Meh! Ugh! Blech!

Ugh, I'm feeling so deflated now. I wish I hadn't bought $30 of meat that turned out to be spoiled. Grr...

Life is Strange

It has indeed been a strange day. I felt like it was mostly a social reconnection or disconnection day. I found out that a friend I only partially knew from Kansas is going to be sent off to Iraq soon. But, I think he has mixed feelings about using a gun on someone. I really wish he had never been persuaded to join, I just don't think he has the right personality for military duty. So I joined his supporter group on Facebook.

Then I found out a friend of mine from high school had a miscarriage. She's been crying every day since it happened. She lives in Arizona and all I could do was call her. But, she seemed upbeat and chatty and avoided talking about the miscarriage. I don't think she wanted sympathy, but she sure wanted to talk about anything else.

Then I found out I had to remove one of my committee members because he had let his qualifications for being on a dissertation committee expire. I felt weird about asking him if I could take him off my committee so that I could push my committee paperwork forward. But, he seemed fine with it.

And then I finally responded to emails from other friends and had coffee with another friend who recently moved back to town temporarily before moving out to Kansas.

Disconnections, reconnections...surprising news...unhappy news. It seems like others are in a state of flux, but not me for once.

In other news, spring break is over and school has started. I actually finished my comps papers within a three-day time frame last week. This is the first spring break where I actually feel like I accomplished what I set out to accomplish. I actually feel good about my productivity over spring break. All previous spring breaks I either crashed or felt like I didn't get everything done. Things have been really turning around for me this semester. I hope to keep it up and actually defend my comps and proposal at the end of this semester.

Me vs Ph.D. Requirements: The Comps Papers

I vaguely recall writing a few posts about me vs. Ph.D. requirements. Let me detail those requirements. I'm at the stage now where I need to write two comps papers. At least one paper must be on an empirical project I have done and the other can be a literature review. I've done enough research projects in the past to eek out two empirical papers. So that's the route I took. Once I'm done writing the papers, I have to submit them to my advisor and at least one other person to read. Both people must pass the papers in order for me to move forward. Then I schedule an oral defense of the papers with my whole dissertation committee. I describe the research projects and then my committee asks me questions. Yikes! At least is it better than a comprehensive test that lasts a few days. Finally, I write my dissertation proposal and defend that. I'm actually planning to defend both comps and dissertation proposal on the same day. I hope we all can handle it!

So far, I just finished writing completed drafts of both my comps papers. Phew! I can't believe I finished them both within three days! Although, I did have significant portions of both already written and I was familiar with the literature on both. Writing a paper from scratch on a topic that is new to me takes much more time.

Well, now I'll submit the papers to my advisor and get some feedback. Hopefully, I won't have much more work to do on the papers.

Philosophical mumbo jumbo revisited...

Well, in case my previous post about this was confusing (as I imagine my ramblings often are) I decided to take another stab at explaining it. Class was cancelled, so we had one more week to digest the article. I thought I'd read over the article one more time and attempt to explain my frustrations with it more clearly.



Here are two major points I gleaned from the article:



(1) The psychologist often constructs a term to explain a set of behavior. Then it is easy to take the next step of projecting the term on an individual, thereby assuming that the individual is engaged in the behavior indicated by the term. In other words, Bredo states:

"In this form of conceptual confusion, the psychologist believes that the concepts he or she uses to explain the behavior are used by the organism itself" (p. 46).

(2) The second step that is often taken is that the psychologist will assume the term used to describe a behavior is an entity itself and that the entity resides within the individual. For example, intelligence is a term used to describe adaptable behavior and extensive knowledge. However, it is often assumed that intelligence is an ability that an individual possesses to some degree. But, intelligence is a term that describes the behavior. It is not a term that explains the behavior. Suppose we were to ask why a child scored well on an intelligence test and then assume the child did well because she was intelligent. We would be committing a conceptual error according to Bredo (and Gould, among others). This is circular reasoning and also called reification of constructs.

In summary, "one takes a pattern of behavior, gives that pattern a name, takes this named "thing" to be a physical entity or as having some of the properties of a physical entity, and then views the person's behavior as being caused by having this entity inside them....a example would be claiming that a volcano erupts because it has "eruptibility" inside it" (p. 47).

So maybe you can see why I'm a little thrown off. In psychology, you get so used to your particular vernacular that you don't stop to consider that these words have been made up by some psychologist in the past and they have no inherent meaning other than to provide a description. Where do we go from here when almost everything a psychologist talks about is supposedly a reified construct? Beats me...

I am honored

It felt so nice to open up my mail and see that I was invited to attend the Honors Banquet because I was nominated to receive a graduate student school scholar award. I was one of two students nominated from my college, which encompasses a few departments. There will be a few other nominees from the other colleges as well. Its so nice that others have noticed how hard I am working and want to reward me for that. Plus, I can put it on my curriculum vitae...I wonder if I'll get a plaque. Heee....

Advising

Ahhh! I love it when students contact me and request to meet with me to talk about their grade and their progress in the class. :) Warm fuzzies. If only more students would do that. If they realized how much brownie points they'd earn with me, I'm sure they would!

Philosophical mumbo jumbo

I just finished reading an article for class tomorrow and I was quite surprised at one of the articles that my instructor picked for us to read. It was all about conceptual confusion in educational psychology and how psychologists fall prey to fallacies, such as reification of constructs. Yada, yada (which is code for the fact that I'm not going to attempt to explain that statement). Instead, I left the reading with one of those philosophical gushy feelings of floating on air. I'm feeling this way because the article questioned fundamental assumptions that we make as a field. But, we are so close to our work that we cannot step back far enough to notice the assumptions we have made, which are supposedly based on fallacies.

Really, the only way out seems to be to recognize that "cognition" is "situated" in "context." Is it me, or does that statement sound like just another post-modern fad that the field is taking? But, all that does is restate the simple adage that "multiple variables contribute to an outcome" in a much more eloquent manner couched in a philosophical discussion. And just last week the practically-minded educator in our class made the very same statement couched in simplistic verbiage regarding the act of teaching.

But, I doubt that half the class is going to understand this paper (read: neither do I). Sigh...