The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The …

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The last time I’d had our Subaru Impreza washed was July 2014, more than two years ago. This is also probably the last wash it’ll have from us. …

When I began teaching AP Psychology, my mentor Steve Phelps gave me an activity for the Social Psych unit that played with the concept of deindividuation. Generally that’s the loss of self-awareness when in a group; in the worst case scenario it …

From the PsychONE Conference website:

A Problem of the Neophyte: Class Discussions and Introductory Psychology
Led by Eric Castro: Instructors can feel unprepared to lead, and students can be unprepared to participate in, a class discussion. Yet class …

It is not often that I am so aware of confirmation bias but after reading a study, The effects of taboo-related distraction on driving performance, this morning, I felt its findings on a 5-mile run through my neighborhood and Golden Gate Park.

Chen …

At a recent faculty meeting the issue of “grit” was raised in reference to a policy introduced at the beginning of the academic year requiring homework due dates and test dates to be posted to our schoolwide learning management system. A significant …

We do not learn from experience…we learn from reflecting on experience.

My semester-long Modern World History class for sophomores not only gets to the present, but I try hard to leave a week or so at the end of the course to discuss the future. I ask the students to consider the history of world 25-years out into the …

I’ve asked before why do we tenure? and even why do we call it tenure? But I’d never gotten as far as a recent study which looks at the impact of tenure on academic risk-taking (what would now, in many circles, be called innovation).

From Brogaard, …

For complex reasons[1] that I won’t go into here, my teaching partner and I had to choose one of those “AP prep books” for our Psychology students to use next year.

We bought a copy of each of the major brands: Barron’s AP Psychology, 7th edition, 5 …

By way of background, our Social Science department is in the process of re-evaluating its entire course catalog; the whole scope and sequence of courses is on the table. Our most senior teacher has been at the school for 35 years and doesn’t …

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Seniors entering

For no particular reason, I share this clip from Thursday’s class. I always like watching students filter into the class. They bring a certain joy and a …

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Philosophical Discussions in Psychology

Following the Advanced Placement test last week, we killed some time with the fewer students who were in the room, others being …

From The Verge’s reporting on Twitter’s earning report:

the company’s haul of $595 million was less than the $607.8 million that analysts expected, and so is the $590 million to $610 million it expects to make in the current quarter.

I sometimes …

Referencing a SocialPsych activity wherein students can choose to earn 5 or 15 extra credit points, a psychology teacher here in Northern California sent me the following email:

I have been running your pre-social psychology test idea today.  The 5 …

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The Jastrow Illusion popped up on Twitter last week, and so Yosup Joo and I replicated it in class with some track that he brought from home. The students’ reactions were …

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My small group of freshmen, coming into their weekly gathering. We call it a Cura Group.