One other thing with this. And don’t take it as a jab. Doctors, and especially nurses, will tell you the worst patients they have are med students. They have just enough knowledge about medicine to think they know what is best. Since you’re working for a degree in teaching, might that be a part of it? If not, that’s cool. But the fact you’re upset enough to go to someone about it makes me wonder. Any thoughts on that?
In the 3 psych courses I took in college, I had one movie shown. The Snake Pit. Appropriate since it was Abnormal Psychology (I was trying to find out what was wrong with me ). I’ve always hated when teachers slough off a day by showing a movie.
Your analogy doesn’t make any sense, frankly. I don’t claim to know more than her about psychology: she clearly knows more than I do on the subject she’s teaching. However, I can recognize bad pedagogy when I see it.
And yes, college is about exposure to other ideas. I’m happy to learn about controversial scientific theories of psychology in a class on psychology. I’m happy to watch religious films in a class on comparative religion. This, however, is a religious film (and it’s a fruity religion, way more retarded than Jesus on the cross) in a science class.
Yes, I went to college, I thought the mention of the psych courses covered that. Maybe not.
I wasn’t challenging your aptitude for teaching. I was wondering if maybe you saw that you were better capable of teaching. Whatever the subject matter was. And if that played into the Pitting. How did I know it would be taken wrong after all the effort I made in stating it wasn’t an attack on you?
But it all comes down to if a person goes to college to you? Here’s a newsflash, your professor has a college degree.
This is a fair point, but psychology is a science, albeit a somewhat soft and squishy one. It’s not ultimately about viewpoints per se, it’s about how they match up to the evidence that we can observe (or, in the absence of evidence, how much sense they seem to make). This isn’t an excuse for rejecting different beliefs and ideas out of hand, but it’s always appropriate to research the merits of the different sides of an argument. And if there’s one unambiguously right side and one unambiguously wrong side, well, science is a bitch sometimes.
Preview: hm, things have heated up a bit. Be assured that this isn’t meant as an attack either.
I almost forgot: if LHoD’s professor really wanted to mess with peoples’ heads in a University-appropriate way, she’d give them Christopher Davia’s theories of cognition. They’re tremendously controversial, and he is regarded as a crank in some (mostly localist) circles, but the man’s doing real research and the debate definitely has two sides.
Yes, certainly. But those ideas shouldn’t be “fluffy.” They should be worthy of serious academic consideration. The professor was wasting class time and appeared to know that some would think so since she told students that they didn’t have to attend. That is indeed “offensive.”
Hey** duffer**, have you read the whole thread? Here are a couple of links from upstream to give you an idea about the movie, and whether or not one should open one’s mind to the it. Cite.Cite.
Did you catch the part about Ramtha, the 35,000 year old spirit from Lemuria?
How about apply some rational standard to deciding what information bel;ongs in the classroom? Honestly, this is like showing The Passion of the Christ in an ancient history class. Many of the students may be intrigued by the ideas in the film, and wish to subscribe to the newsletter, but this is a college class taken for credit. It’d not unreasonable to expect a little fucking quality control.
First, I’m not 19. Second, even when I was 19, I had some capacity for critical thought, and I applied it.
I don’t think I’m a better teacher than everyone, but I do know that many college professors haven’t studied pedagogy, and of the ones that have, some of them seem to have no idea how to apply it. As I’ve said before, not all of her teaching sucks. Showing a cultish junk-science movie, one characterized by a co-director as “a religious movie for the left,” does suck.
Folks should be exposed to new ideas during college. Where does that stop? Could a professor get away with using several English class sessions to shill for Scientology? Should a professor go into history class, pop a copy of American Tail into the VCR, and leave without ever following up with a discussion of the movie? Should a mathematics professor teach the class that because non-Euclidean geometry exists, that means that mathematics has no rules and you should be able to do whatever you want in mathematics? Or should a professor stick to exposing students to new ideas that expand their understanding of the subject instead of misleading them or wasting their time?
I asked you if you’d gone to college because you seem so off-base in your understanding of the purpose of college; if you hadn’t been, I’d spend more time explaining it to you.
I feel for you, LHoD. I’m posting this from a classroom where I’m showing a video about visually-impaired children. The regular professor has missed about half of the semester due to various health problems.
There was a worksheet the students had to do, too. Most of them did it during the video and so the classroom is half empty.
). I’ve always hated when teachers slough off a day by showing a movie.
