Category Archives: Teaching

A Tale of Two Cults: Chapter 2

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This time ’round the “cult” in focus is actually a “culture”.  I am headed to Bali to participate in a music arts festival.  No lie.

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In the first shot I believe we see the backs of both Alice and Logan, two members of my Gamelan orchestra.  The second shot is my gong. *My* gong.  Yep.

In about December of 2015 my dear friend Janelle invited me, for about the 10th time, to come to see her Gamelan group perform at Gettysburg College.  I happened to be free and I popped by…a nice way to spend some time knitting, I thought.  I. WAS. ENCHANTED.  Completely.  I even left my knitting bag on the floor of the auditorium and…LEFT IT THERE…I was so taken (I had to hunt it down days later at the Campus security office where they were somewhat amused by my stricken plea: I’ve lost my knitting and I hope you have it!  “Ma’am…we don’t get much knitting in the lost and found so you can be sure we still have it here.”

Anyway, that day in December (or November…whatever) I took off my shoes and made my way on to the stage after the concert and just gaped.  I HAD to play this music.  The professor in charge, Dr. Brent Talbot, said “sure” (actually, he screamed from across campus, “Kris!  Are you in?”  My kind of guy!).  I started playing with them every Friday starting in January and I cannot imagine a better way to end a week.

Now, everyone needs to understand I have NO MUSIC BACKGROUND except I like to listen to it.  Mostly alt rock and folk rock with a few musical theatre show tunes (who am I kidding: with A LOT of musical theatre show tunes).  I don’t know a note from a hole in the ground.  I can sing Do Re Me from the Sound of Music.  Except for the occasional church choir I never had a music class IN MY LIFE.  And I think everyone in the orchestra will admit I am the “weak link”…but they are all so good natured about my sincere attempts to learn it.  I am determined not to be an embarrassment.

When it was announced that the troupe would travel to Bali this summer to participate in a music arts festival I immediately jumped in.  Got a new passport (it had been THAT long since I’d had international travel), a few immunizations, a travel cpap machine…I am all set to go.  I’m not sure how easy it will be to document the trip while we are there…but I’ll try.

And guess what ELSE???  I’m totally going to document the religious and spiritual aspects of the culture and the music and create a lecture for my Psychology of Religion and Spirituality class.  I understand there are Hindu temples galore on the island and I hope, hope, hope I can take photographs!

Bon voyage!

A Tale of Two Cults: Chapter 1

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Last time, dear reader, I reported I would be following up about the next set of plans in my life that promised to ring in more crazy.  Today’s episode: AP Psych crazy.  And by that I mean Advanced Placement Psychology Exam reading:

AP Psychology

My dear friend, Caitlin, is a reader for the Advanced Placement exam in psychology.  This is the exam for high school students who take an advanced class and hope to get college credit by scoring a particular score on a standardized test.  Caitlin shows up for a week every year and grades exams until she needs a new eyeglass prescription.  And this year she convinced me that this was EXACTLY what I needed to do to round out my academic year.  (She was only able to compell me because I was motivated by the money, needing to fund a certain excursion that will be detailed in the next installment.)

So last Thursday afternoon she and I boarded a plane and flew to Louisville, Kentucky…on the self-same day that the fine city buried its hometown hero (Mohammed Ali: it was an honor to witness the thousands who came to pay respects)

Mohammed Ali

We arrived too late to get tickets to the memorial service but the testimonials were broadcast on outdoor televisions all around our hotel and conference site.

It wasn’t too long until I realized that I was being inducted into a freakin’ CULT!  Seriously…all the cult indoctrination techniques were in evidence.  Taking a group of relative strangers to a place outside their normal environment; restricting their access to media by insisting we actually TURN OFF our phones during the eight hours we are cloistered into frigid rooms lit only with horrid florescents; surrounding us with hyper-enthusiastic leaders/cheerleaders whose job it is to keep us in line and ALL GRADING THE EXACT SAME WAY.  A cult!  Wait until I tell my students…

But along the way I met with some really cool high school AP teachers whose devotion to their profession/students is without compare.  I found an old friend from more than 20 years ago who is also a grader (“reader” — we’re actually called “readers”).  I played my first game of Cards Against Humanity (and I was pretty darned good at it!)  Several of my “young” friends tease me UNMERCIFULLY because I keep calling it Crimes Against Humanity.

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We’re trying to take really good care of ourselves (hydration, sleep, protein) because, my people, this work is GRUELING.  The effort that goes in to eight hours of focus, consistency, alignment with the rubric, etc., does not permit staying up to close down the bar or subsisting on donuts and Snickers bars.

More evidence of my entry into a cult?  Secret handshakes in the form of honorary titles for various roles: *I* am an “acorn” (a first-year).  “Aliens” are people who can plow through piles of essays with superhuman speed and maintain excellent consistency scores (oh yes, we are being evaluated on our evaluations).

Will I do this again next year?  I haven’t decided.  Dinner last night with five really great people, most of whom were new to me, at a fabulous Southern Smokehouse, after a day putting in REAL work was pretty fabulous.  Let’s see how the next three days pan out…

The End (and the Beginning) of Crazy!

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Had a bit of a blog lapse due to the end of the academic year craziness and currently experiencing a lapse due to beginning of summer craziness.  Will it not stop?!?  Let us itemize:

End of academic year: after the final push to get any papers out before tenure review I was reminded that, oh yeah, I have STUDENTS I’ve been ignoring!  Grade, grade, grade the work that piled up; prep, prep, prep them for their end of term projects/papers/presentationsCopies 05 27 2016 852Evaluate said work; turn in grades; celebrate:

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Crash from exhaustion (but still answer their emails inquiring about said grades).  And, naturally, graduate some of them:

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Finally, get that presentation ready for the conference and, oh, it might be nice to make flight and hotel reservations.

Next up: what ensued in the post graduation frenzy.  Hint: it involves this:

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Til next time, where upon all mysteries will be resolved!

From What Life Were you Reincarnated?

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A wise friend recently posed a question to a group that I belong to that has been sort of plaguing me: if, he asked, reincarnation is true and if, according to some tenets of the Buddhist faith, it is designed to offer us lessons not learned in past lifetimes, then what must our last lifetime have been like?

reincarnation

I imagine that the way people answer this question will be telling.  Some may adopt a binary response with either “I must have been terrible before to deserve this life” or “I’m closer to Nirvana than ever before!”  Others, such as the equally wise partner of the question’s originator, might re-frame the question to “what are the lessons I am supposed to be confronting with this particular life?”

Please know that I am not an advocate for literal reincarnation, but I like the opportunity to speculate about the lessons I might have been meant to learn along the present path:

  1.  People are kind and generous.  I know that there is evil in the world and that evil usually manifests itself in excessive self-focus.  But more generally I find people to be empathic, helpful, and downright lovely.  At least the people I run into boast these characteristics.
  2. There is a fundamental need for beauty.  I listened to a TED talk the other day (Denis Dutton: biologically hard-wired for beauty) and marveled at how, well, marvelous works of art, theater, literature, dance are and how crucial they are to positive existence.  I love living in the age of Instagram, where I can daily see the sunrise from my friend’s woodland home, witness the smile on a former student’s new baby, and see the first blooms of the season peek out from their wintery slumber.
  3. Skepticism beats gullibility any day.  Had to learn that one the hard way but it stuck good and hard.
  4. Disappointment is disappointing. But everyone confronts it, I imagine, and I have had my share.  I’ve done my best, I hope, to pick myself up and make the best of a disappointing situation.  I’m fairly sure there will be more of it along the way…
  5. Speaking truth to power is hard…and often has consequences.  If I was supposed to learn how to stop doing that I failed!

I know there are more, but these stand out to me as lessons I continue to confront.  What about you?  What lessons were you meant to learn from this turn around the wheel?

 

Blog Lull

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This blog endeavor was supposed to be about my scholarship and teaching (“with occasional forays into knitting and audio books”) but this semester my teaching load does not lend itself to inspired posts.  I am teaching Research Methods and Statistics (twice) and I supervise Senior Project (16 of them this semester).  Although *I* find the two domains interesting I am not convinced that the students do, nor any readership I may have garnered.

And the place I am at with my scholarship/research is the tedious place endemic to all scientific endeavor…I am slowly, oh-so-slowly, plodding through data analysis on just about all my current projects.  Readers are unlikely to care that one must use Menchley’s Test of Sphericity in a within-subjects ANOVA to correct for any lack of homogeneity of variance across repeated measures conditions.   I can barely believe I just typed that and knew what it meant!

I’m knitting up a storm, but I’m always knitting up a storm…nothing exciting to share on that front.  And my current audio book is a non-fiction exploration of the latest nutrition science on the best ways to decrease obesity.  Unlike other “diet” books I have read I actually believe this author (a leading obesity researcher and endocrinologist, I believe) is relying on good science and I am likely to attempt some of his suggests: Always Hungry (an unfortunate title, in my opinion) by David Ludwig, M.D.

I guess all blog posts can’t be inspired or coherent.  Sorry…let’s just call this a blog “check in”!

10 on Tuesday

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Carole over at Caroleknits.net posts a regular column every Tuesday where she enlists people to blog about 10 things.  I’m new to her blog so I am not sure how it is organized but today’s list is: 10 Things I Did in 2015 That Made Me Feel Proud.  So here goes…

  1.  I survived rejection…LOTS of rejection.  One paper submitted for review was rejected three times and another twice.  I learned a lot from the experience and will attempt to reconcile all the constructive feedback (and ignore the ridiculous).
  2. I lost 30 pounds.  Actually I lost more but the holidays have enabled a few of the shed pounds to reappear.  I’m in it for the long haul, however, and am motivated by health so I feel secure that I will continue on this VERY SLOW PATH.
  3. Although the semester was a bear and I never really felt like I caught up with myself I had some pretty splendid teaching moments this time ’round.  One particular highlight was the very successful Genealogy project my History and Systems in Psychology students completed.  In small groups they interviewed every faculty member in my department and traced their academic lineage back to the “fathers” of modern psychology (either Wilhelm Wundt or William James).  Along the way they met reference librarians (THE MOST important people to make friends with while in college) who fought one another over who got to help with the project.
  4. I discovered a new musical enchantment: Balinese Gamelan!  My friends Janelle and Dan play in an orchestra at my local college and I attended two concerts.  I was so taken that I begged to be permitted to join the group.  I start rehearsing with them in January and hope to journey with the orchestra to Bali next summer for a festival!
  5. Listened to some fairly remarkable audiobooks on the 2015 commute.  Notable among them are: Station Eleven, (Emily St. John Mandel), Being Mortal (Atul Gawande), and a re-listen to The Wee Free Men (the late Sir Terry Pratchett).
  6. I exercised with great regularity, despite a bum knee (that is currently in real need of a cortisone shot).
  7. Oh…and I started this blog.  I’m not a frequent post-er and my content spans both my professional life as well as my personal life, but I am pretty satisfied with it overall.
  8. I cleaned out the linen closet (which had been on my to-do list for more years than I am willing to reveal).
  9. I knit just about every day and twice a month with some of the best darned knitting friends a person can hope to have!
  10. Kept up with social media: got an Instagram account
  11. Whoops…I just remembered!  After a very splendid trip to the Shenandoah Fiber Festival with Janelle (with a meet up with Laura and Janet) I hatched a plan to make a real effort at reducing my stash yarn.  I pulled an assortment from my many bins, paired them with patterns, and had my husband put them in paper bags and staple them.  As soon as I clear the 2015 deck (I have one pair of socks to finish and a log cabin afghan to seam) I will plow into the project bags!

To err is human…

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When I started this blogging adventure I was hoping to post a bit more frequently, but this is the time in the semester cycle that always finds me frantically making lists of all the things I don’t have time to finish that have crushing deadlines.  All the little balls I have flying around in the air will soon start crashing down on me.

I offer this image, then, of the BEST example of Type I and II errors I have seen (thanks to a colleague for sharing this on Facebook):

Type I and II error example

 

 

The Digital Turntable: Psychology of Religion and Spirituality

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In the next week or so we will consider the subject of atheism in the Psychology of Religion and Spirituality.  This song speaks to the concept of “foxhole faith”, the idea that when confronted with such existential issues as death “no one is an atheist”.  Not sure I agree with this sentiment, but this Regina Spektor song speaks to the larger issues we will discuss in class: Laughing at God

The Digital Turntable: Psychology of Religion and Spirituality

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In a fit of active procrastination the other day and I was inspired to search the internet for songs that I might use to start my Psychology of Religion and Spirituality class.  Turns out that there are A LOT of songs out there that have some kind of generic religious message.  I am not talking about hymns, Buddhist chants, or “Christian Rock,” mind you.  Rather, I was interested in popular music that reveal some kind of religious theme.

What if God Was One of Us, written by Eric Bazilian and performed here by Joan Osborne

I am not aware of all the details surrounding copyright, but I do own this recording and I am not making any money off this blog…so I hope this is okay.  I intend to post other religiously-themed music from time to time.

Does Your Major Matter?

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When I was in college I took several courses in my University’s Anthropology department.  I did so well in the courses my professors strongly urged me to major in the field.  Because I “could not get a job” with an anthropology major I declined and picked the obviously employable field of psychology (snort)!  But I loved anthropology.  Loved sociology as well.

Nobody ever told me that 1) I should pursue what I loved; 2) it almost doesn’t matter what one majors in; and 3) education isn’t only about “getting a job”!

Today I engaged in interdisciplinary course prep involving mostly history and anthropology/archaeology.  I teach a course in the psychology of religion and spirituality and I believe that we need to look at the development of religion among early humans to put contemporary spirituality in context.  Hence: Gobekli Tepe!  Gobekli Tepe2

About 11 thousand years ago people began to create what some are calling the earliest known worship space in what is now known as southeastern Turkey.  A German archaeology team led by the late Klaus Schmidt uncovered over 200 sculpted pillars installed into the bedrock.  Etched on the pillars are an assortment of animals.  There is no evidence of human habitation at the site, so we know it wasn’t a dwelling space.  The bones of an assortment of wild animals and birds indicate that people probably did consume food at the site, perhaps as they were working.

Maybe it was the first church potluck.Gobekli Tepe3

Gobekli Tepe4

What BLOWS.MY.MIND is that this work was done before the invention of agriculture.  I was taught, and I believe it might still be the predominant theory, that it was the invention of agriculture that enabled the social organization necessary to create other social structures like organized religion/spirituality.  Turns out IT MIGHT BE THE OTHER WAY AROUND!  Perhaps it was religion that brought people together so they could discover that the wild wheat all around them might be intentionally planted and harvested (and, side note:  the women probably figured that out, given that they were likely more skilled in understanding plant life).

I know that I might be over-simplifying all the details of this find and that I am likely not using all the right vocabulary words, but that doesn’t detract from my fascination.   And a good liberal arts education, obtained decades ago, enabled me to plod through the discipline-specific information so that I could synthesize it into a lecture for my students.

I guess it doesn’t really matter what your major is…