Very, very sad

Recently I assigned as a homework assignment to all my Priests. I had them read the following conference talk and then return and report on it:

The Sanctity of Womanhood by Elder Richard G. Scott

If you haven't read it in awhile, I recommend you review it because what I'm about to share highlights his point very well.

Today in my Human Sexuality class the topic was on rape. It is a touchy topic, but one that I was looking forward too since with a goal to be an adolescent therapist, I think that treating rape victims will be in my future.

At one point during the class our teacher talked about a very typical rape scenario, which is that a woman, on a date, has been flirty and permissive right up to insertion, then tells the man to stop. The teacher then asked the class two questions:

1) Does this constitute rape?

2) Was it the woman's fault?

To be very clear up front, the answers are: 1) YES 2) NO

The teacher then engaged the class into a discussion about the second question. He really wanted us to think about the situation, the definition of "fault," etc. Believe it or not a couple of guys said that the girl would be a bit at fault. Other people mentioned that at any time a woman should be able to say "no" and expect the situation to end.

I decided to say something and raised my hand. When the teacher called on me, I believe my exact response was "I want to make sure that I say this right. It is not the woman's fault, and no one should blame her. However, people in their lives occasionally make bad decisions that lead to unfortunate and unexpected consequences, that are not their fault. At the same time the decisions that led to those consequences can serve as an example to others to help them avoid similar circumstances."

It was the answer the teacher wanted, but a girl in the class could not have been angrier about what I said. She yelled out, "what, so girls aren't supposed to date?" I retorted that dating is one thing, but naked foreplay on the first date is usually a bad decision. At that point the class somewhat exploded and it took a few moments for the teacher to calm everybody down. He then moved on so that we could get through all the material for the day.

More happened then I can put into this whole post, but suffice to say this clearly illustrates the unfortunate state of womanhood in today's modern society described by Elder Scott. So many women nowadays only describe themselves in terms of their sexuality, and don't even know how to relate to men outside of that context.

Unfortunately, women will not be able to fix this problem themselves. It can only be done by men rising up to the higher standard set by modern prophets and then helping women reach their divine potential.

An interesting week and slightly new plans

I've had stuff that I've wanted to post about all week, but given that I had two tests this week, this is the first chance I've had to post anything.

The first thing to mention is that I've altered my approach to getting into graduate school slightly. In order to make sure that I've got a competitive background, I'm going to hang out at UNT a few extra months and get a second BA in psychology before applying to graduate school. This will give me a chance to explore which schools I want to go to during the next year, and give me the opportunity to work on some undergraduate research projects, which will increase my likelihood of being able to go to a school I want. It will also give me a bit more time to prepare for the GRE.


In more interesting news: One of my class instructors was FIRED this over last weekend!

Let me set the stage for this. The first day of class, this cocky graduate student announced that he would be teaching quantitative methods in psychology (statistics), and that we wouldn't have any homework, and that we'd have our grades based entirely on three tests. That would be fine, except that he was totally vague about what to study for the exams ("just know the materials in the chapters"). He thought that reviews were tantamount to cheating.

On top of that, the only way he'd ever lecture was by going through the most poorly designed Powerpoints I have ever seen. He'd rarely try to engage the students to see if they comprehended the material, and if he did ask a question for someone in the class to answer it was a dumb rhetorical one that there was no point in answering if you were following along, and meant nothing to you if you were completely lost.

The first exam in September ended up with an average of 59 and a median of 54, in stats lingo that means more people did worse then the average then did better (I got a 91). A good portion of the class dropped at that point, but most decided to stick with it. Most of the students were hoping that the low grades who inspire him to change his methods since they clearly demonstrated that he wasn't properly presenting the material. He didn't.

After he stuck to his poor teaching method a group of students went to him complaining that he needed to change methods, show more examples and take more time to see that everyone was following along. He instead lectured them that they were just lazy kids who weren't applying themselves and were spending too much time in college parties then studying. In reality a few of the complainers were middle aged mothers who had returned to school.

When he didn't listen they went to the department, but thought all of their complaints were falling on deaf ears. Finally the department chair said he'd sit in on the class for a few minutes, which he finally did on Wednesday of last week, two days before our second test.

I took the test on Friday and figured I got another A, but I knew that it would be beyond the ability of most of the class. I was pretty sure that the instructor was going to be going to be skewered on Monday during class, until an email from the department chair went out to everyone in our class Monday morning. This email was offering everyone in our class a short window of opportunity to take an "I" in the class, and then be allowed to retake the class without having to pay tuition for it. I had never heard anything like that ever happening before anywhere.

During the hour I had between classes I went up to chair I read in near where my class is and saw a good number of students from my class discussing this email wondering if this meant our grades on this test had been even worse. While we were all discussing this another student showed up who announced that she had tried to meet with our instructor during his office hours that morning, but he had refused to discuss anything with her because he was no longer he instructor. When she inquired as to the details he asked her to leave.

About 5 minutes into the start time of the class a tenured professor finally showed up to tell us that he'd be in charge of the class from this point on, but had only known that for about 3 hours. He didn't have any details about anything, but he had been told that almost everyone failed the tests that they had already scored. He then told us to take the rest of the time off, to consider the "I" option and that he'd have a new syllabus for us on Wednesday along with our grades up to that point, and how scoring would work for the rest of the semester.

Well, Wednesday rolled around and he had the syllabuses as promised, but no grades. For some reason our former TA could not be reached, and all of our first test scores had only been recorded as letter grades instead of actual test scores. As of today we still don't have our grades, because apparently the TA had a death in the family. Man when it rains it pours.

With all this happening and the fact that the same people who run the undergraduate program run the graduate program, I think you can all see why I've decided not to get my PhD from UNT.

Dan Rather and I.Q.

Sorry it has been so long since I've done a post, I had a test in statistics on Friday and I was pretty stressed out about it all week. I think I did alright though, so now I can stress over the two other tests I have this week.

Anyway, I thought I'd write a bit about a video we watched in History of Psychology. It was a 60 Minutes report from 1975, featuring a young Dan Rather discussing I.Q. with the big psychologists of the day. It mentioned all the big questions that 30 years later we still don't have the answers to: why so much disparity between whites' and blacks' scores? is intelligence a single construct or comprised of several abilities? does a low score really indicate a low ability to perform? etc. Given that we still don't have the answers now, I won't be holding my breath for any breakthroughs.

The other interesting thing that was brought up, in classic Dan Rather form, was a class warfare argument. I believe one direct quote from the film was "the only purpose intelligence tests serve in our society is as a tool for the middle class to disenfranchise the working class, and to justify racism by using a 'scientific' measurement." I found that all very interesting since the middle vs. working class argument does not exist in today's class warfare vernacular, now it's the upper class vs. the middle class. Since there isn't an I.Q. discrepancy between those two groups I doubt we'll hear John Edwards citing I.Q. tests in his approach to class warfare.

Why Al Gore doesn't deserve the Nobel Peace Price

Okay, I know that this is my "Psych" blog, but my first college love was Political Science, and it will always be important to me. This is why I have to vent on one of the worst choices for peace prize ever.

First off, let me state that I am not in Climate Change denial. I just think our time and money would be better spent preparing for natural disasters (caused by climate change or not) than hobbling our economies based on incomplete science.

The real tragedy in giving the Nobel to Al Gore is that his view of Global Warming is more likely to increase violence and anonymity in the world than reduce it. His view is based on a global Marxist perspective of "haves" (those causing the problem) and "have nots" (those on the receiving end of the disaster). This is the same ideology that Chavez of Venezuela, Ahmadinejad of Iran, and Castro of Cuba use to enslave their own populations. Sooner or later these renegades are going to start using Global Warming rhetoric to defy the world community.

Who thinks giving these guys more ammo against America will bring peace to the world?

Another First

A couple of months ago I did a post commenting on how, for the first time in my life, I had read a textbook from cover to cover. Well, that might not have been the best thing to brag about at 29 years of age, but this sure is:

For the first time in my life I SET THE CURVE ON AN EXAM!

I just finished my History and Systems of Psychology class and we went over the test from last Friday. Now, when I finished that test I did not feel confident about my score at all, and it was the first time I finished a test this semester not feeling good about my performance. There had been 64 questions, 2 of which I didn't remember the material at all, and about 12 of which were familiar, but I didn't know for sure what the answer was. As we sat down in class today the professor states that as a class we did good, and that he had adjusted the scores so that our raw scores would be out of 52 questions instead of 64 to set an accurate distribution. So I sat there in agony as they handed out our tests (waiting for a graded test to be handed out is one of the areas of my life where I have no control whatsoever over my internal stress and anxiety). Low and behold, I got a 53.

It turned out that my own personal assessment following the test was pretty accurate, I mean I did get 11 wrong, but fortunately for me the test was hard enough that no one else did better than that.

An Argument For Monogamy

This last week in my Human Sexuality class we were discussing difference in sexual behaviors and preferences between men and women. We already discussed gender differences in general a couple of weeks ago, so this time we were only talking about sexual behaviors specifically.

During the course of our discussion our professor brought up a theory that argues women are biologically driven to cheat during their most fertile days of the month. Some of you may have heard of this study before where you have women rank the attractiveness of various pictures of men during different points of their cycle. An alternative method is to have them take pictures of men on a computer that can be manipulated to adjust basic features (jaw line, brow, nose, etc.). What they've found is when women are menstruating or during normal days they prefer men's faces that are slightly feminine; however, when women ovulate they prefer faces that are more strongly masculine.

The researchers who did this study then argued that women must have a biological drive in them to find spouses who can take care of them, but when it comes to getting pregnant, may secretly look elsewhere for better genes. (A sad fact of DNA genealogy projects is that there is about a 10% paternity discrepancy, meaning about one in ten people are not biologically related to the man they think is their father).

I was not about to let this theory go unchallenged though so I asked the teacher about a specific study I had read about once that presented a biological argument for monogamy. He had never heard of it before but told me if I found it he would like to read it. Well, find it I did, and since I can't link to it because I found it on one of those proprietary campus search engines, I'll summarize it for you all here:

The study was done at the University of Adelaide in Australia to try and figure out why some women with perfectly healthy reproductive organs had repeated miscarriages. What they discovered was that their partners didn't produce a specific protein in their semen (only about 1% of semen is sperm). When trying to figure out what this protein is they realized it had implications beyond simply miscarriages. You see a pregnancy is a lot like an organ transplant, it is a body of foreign material growing inside of a human, and human immune systems do not like foreign material. What they discovered is that this protein tells a women's body that the DNA from her husband is permissible and not a hazard to her system. The thing is though, is that it doesn't work perfectly until there has been a critical mass. One thing that I think a lot of us know is that for a good number of people, that a first pregnancy is a bit tricky in terms of conception. In addition, if a women becomes pregnant within 4 months of her first sexual encounter with a specific man, the incidence of preeclampsia is 40%, while those who waited 12 months or more only had an incidence of 5%. Preeclampsia is in terms of symptoms very similar to organ transplant failure.

Well, I hope you all found that interesting. My professor did, I got 2 extra credit points for my effort. Of course, it would mean a whole lot more to me if this information became a part of his regular lecture.

Another Interesting Excerpt from one of my textbooks

This is from my Abnormal Psych book for you ladies:

(Hint: read it slow, and read the whole quote, this one is pretty technical)

• Hippocrates (Greek Physician from about 400 BC) also coined the word "hysteria" to describe a concept he learned about from the Egyptians, who had identired what we now call "somatoform disorders." In these disorders, the physical symptoms appear to be the result of an organic pathology for which no organic cause can be found, such as paralysis and some kinds of blindness. Because these disorders occurred primarily in women, the Egyptians (and Hippocrates) mistakenly assumed that they were restricted to women. They also presumed the cause: The empty uterus wandered to various parts of the body in search of conception (the Greek term for Uterus is "hysteron"). Numerous physical symptoms reflected the location of the wandering uterus. The prescribed cure might be marriage, or occasionally, fumigation of the vagina to lure the uterus back to its natural location. Knowledge of physiology eventually disproved the wandering uterus theory; however, the tendency to stigmatize dramatic women as "hysterical" continued unabated well into the 1970s, when mental health professionals became sensitive to the prejudicial stereotype the term implied. Somataform disorders (and the traits associated with them) are not limited to one sex or the other.

Please do me a favor, the next time your husband calls you "hysterical," and you throw this information back in his face, don't tell him you learned it from me.