Why I love my Ed Psych Class
This morning I was in a little bit of a bad mood. I can't even
remember why now, but it was nothing important, I was just grumpy. I got
up early to go to my history class, and enjoyed it. I had to leave
class a little bit early so I could drive down to the high school. I've
been going to the high school every Friday just to observe and help out
if needed. When I arrived there today I found the classroom dark and
locked, not only that, but there were tons of people in the hallways all
in professional dress. I found out later that there was a debate
competition there today, and most of the students didn't even bother to
come to school if they weren't participating. That annoyed me a little,
because I had left my class early to be there, only to discover that
they didn't even hold class today. That put me right back in the bad
mood I had been in before class.
During the next two hours I tried to spend some time with the kids and Dean and just be happy but I was finding it really hard for some reason. At one point DJ told me to go away, and that really hurt. Eleven o clock rolled around and I decided to go to class a little early today and I told Dean to make sure the kids got lunch while I was gone. I guess that was a little insensitive of me. Dean is taking a world religions class and for a project, he chose to experience Ramadan: one month of fasting from sunrise to sunset. I knew that he couldn't eat lunch, but I really didn't think about the fact that maybe getting food for the kids would annoy him.
Well anyways, I went off to class grumpy. I cheered up almost instantly when I walked into the classroom. My Education Psychology class is always enjoyable. There is very little structure, it's just a bunch of future teachers that get together and talk about... a little bit of everything. Usually during the conversation our teacher will identify a few terms that we come across, things such as the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and that just comes up in the conversation. Because we are all future teachers, we all want to learn and we are all eager to get information to apply to our future classroom, therefore we are all very intrinsically motivated in that class. Brother Wilson has a list of 100 terms that he wants us to learn by the end of the semester, and most days we cover 3-7 of them, just as they come up. Today though we were just hopping from one term to another and we covered a lot more than usual
At the beginning of class Brother Wilson called on someone to choose a song for us to sing. We usually sing a hymn, but today the class voted that we wanted to do something different. The girl asked to choose the song chose to sing "Hey Jude." Brother Wilson then proceeded to pull up the words and put them up on the projector so we could see them, and a guy in the class, Jonas, offered to play it on the piano.
Before we ever got around to singing Brother Wilson made some reference to the girl who had chosen the song and he pronounced her name wrong. Someone said that he had had a "brain fart." That got the class laughing pretty good. Brother Wilson then proceeded to reword it as "neural flatulence" and then he drew our attention to the list of terms. On the list were several different varieties of "neural flatulence" as we now call it, including failure to retrieve, failure to store, Interference, and reconstruction error. After defining each of those and several people giving some good every day examples, someone mentioned how they sometimes mix up foreign languages, and then someone gave an example of when they were on their mission and she was speaking to someone in ASL and thinking in English and mouthing the words in Spanish. And with that, Brother Wilson introduced us to the term Psychomotor Domain, and with it Cognitive Domain, and Affective Domain. While talking about Cognitive Domain we talked about Blooms Taxonomy and several parts of the brain, all of which were on the list of terms. All the time we were learning about these terms, Brother Wilson was very rarely doing the talking. Someone who knew the term would define it for the rest of us, and then we would all throw out our examples and stories, and verify that we were understanding the term correctly.
At this point we still hadn't sung "Hey Jude," so we decided to go ahead and do that since there was only about 20 minutes of class left. As Jonas got up to play the piano he made some mention that he didn't know if he could actually play it. Then we Started talking about anxiety, debilitating anxiety vs. enabling anxiety, and state anxiety vs. trait anxiety. We concluded that Jonas had enabling state anxiety, and then he sat down at the piano.
We then proceeded to sing "Hey Jude" and it was the funniest thing I have ever seen. When we sing the hymns in class, our class is a little pathetic, and people often start laughing because we're so pathetic. Today, everyone was in a great mood, and most of the class knew and loved the song and so were singing it out with gusto, and it sounded way better than any of the hymns that we had sung all semester long. At one point several people started waving their arms in the air, one person pulled out a lighter and was waving that around in the air, then some people got up and were dancing in the middle of the classroom (Brother Wilson started that one.) Some people knew the Beatles' version so well that they were adding their little quirks to the song the the great enjoyment of everyone else in the class.
When the song ended everyone was laughing and applauding and throwing out some of the terms that we learned previously that we saw during the song such as "situational interest" and "contagious behavior." When Jonas got up from the piano and started going back to the chair, Brother Wilson asked him how he thought he did, and Jonas responded that he did okay, but it could have been better. Brother Wilson then introduced us to "Attribution Theory" and as a class we analyzed Jonas' opinion of his piano playing skills and whether that song was a success or a failure. And it was interesting that while the entire class thought it was a success, he mostly thought it was a failure. That got us talking about self efficacy, self esteem, and self concept.
It was that point that we all realized that class had ended about five minutes previously, so we all left happy, mostly still laughing, having discussed 37 terms, 16 of them new. In any other class he would have just given us the list of 100 terms and told us to learn the terms and maybe come up with our own examples of it, but in this class we learn them, and apply them, and learn to see them everywhere around us. And we have a lot of fun doing it. It's hard to be in a bad mood after that... and I still have "Hey Jude" stuck in my head, I'll never think about that song the same ever again.
During the next two hours I tried to spend some time with the kids and Dean and just be happy but I was finding it really hard for some reason. At one point DJ told me to go away, and that really hurt. Eleven o clock rolled around and I decided to go to class a little early today and I told Dean to make sure the kids got lunch while I was gone. I guess that was a little insensitive of me. Dean is taking a world religions class and for a project, he chose to experience Ramadan: one month of fasting from sunrise to sunset. I knew that he couldn't eat lunch, but I really didn't think about the fact that maybe getting food for the kids would annoy him.
Well anyways, I went off to class grumpy. I cheered up almost instantly when I walked into the classroom. My Education Psychology class is always enjoyable. There is very little structure, it's just a bunch of future teachers that get together and talk about... a little bit of everything. Usually during the conversation our teacher will identify a few terms that we come across, things such as the difference between intrinsic motivation and extrinsic motivation, and that just comes up in the conversation. Because we are all future teachers, we all want to learn and we are all eager to get information to apply to our future classroom, therefore we are all very intrinsically motivated in that class. Brother Wilson has a list of 100 terms that he wants us to learn by the end of the semester, and most days we cover 3-7 of them, just as they come up. Today though we were just hopping from one term to another and we covered a lot more than usual
At the beginning of class Brother Wilson called on someone to choose a song for us to sing. We usually sing a hymn, but today the class voted that we wanted to do something different. The girl asked to choose the song chose to sing "Hey Jude." Brother Wilson then proceeded to pull up the words and put them up on the projector so we could see them, and a guy in the class, Jonas, offered to play it on the piano.
Before we ever got around to singing Brother Wilson made some reference to the girl who had chosen the song and he pronounced her name wrong. Someone said that he had had a "brain fart." That got the class laughing pretty good. Brother Wilson then proceeded to reword it as "neural flatulence" and then he drew our attention to the list of terms. On the list were several different varieties of "neural flatulence" as we now call it, including failure to retrieve, failure to store, Interference, and reconstruction error. After defining each of those and several people giving some good every day examples, someone mentioned how they sometimes mix up foreign languages, and then someone gave an example of when they were on their mission and she was speaking to someone in ASL and thinking in English and mouthing the words in Spanish. And with that, Brother Wilson introduced us to the term Psychomotor Domain, and with it Cognitive Domain, and Affective Domain. While talking about Cognitive Domain we talked about Blooms Taxonomy and several parts of the brain, all of which were on the list of terms. All the time we were learning about these terms, Brother Wilson was very rarely doing the talking. Someone who knew the term would define it for the rest of us, and then we would all throw out our examples and stories, and verify that we were understanding the term correctly.
At this point we still hadn't sung "Hey Jude," so we decided to go ahead and do that since there was only about 20 minutes of class left. As Jonas got up to play the piano he made some mention that he didn't know if he could actually play it. Then we Started talking about anxiety, debilitating anxiety vs. enabling anxiety, and state anxiety vs. trait anxiety. We concluded that Jonas had enabling state anxiety, and then he sat down at the piano.
We then proceeded to sing "Hey Jude" and it was the funniest thing I have ever seen. When we sing the hymns in class, our class is a little pathetic, and people often start laughing because we're so pathetic. Today, everyone was in a great mood, and most of the class knew and loved the song and so were singing it out with gusto, and it sounded way better than any of the hymns that we had sung all semester long. At one point several people started waving their arms in the air, one person pulled out a lighter and was waving that around in the air, then some people got up and were dancing in the middle of the classroom (Brother Wilson started that one.) Some people knew the Beatles' version so well that they were adding their little quirks to the song the the great enjoyment of everyone else in the class.
When the song ended everyone was laughing and applauding and throwing out some of the terms that we learned previously that we saw during the song such as "situational interest" and "contagious behavior." When Jonas got up from the piano and started going back to the chair, Brother Wilson asked him how he thought he did, and Jonas responded that he did okay, but it could have been better. Brother Wilson then introduced us to "Attribution Theory" and as a class we analyzed Jonas' opinion of his piano playing skills and whether that song was a success or a failure. And it was interesting that while the entire class thought it was a success, he mostly thought it was a failure. That got us talking about self efficacy, self esteem, and self concept.
It was that point that we all realized that class had ended about five minutes previously, so we all left happy, mostly still laughing, having discussed 37 terms, 16 of them new. In any other class he would have just given us the list of 100 terms and told us to learn the terms and maybe come up with our own examples of it, but in this class we learn them, and apply them, and learn to see them everywhere around us. And we have a lot of fun doing it. It's hard to be in a bad mood after that... and I still have "Hey Jude" stuck in my head, I'll never think about that song the same ever again.
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