psychology dector

A boat, beneath a sunny sky Lingering onward dreamily In an evening of July— Children three that nestle near, Eager eye and willing ear, Pleased a simple tale to hear— Long has paled that sunny sky: Echoes fade and memories die: Autumn frosts have slain July. Still she haunts me, phantomwise. Alice moving under skies Never seen by waking eyes. Children yet, the tale to hear, Eager eye and willing ear, Lovingly shall nestle near. In a Wonderland they lie, Dreaming as the days go by, Dreaming as the summers die: Ever drifting down the stream— Lingering in the golden gleam— Life, what is it but a dream? -Lewis Carroll In my dream we are in a boat upon a lake, neither of us speaking, my grandfather and I. We are fishing on a foggy summer morning, like we did for a brief period a very long time ago. He looks the same: baseball cap on his head, dark, squinty eyes, ruddy skin, double chin, pot belly, but sickly, just beginning to show the signs of the disease that would kill him. He stares ou...

I have written previously on LocalSchoolDirectory.com about a former student of mine lost in community college hell. Such is the educational reality in America these days that one must wade through a lot of crap to get to a decent university and a desired program of study. This is the case for Elda , a student much too smart for her particular ring of Dante’s Inferno . However, she hasn’t allowed her woefully deficient education experience to damage her sharp sense of humor. Logging on the other night, I found her latest rant lodged in my inbox. A new semester brings yet more grievances from the land of allegedly higher education. She listed her most pressing pet peeves: “Expensive college textbooks that are assigned merely because the professor must assign a book or is too lazy to make his own multiple choice exams and thus, I must go buy a $200 book for a class I have already taken in high school.” “Taking a class I have already taken in high school because a 3 on the AP exam is n...

I did not set out that day intent on murder, but that is what happened. I was nineteen, and reveling in the freedom of my first car. The world was an open door, it was summer, and every day was a gift. My mother decided it was time to bring me back to earth. She had me running errands all over town, both before and after my part time job at the aerospace parts warehouse where I sweated out every afternoon from two to eight. So it was on that fateful day she sent me off to pick my sister up from some activity or day camp. I was not happy. For one, I would barely have enough time to pick her up, drop her at home, and rush to work. Second, the streets surrounding the school would be clogged with traffic, and I hated traffic. However, I was given no choice but to fulfill my obligation. I raced the streets to the school, double parked, and hit the horn as soon as my sister came out of the gate. She got in the car and I sped away toward my destiny. About six blocks from home, the street slan...

Stanley Aronowitz teaches at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York . He studies labor, social movements, science and technology, education, social theory and cultural studies. This is the long way of saying that when he announced the death of critical education on truthout.org last September, he knew of which he spoke. He begins his essay, entitled “ Education Reconsidered: Beyond the Death of Critical Education ,” by telling me something I already knew: “Credentials seem to have lost their advantage; parents and politicians are complaining that the schools have faltered in delivering what students need.” His first point leads directly to the second. Graduating from an education school with a license or credential does not, on the whole, produce good teachers, and therefore, the public has lost faith in, and no longer trusts, the educators in our schools. People hear the media’s overwhelming focus on failing schools; they see the incompetence of school administration...

For far too many years, I had an almost pathological aversion to annotating my books. Was it because I wanted to resell my textbooks at the end of the semester? I did need to scrape up every penny I could find to pay for those books, and many times, I would rush to the library to check the course books out before anyone else got them because there were no pennies left to scrape up. However, the answer is no, I kept every book I purchased during high school and college. When the semester ended, I simply had grown to love them all too much. I’m the guy who at the end of my ninth grade year, was sickened by the sight of my fellow students burning their books in a bonfire at the bus stop. The reason I could not mark up my books for so many years was that I did not want to mess up the pages with yellow highlighter and penciled notes. That is not what you do with holy objects, and to me, books are sacred . So why am I a committed annotator now? I got over my trepidation and changed my thin...

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, “The process of writing…includes as a dialectic correlation the process of reading, and these two interdependent acts require two differently active people. The combined efforts of author and reader bring into being the concrete and imaginary object which is the work of the mind. Art exists only for and through other people.” For Sartre, and many other cultural critics, art requires three things: the artist, the object, and the viewer. It is only through the communion of these three that the art is fully realized. In literature, there are also three conjoined entities: the writer, the book and the reader. Only through the work of these three can the story, the image, the poem be fully imagined and come alive. Writers write to be read, and anybody who says otherwise is a liar. It is a way for the writer to process the world, to make sense of the experience of existence. Therefore, shut down a writer, refuse to publish him, and he will die. Although it has happen...