Psychology and More

I am returning (slowly) from my summer break.

I didn’t realize just how burned-out I had become until a few weeks into the summer break my fiancée commented on just how relaxed I looked, and how she hadn’t seen me like that since the school year started. I still feel relaxed, but as usual, I am feeling the anxiety of the impending class schedule.

I am trying a couple of new things this term — In my Intro Psych class, I’ll be doing more with psychophysiology, because of a NSF-sponsored workshop I attended over the summer. I’ll be creating “Laboratory” sessions in my class, to measure the physiological (body) response to psychological stimuli (mind). It’s also a laboratory in doing science — the experimental method, and how it works. It should be very valuable (and fun) for my students, and it is also serving as a test for a research project being run by the people who ran the workshop.

In Abnormal Psych, I will be implementing a service-learning component, so my students will be conducting a mood disorders screening event. It’s part of the National Depression Screening Day program, and I have run it at another school, but never at this one. It’ll be a little scary, a little risky, a lot of work, and a lot of fun. My job is to help them pul together the resources they need to create a great event educating about and screening for mood disorders.

Classes start in a week, so I’ll be posting more on here this week, and getting content ready for the new school year!

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