Finals Week Freak-Out Fest is on!!!!

And I'm amazingly calm about it...don't have a clue why. I just lay around, saying "Meh! Whatever!" I must have caught up on my sleep.

So next week I have bible study, my other research project, two classes, two papers, a theory of development to write, and various sundry readings.

I also have some weeding to do and bill paying to write out (I gotta start doing that online, usually I just wait until they call me and demand payment over the phone, hehe, just kidding...kinda).

I am still so tired

I've been testing so many people that my brain is getting fried. Gah! I need some time off to let my brain recuperate.

I'm so tired...

Ugh! This is one of the most unpleasant end-of-the semester crunches ever. Two major research projects scrunched into two weeks time. And all I want to do right now is sleep...

Sleeeeep!

In other news, I was awarded a graduate assistanceship for this semester, which means I will get reimbursed for half of my tuition. Sooo happy! The bad news is I'm going to have to work. Heh! Just kidding, well, not really. I'm just not in the mood to have my time taken up by something I'm not that interested in and that may never get published. The real issue is that I don't want to be doing some professor's project. I want to be doing my own. But, I'm getting paid, which is a God thing. Last Sunday my Pastor prophesied that somebody in the congregation should stop worrying about finances because God had it under control and all they needed to do was reach out and grab it. I didn't think it was me, because usually I'm too oblivious of my finances to worry about them, but it sure is more than a coincidence that the Monday following this, I find out that the department has money left over and they want to give it to me if I'd be interested. "Sure! Give me money, put it in my bank account. That's fine, I have plenty of available time to work for it his summer." God really does take care of me. I had some unexpected expences, and I thought that my bank account was going to go into the red soon. I was even afraid to check my balance. (Actually, I still haven't checked my accounts, but that's because I'm too consumed by school.)

I am experiencing sensory overload...

It is 3:30am and I can't sleep. So I figure I'll blog. Maybe it'll be therapeutic. Way too many things happened today, and I'm having a hard time absorbing it all. Basically, I have difficulty with extensive social interaction. I need to remove myself from the world occasionally and recuperate from normal goings-on. But today presented me with so much social stimulation that I just simply can't process it all. And I need to process it before I can move on (i.e., SLEEP!). So perhaps let me recount some of the highlights (or lowlights):

I checked my email this morning only to be affronted with an academic chastisement by the head of the participant pool. Apparently, we had made some mistakes and a few students went to the wrong room to participate in our experiment. Furthermore, I didn't post the correct room like I usually do. So many mistakes fell into place to land me in trouble. So he wrote me an email and sounded professionally angry. I ignored the email in the morning, but I was so angry and ashamed. I hate looking like a negligent, incompetent, dolt. So I fumed....

Then during class I couldn't concentrate because of that email. However, I made friends with somebody in class who is planning to use structural equation modeling (SEM) for his dissertation next year. I stayed behind to talk with him and the prof. We all decided that we should hold meetings every other week to discuss self-assigned readings on SEM. So I'm very excited about that.

Then I met with my research group, sans one individual who sent an email proclaiming the demise of our research (i.e., we might as well quit while we are behind). In other words, this person was emotionally reacting to the end-of-the-semester stress fest. So I critically analyzed his manifesto of doom with the other member of the group and decided to schedule a group meeting tomorrow morning with the premise that we shall move forward with testing whether this person wants to participate or not. I'm not really looking forward to this meeting.

Then I went to an awards ceremony with my friend, which was nice. I enjoyed meeting new people. Afterwards, we ran into someone who I shall call The Comedian. He mercilessly teased my friend to the point where I was getting a little shocked, although I knew it was all fine between them. It became a little overwhelming for me even though The Comedian was just being funny. This heralded my decline into sensory overload. I was running low on food and beginning to wilt.

I went to dinner with my friend, but I felt bad because he usually goes to dinner with his friend. I shouldn't feel bad, but I do. Normally, my day is over long before all this. I go home, veg, play on the internet, and unwind. But, I still had another research meeting later that night at around 8pm. We had planned to call people to participate in our study. I had a lot of fun chatting with my research friend before we got down to business. But, by the time we were done at about 9:45, my brain was dead and I had moved into my flighty, delirious, ridiculous state of mind in which I make unusually witty jokes and overly hilarious facial expressions. It's a wonder my research friend doesn't think I'm a little unhinged.

So here I am again at 4am, not the least bit tired, but begging myself to go to sleep for tomorrow will not be easy....

Almost 27 for real this time

Tomorrow is my birthday and I'm finally 27. I've been thinking I was 27 for the last 6 months. Ever since I met my prayer partner and learned that she is 27, I've been thinking of myself as 27, when I'm actually 26. Looking back into my childhood I realize why my age shifted in my mind. I've always been one year older than my friends. So now that I have a friend that is one year older than I, my psyche took over and dictated a new age to assure myself that, yes, all is right with the world.

I really must get it into my head that I'm going to turn 27 tomorrow and not 28. And I will finally be the age I've been thinking myself for the last 6 months. Ohh, this is so confusing!!

In a time warp

I had quite a fright this morning as I lay in bed. I thought that this was the last week before finals! Ahhh! How was I going to test everyone in two days this week? When was I going to prepare to meet with the teacher? How was I going to write one paper before I needed to write the other paper? What about that reaction paper and I still had readings for class!! But, I whipped out my laptop and realized I still have one more week. Huge sigh of relief...

But now I'm thinking that maybe I should write deadlines in my planner and start planning out a strategy for the end of this semester. Yeah, maybe that might be a good idea.

By the way...

Jesus died on the cross...

and rose to save the lost...

and it would all have been worth it,

if only one person was saved...

and that person was...

You.

Easter Sunday

Well, today was a lovely Easter Sunday. I really enjoyed the service. I got up this morning just wanting to worship God. So that's what I got to do at church; and it is so much more sweet to worship God in the presence of other believers who are worshipping alongside you. I don't think there is anything else in life that can really top that feeling, so I'm overjoyed to think that will be what Heaven is like, a bunch of believers worshipping God all day and all night.

Pastor's brother taught because Pastor was still on the mend from his illness. I can tell that God has given Pastor's brother a heart for the nation and revival and teaching others to be prepared to rise up as God calls them.

Pastor is feeling much better. I didn't realize that he was so sick, since I was away last weekend. Apparently it was very serious, but God has brought him through and shown him things in the process. You know you're dedicated when you can still manage to commune with God and learn of Him while you are in such a weakened state. I just thank God for my Pastor and this church. I thank God for the two year preparation time that He spent disciplining me before I got here as well! As Pastor says, God wants His children to become mature believers. I couldn't agree more, and I give God full reign to mature me as He will.

Happy Easter, everyone!

My wonderful little niece

I love my niece. I got to visit my family last weekend and I played with my three-year old niece. She is absolutely adorable. We were putting together a puzzle that was probably a little too advanced for her. So I began to analyze her behavior as she and I put the puzzle back together. It actually turned out to be wonderful fodder for my human development class the following Tuesday. We spent some time discussing how different theorists would have explained her behavior.

Interestingly, she would focus on one side of a puzzle piece and not integrate the rest of the sides to help herself orient the puzzle piece in order to fit it to the puzzle. She also was not integrating the second dimension of color.

Piaget would have suggested she was centrating on one aspect of the puzzle. Werner would have suggested she had differentiated the pieces, but not hierarchically integrated them. Pascual Leone would have suggested that she did not have enough M-capacity to hold all the different aspects of the task in working memory at once. Also, she was dealing with an affective component of the task because it was a Casper the Ghost puzzle and she was afraid of the large ghost eyes. She regulated herself by using self-talk, "This isn't a real ghost. It's okay. It's not real." The affective component would have drawn some working memory, thereby taking away from the available working memory for the task. Finally, Robbie Case would have suggested that she was operating at a unidimensional level and had not integrated the two to three dimensions required for optimal performance. Jeez! I love this kind of stuff!

I'm a little concerned...

I cannot even begin the fathom the magnitude of work I have left to do. Today I met with my research team to train them on the tasks we are going to administer to the (hapless) participants. One of the tasks is actually very difficult to administer. It is spatial span from the Wechsler Memory Scale. It actually requires a great deal of visual working memory to even administer. You must touch blocks in a predetermined order and then record whether the participant correclty touched the blocks in the same order. Then you have to administer it backwards (yeah, it's tough). Unforturnately, the task goes up to 9 blocks to touch which is the top end of the magical number 7 plus or minus 2 for short term memory capacity.

My concern is that the task won't correlate with the other task (which is the task we are trying to predict performance on). The reason it might not correlate is that we make mistakes in administering the task and cannot adequately measure the upper limit of people's spatial working memory because we don't have enough working memory ourselves. Years ago, the other graduate student failed to find a correlation whereas my group did. Now, I want to make sure that whatever caused the lack of findings in her research group does not occur in my new research group. I'm especially concerned about one person in my group not bothering to train enough to administer the task well. Not. Good.

The countdown is on...

There is only three weeks of class left and one week of finals. My prognosis? This is going to be the worst end-of-the-semester crunch ever. One of my research projects is going to require testing forty people in two and a half weeks. I'm going to be so swamped with testing that I won't be able to prepare for classes. Plus, I still have two papers to finish writing on these research projects I'm doing. When am I going to find the time to read for the papers AND for class. Then finals week is filled with testing for my other project and we're going to have to write up the results the day after we finish testing if we're going to turn this paper in on time (which means I'm going to have to write the majority of the discussion without knowing the results yet. Not. Good.) Blech! I am not looking forward to this....

My mind has gone to mush...

This week has been very overwhelming. I'm finding it harder to balance classes and my two research projects. Plus, I seem to have caught another cold or perhaps my old cold came back in force. I haven't been able to sleep as much due to these extra demands this week, and now my mind has turned to mush.

Mush, mush, mush. That is my mind. I've been trying to read about polytomous IRT models and my mind goes to mush. Normally, I can make some sense out of the book, but not now. Instead, mush. Mush. Mush.

My mind was mush in class on Tuesday and so I didn't talk much. I could not speak in coherent sentences. I must get more sleep tonight or my mind will be mush again for class tomorrow. My prof noticed I wasn't speaking in class and stared directly at me at one point. I'm getting better at reading him. That stare was an indication that he was expecting me to contribute something. Especially, since he picked an article that I expressed interest in during the previous class. So tomorrow, I must not let my mind be mushy in his class again.

Mush...mush.

On the plus side, I did manage to pull off a research colloquium with only two other people present. It was a little embarrassing to have so few people attend, especially since the head of the department was one of those attending (to support me and the Ed Psych Soc, I'm sure). The colloquium was on Formative Assessment, which is very interesting to me. I think it went very well, except for a few moments when I talked about a couple of things that the department head wanted to challenge. I don't really understand why he selected these things to challenge. The other graduate student was even surprised that he had to make sure I had considered certain things that she knew I would have considered (without a doubt!). Sigh! Grad students are given no respect. They really need to set the bar higher for grad students around here. It's like they think we don't know very much, and we can't possibly lead something as sophisticated as a dialogically-based research colloquium. The faculty advisor to the Ed Psych Soc repeatedly asks whether I'm going to get a professor to lead the discussion. (Nooo, we grad students can manage to discuss a topic together as colleagues with professors.) "I'm facilitating the discussion," I say. A look of fear, worry, and disbelief crosses her face for a split second. Le Sigh...

We're getting a new professor next semester who has expressed interest in forming a grad/prof salon. It's the same thing as a research colloquium, just a different name (unless there's some nuance I'm unaware of). Don't they realize the colloquium is currently student-led?

Oh, well...perhaps my desire to lead will be directed into some other outlet...

Let the research begin!

Things are moving at breakneck speed in the research realm. Tomorrow we have a meeting with one of the teachers we plan to work with. Then we wanted to turn in the IRB application (which is kind of like an ethics committee to make sure we aren't unduly harming the kids or shocking them). But, so many loose ends have been left undone. So I have a great deal to do tonight: write the debriefing form in language that a 4th grader could understand (uh oh!), make up the other Theory of Mind measure (because the author of it would only send us references, not the actual passage, harumph!), figure out which four passages to use (rich in ambiguity, emotion, and character mental states), and polish up the application narrative. I'm glad I thought to buy an ink cartrige today, otherwise I'd be scrambling tomorrow morning to get all this printed.

My other research project is starting on Wednesday. We are going to have undergrads fill out a sublcinical psychopathy survey disguised as a personality survey (hehehe). Then we'll select the low end and high end of the subclinical psychopathy range to test them further on cognitive tasks. Don't worry, these people are NOT actually psychopaths and the measure is not diagnostic of clinical psychopathy, just personality characteristics that tend toward that direction.

With only a month left of school, the race is on to get all this finished in time!

The Mind/Body Problem: Philosophy or Religion?

My readings for my online class briefly mentioned the mind/body problem, so my instructor posted a question about it. The question was about Cartesian Dualism, which posits that the mind and body are two separate entities made up of different substances. Apparently, Vygotsky favors monism, which posits only the physical substrate of the body. I can see this because Vygotky and his colleague, Alexander Luria, were the founding fathers of neurophyschology, which examines the relationship between the brain and behavior. Everything can be reducible to brain functioning. It's reductionistic. However, this doesn't seem to mesh well with Vygotsky's stance that cognition is emergent. Hmm, I think I'm confused and might have to read back over this chapter again.

My professor posted this question and a few people responded with explanations of various philosophical stances on the mind/body problem. But, then a Catholic posted a ton of questions about where the soul fits in. Every other week, she makes references to Catholicism and the Catholic nuns who taught her in school. Since the Catholic nuns made such a big deal about the soul, where does the soul fit in with the mind and body? It is a trinity rather than a duality? I have thought about all this before, but I wasn't sure about posting an answer to her question. I think of the mind/body problem as psychology's way of addressing the question of the existence of a soul and God without actually outright acknowledging that this is what the mind/body problem is about. I think that the philosophers who posited dualism (e.g., Rene Descarte) were really just trying to state that there is a soul (i.e., mind, which is immaterial and survives the body in death), but there were questions about whether the mind (i.e. soul) had freewill or if God occasionally directed the mind (e.g., occassionalism, determinism suggests there is no freewill, but that God doesn't direct anything either).

Even though the psychologists are only stating the words mind and body, I see "mind" as a metaphor for "soul." I though about posting something of this respect to her question, but I actually tried and got a technical error. So I'm not going to attempt to address her question, I think most of the people online ignored it and consider it irrelevant.

One of the students online stated that he thought the field was moving from predominantly monist to dualist. I was pretty shocked, there must be something more about this philosophical question and how it relates to research and practice in education that I don't know about. I think holding certain views on this topic is relevant for the paradigm which organizes the predominate mode of thought in physchology and education. I believe we are moving away from the cognitive information processing paradigm (which holds that monism, materialism, reductionism, and determinism are true) and towards something else. Perhaps this emergentism, dualism, or whatnot. Anyways, the ideas I'm interested in peaked in the 80s and are currently in decline because they are focused on cognition (e.i, skills-based reading, impact of schooling on higher level thinking). Now I think people are more focused on social development, emotion, and culture.

(P.S. the spell check keeps wanting to replace the word "Vygotsky" with the word "bigot." Weird.)

The lawn is sprouting weeds, leading to a rant about Vygotsky

I have been relatively useless all day today. The only thing I accomplished was pulling up some of the weeds in the front lawn. Although it was nice to be outside, I know that everything I do is for the purpose of procrastinating from doing what I really need to do, which is read two chapters and comment on it for my online class. But, ugh! I can't seem to get into the reading. We started a new book on Vygotsky. Vygotsky is totally "in" right now in educational psychology, but I can't seen to wrap my brain around what I'm reading. I think the reason is that Vygotsky's ideas seem to run so contrary to my own that I'm either not interested in reading it or I'm annoyed by everything that is written, so I don't want to read it.

I think there is some accuracies to his ideas, so I want to get something out of the assignment. Vygotsky suggests that cognition originates in social interaction that is internalized. What first occurs interpersonally then occurs intrapersonally. Education is simply a means of enculturation through dialogue and artifact mediation (i.e., language or other tool use). I can agree with these ideas and I think dialogue is important for learning, but Vygotsky also suggests that cognition must be examined holisitically. It cannot be broken down into its component parts. In fact, cognition is emergent. Its emergent properties are fundamentally different from its constituent parts (i.e., cognition is more than the sum of its parts). If you break down cognition into its elements and study those independently, you can say nothing about the whole thing when you put it back together again.

I don't fully agree with this because I think that a stance like this inevitable leads to a return to strict behaviorism (in the guise of a sociocultural/historical paradigm) and shunning cognitive information processing. The only proper unit of analysis is behavior in a sociocultural context and there is no one-to-one relationship between behavior and cognition. I hail from the cognitive information processing approach, so these ideas about cogntition grate on my nerves. I think it is still possible and beneficial to examine the cognitive processes involved in any learning activity. In fact, I think we are doing a disservice to children to ignore this aspect of learning. I don't suggest that cognition is fixed, and therefore, we should differentiate between children based on cognitive tasks (especially ones with questionable validity). But, we should analyze the potential cognitive processes involved in a task and work on improving these processes if the child so needs it. Bringing Vygotsky back in, the way in which these higher cognitive processes are learned is through social interaction in the child's zone of potential learning.

There are many other aspects of Vygotsky's theory, but I won't go into it. The reader can do so if he or she wishes.

I have been tagged...

Feel free to complete and pass on/back....

A) Four jobs you have had in your life:

1. Project Coordinator for a research grant

2. Assistant Instructor to teach undergrads

3. Receptionist for psychology front desk

4. Library Aid


B) Four movies you would watch over and over:

1. Robin Hood: Men in Tights

2. National Treasure

3. A Christmas Story

4. umm...


C) Four places you have lived:

1. Colorado

2. Kansas

3. Arizona

4. Florida



D) Four TV shows you love to watch:

1. Malcolm in the Middle

2. Design on a Dime

3. Trading Spaces

4. anything else on HGTV


E) Four places you have been on vacation:

1. We pretend that every move we've made is a vacation

2. maybe snowboarding in Colorado?

3. how about that conference I went to in Hawaii?

4. conference in Boston, Toronto, and Baltimore? it's like vacationing, right?



F) Four websites I visit daily:

1. Words for Your Enjoyment

2. msnbc.com

3. hotmail

4. school website/blackboard


G) Four of my favorite foods:

1. cinnamon raison bagels

2. lasagna

3. strawberries

4. shredded beef chimmichangas


H) Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Nowhere

2. Nowhere

3. Nowhere

4. Nowhere


I) 4 Things that make me REALLY HAPPY

1. being in grad school, ahhh!

2. fellowshipping with other believers

3. family and friends

4. did I mention grad school?