow, it took me a while to realize that I was doing it. Starting to talk like a professor. Well, I guess it’s a good start. Now I just need to get the professorship to go with the big speak. And, for those that are wondering, I haven’t even had a sniff yet.
