Lessons

Talking about sex differences in my Human Sexuality class yesterday produced a storm of outrage and defensiveness from some of the women students.

Seems a lot of people spend a lot of time these days being outraged by something.

A lesson for men:

If I say that men and women have different skill sets and it turns out that women can do whatever men can do, but men can’t do all the things men can do, there is no outrage. (Reference the silly film, Daddy Daycare, or the self-proclaimed feminist who didn't mind yelling out in class, "Men are stupid," but complained repeatedly to my chairman if I mentioned evidence showing men more capable than women in ANYTHING).

If I say that men and women have different skill sets, and it turns out that men can do whatever women can do, but women can’t do all the things that men can do, the women are outraged (and reason leaves by the back door).

If I say (correctly this time, using over 50 years of research evidence, produced by both male and female scientists) that men and women have different skill sets, and it turns out that men can do some things that women can’t, and that women can do some things that men can’t, the women are outraged (and reason leaves by the back door).

A lesson for everyone:

My Squeeze (live-in female significant other) has a much higher salary than I do, despite her being 9 years younger, being in her present occupation about half the time that I have been in mine, and she only has a bachelors degree compared to my doctorate (both in psychology).

Because of this inequity, I think Squeeze has an obligation to give me her paycheck every month, and I should be the one who decides how that money is spent.

Do the women think that is an outrageous thing for me to suggest?

Yet, in as many as 86% of US marriages, this is exactly the situation that applies. The husband, making more money in his job than his wife, comes home with his paycheck and hands it to his wife, who decides how the money is spent.

Are the women outraged at this?

No. No, they’re not.

“You want the truth? You can’t handle the truth.” – A Few Good Men

The Eye of God

In 1980 an Israeli road crew working near Jerusalem accidentally uncovered the entrance to a first century tomb. In the tomb were 10 ossuaries, six of them with the names of those whose bones had once been inside. Incredibly, there as “Jesus, son of Joseph,” “Mary,” “James, brother of Jesus,” and “Mariamene,”(according to the Gnostic gospel of Philip, Mariamene is the name Mary Magdalene actually called herself). Just as many have speculated, the inclusion of Mary Magdalene’s ossuary in the Jesus family tomb suggests that Jesus and Mary were husband and wife. As Dan Brown noted in The DaVinci Code, it would seem that DaVinci was aware of this and painted the Last Supper with one of the disciples, the one closest to Jesus on the right of him, as a woman (in similar garments, but reversed colors. How could DaVinci have known? Dan Brown’s invention of the Priory of Sion is not a reasonable explanation.

Above the Jesus family tomb is a weird logo.

It is often described as a inverted V with a circle in it. No one today seems to know for sure what it means. But about 1000 A.D. the Knights Templar, many of whom lived in Jerusalem, began to use a symbol that they claimed represented the “Eye of God.”

They’re quite similar, aren’t they? Could the Knights Templar have known about the tomb?

Modern Free Masons have a traditional link with the Templars. Here is a logo that is a common theme in modern Masonry.

The G is a God symbol and the compass provides the triangle, or inverted V.

Finally, look at the back of a U.S. dollar bill.

I mean, come on! How weird is that?

I don’t know what it all means, but I find it very interesting.

Distance Learning

I'm cognizant of the need to attract students with whatever means necessary, but the application of the so-called "bidness model" is just wrong, wrong, wrong. Regents use the bidness model because they are bidnessmen, and that's all they know; clearly they don't have imagination to consider a better approach. Colleges and universities once actually did a pretty good job of educating, and that was before the billboards and give-away pens.

Students shouldn’t be seen as our customers, but as our children. In the bidness model the bidnessman offers a product, and tries to line his pocket with the customer’s money; the assumption is that the bidnessman is trying to accumulate wealth at the literal expense of the customer. With the children model, the parent makes tough, sometimes unpopular, decisions about what’s best for the child, even if it’s not what the child wants; the assumption is that the parent is wiser and more experienced than the child. With the children model, we are providing structure and guidance for the benefit of the child and not for the bidnessman.

My college is instituting a new program in the fall, providing free tuition to Tulsa high school graduates. Will this attract good students who otherwise would not have gone to college? I hope so. Will it attract an even larger population of undereducated unmotivated students that would otherwise not have gone to college because it was too much trouble to apply for the loans and grants to pay for it? I fear so.

A recent study showed "conscientiousness" to be a better predictor of student college success than IQ was. Additionally, psychologists have demonstrated people value what is given for free less than what they have to work for personally. Let's take my adult son for an example. He's currently attending Texas State University, and has maintained a 4.0 there. He sent me a copy of one of his research papers and I was quite impressed. Few at my college, some faculty included, would have been able to put together such a good, tight piece of work (rumor has it that some of the applications for Associate Professor this year were an embarrassment of illiteracy). He's putting himself through college with a part-time job, loans, and grants. How conscientious will this hoard of fall freshmen be? How will it affect the classroom? I already have a sizable cadre of students that think that Intro Psych is a pretty good place to take a nap, my threats of evisceration non-withstanding.

A regent’s recent promise to train faculty who are not currently teaching Internet or telecourses so that my college can extended offerings in distance learning because that’s what the customer wants, is an example of the bidness model gone mad. I taught psych telecourses for only one year, and never experienced a whinier bunch of students. Time and again I was told that the reason they were taking the telecourse is because it was convenient (easy) but I was not making it convenient and additionally was damaging each and every one of their 4.0 averages. When I had an office visit or a telephone conversation with any of them late in the semester, I made a point of asking each to tell me the definition of psychology. Not a single one was able to do so correctly. In my view, the telecourse was not providing anything resembling education.

It's a sham.

Pavlov

I suppose every reasonably educated American is familiar with Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, and has some rudimentary understanding of his work conditioning reflexive behavior in laboratory dogs. His research was astounding in its breath, and remains an inspiration in its accuracy.

Fortunately for American scientists, most of Pavlov's research and his theoretical papers have been translated into English. Yet, only since its April issue of this year has the journal American Psychologist made available translations of the studies that obsessed Pavlov in the last year or two of his life. Finally, we find that Pavlov had evolved his interests, from the common laboratory canine, to the more difficult and intriguing study of the common knee-jerk reflex in college and university administrators touting the “bidness model” of higher education.

For the first time we have learned that Pavlov was able to demonstrate that the knee-jerk reflex is essentially universal in the targeted population, and once elicited by concerns for personal, and largely political, private agendas, is nearly impossible to extinguish. It is also notable that although the knee-jerk reflex is ultimately a poor and self-limiting response that is harmful to the responder and, more often than not, other innocent bystanders, it is rarely something of which the afflicted administrator is aware. Pavlov called this inability to take accept personal responsibility, while simultaneously facetiously claiming responsibility, by a Russian term that loosely translates into English as the “Hopelessly unaware what it is college teachers really do, but have lots of ideas about how to make them do whatever it is they do better, but in reality just creates busywork and make people upset with you,” syndrome.

Talk therapy failed at eliminating the reflex, but Pavlov predicted that a medicine might eventually be developed that either suppressed the reflex, or, failing that, kindly and efficiently put the sufferer out of his misery.

Won't you please help? Be generous in your contributions to your United Way, and someday we may be able to say that the much feared knee-jerk reflex was once a thing of a dark and frightening past. Remember, a mind is a terrible thing to waste, and even more importantly, a wasted mind is a terrible, terrible thing.