We’ve been doing a lot of writing in Jordan, but instead of formal papers, our professors have opted to require journal entries. The idea is that we can get at the same sort of analytical ideas that papers would without spending time editing or paying close attention to footnotes. Between all of the travel and …
Category Archives: Courses
The Best Intro to a Block Ever
The Amman portion of the Mediterranean Semester is run through an educational program called Amideast and it was at this school where our class met at 9 Monday morning. We took our bags and boarded our bus to Wadi Rum, a vast desert controlled by tribes and famous for its red color and really big …
Wadi Rum
I’m typing this in a Bedouin style tent in Wadi Rum, a desert in Jordan. (I’ll post it the next time I get wifi. [Which is in a hotel near Petra, the next stop on our travels.]) This class is off to an exciting start! I flew into Jordan from Paris yesterday with my friend …
Laughing Club: Fake it Till You Make It (a wrap-up of PY281, Personality)
I’m pretty sure the people walking past Tutt Science this morning thought my class was going crazy. There we were, standing in the quad in front of the science building, maniacally laughing as we playfully charged each other, our mouths open to a roar and our eyes squeezed together. We were pretending to be tigers …
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The Myers-Briggs Personality Test
Yesterday our entire class took the Myers-Briggs personality test. I found out that I am an INFP, which means that my primary way of dealing with the world is Introverted Intuitive Feeling Perceiving. I was actually very impressed at how accurate the results seemed to me. Perhaps it is the horoscope effect (where all predictions …
Let Freedom Ring! (And if you make it to the end of this post, you will be rewarded with a video of pigeons playing ping-pong.)
“Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!” Martin Luther King Jr.’s words, spoken almost 50 years ago, still inspire me today. But what if freedom couldn’t ring anywhere? What if freedom simply didn’t exist, at least not in the sense that King meant it or that we envision it? For B.F. Skinner, a …
I have a confession to make: I do not enjoy listening to music played by The Beatles. I am fully aware that this should result in me having my musician’s card removed, my guitar taken away from me and me being locked in a room with a TV playing “Yellow Submarine” until I can recite …
Sibling Birth Order
The other day in class we talked about sibling birth order. Alfred Adler was the first one to propose that our personality is at least partly determined by the order in which we are born. These are some of the possible qualities he associated with each birth order: 1. Oldest child: nurturing and protective of …
Stop Shoulding All Over Yourself! (A Short Discussion of Flow and Human Potential)
When I steal the ball in an intramural basketball game, break past my defender, and sprint for a layup, I won’t hear you if you scream my name. When I pole-vaulted in high school, launching myself 8 feet in the air to clear a plastic bar, I never heard my parents’ cheers, no matter how …
Ballet and Black Swans
If you are feeling that your brain is very happy and content and have a desire to change that, I would encourage you to watch Swan Lake and immediately follow it with Black Swan. The juxtaposition of the smooth, ethereal dancing of Tchaikovsky’s ballet– which was first produced in 1870– and the gritty and rather disturbing …
