After the Childish Psychology class, I decided to just forget the community college and take the same course at San Jose State University. The two main reasons for this decision were 1) I was too stressed after that class to think about trying to wait list other classes at that school at that point in time 2) If I took the class at a 4yr school it would count as upper division and I could therefore use it toward the prerequisites for a higher education degree in psychology. (I need 30 units of undergrad psych courses to get into an SJSU psych Masters program, 9 of which can be lower division, which I've already done)

I didn't have time to re-apply to SJSU before classes started. I'd applied and been accepted to SJSU a year ago, but at that time my intent was to get a masters in research psych and teach at the community college level (because that is the most likely job with a masters in research psych). I changed my mind because I decided that I'd enjoy teaching piano lessons to individuals much more than lecturing to a class of community college students. Currently I don't think I will go for my degree for several years, and I'm leaning more toward a clinical degree than research (being a therapist rather than teaching cc classes or doing lots of boring documentation), but I do think that I will want to eventually, and it seems like chipping away at the prerequs isn't a bad idea, especially since I'm very interested in and enjoy learning about psychology :)

So I decided to try out SJSU's Open University program. It costs a lot more than a community college, but for taking one class/semester isn't that far off from the cost of being a part time student, especially since being a student would cost me more because I already have a bachelors degree.

There were three possible sections of child psych that would work with my schedule and they were all in a row, so I decided to just go to the early one even though I'd prefer later, to up my chances of getting into one. (with open university you can't pre-register: you just show up the first day and hope you get in)

I was dismayed at the first class I sat through. The teacher's approach was pretty much the opposite of "warm fuzzy" teacher but almost equally annoying. She spent the entire time talking about consequences of inappropriate actions. Things such as how its bad to cheat on tests and how "SJSU students are better than that," and what happens if you fail to come to any classes and don't drop (you get an F). Then she got to talking about people adding the class, and went on for about 15 minutes about how seniors get priority, how psych major seniors get priority over other seniors, yada yada.

In short, she spent the whole hour and fifteen minutes talking about special interest groups, most of which were the types who wouldn't listen to such lectures anyway, and explaining the intricacies of rules she had that we could do nothing about. Plus there were a lot of people who were there to add, and given her rules about senior status I was unlikely to get in anyway.

A different teacher taught the next section, and the same bad teacher taught the section following that, so I was really hoping that I'd like the next teacher. I figured that I'd take the unimpressive teacher's course if I didn't have other options and could get in, because despite my not liking her style, at least her class outline sounded reasonable, and I figured I'd learn something even if most of what I was going to hear was going to be blathering about topics irrelevant to 90% of the class. (I'd really love to give that woman some classes in economics with focus on efficiency!! ;)

So I was quite pleased when the next teacher started her class by announcing "First of all, this is a very interesting and useful class."

It was such a stark contrast to all the talk about warm fuzzies, or about what happens to students who don't do what they're told.

This woman was interested in the material and assumed that the material was what the focus of the class should be!! She was the only one of all three teachers who spent the first class giving an outline of what we were to learn (beyond repeating the short description in the syllabus), and she actually made time to start going over the first chapter material.

The rest of the class did live up to her opening. She asked a lot of interesting questions of the students, addressed student questions with the results of relevant research, and brought up many interesting points. One of many cool tangents was that of punishment. Rather than just posing the question "does the punishment work," as is commonly asked, she posed the (in my opinion more appropriate) question, "what is the goal when we discipline children?" She then noted that unlike not many decades ago, we now have a fair bit of research about what achieves various goals and doesn't. She asked the class how societies evaluated such techniques before such research was available. She then went on to give an example from the Bible: "spare the rod, spoil the child." Following this, she asked the class who was "given the rod" and then called on a few of them and asked about an example, and then if they thought that the punishment "made them a better person." The answers were uniformly no, as she seemed to expect ;) (I'm looking forward to getting into this topic in more detail)

Another interesting topic she brought up was that of distinction of levels of certainty. She noted that children of young ages do not have this ability to the same degree as adults. Things such as "This is true v.s. this might be true v.s. this is probably true v.s. this is probably not true, etc." She tied this into questioning whether or not children should be testifying in courts. According to what she was saying, if children can picture something they tend to have a hard time distinguishing between their visualization and what is actual. So if you describe an event and ask a child about it many times, it sounds as though their answer (and their opinion honest) is likely to change from I wasn't there to I was there. At least, that is my take on what she said so far, although we did not get into detail yet.

We touched on several other equally interesting topics.

So needless to say, I was really hoping to get into this class, although I figured that my odds were low given the overly full room and my rank on the totem poll ;) When the teacher finally got to asking about who wanted to add, fourteen hands went up. She thought about it for a moment, and then said that "just this once" she was going to add all of us :)