Psychology isn’t brighter (smarter) but the going-to-class looks brighter (isn’t as dark and hopeless as before) now.

I was in class, it was break time. It was good ’cause I needed a break from hearing the usual evolution garbage that I alway hear in my psychology class. Especially when the prof had just explained away why family members had a hard time getting along, basically the parent/child relationship  is always easier than e.g. brother/sister or brother/brother relationship because parents and their children share 50% of the same genes whereas siblings only share 25%. The less similar the genes, the more competition you get (competition involves survival, but also stuff like: There are two bedrooms and three children, they’re going to fight to get one of the two bedrooms, food, etc.). So after the prof talked about that for a while, I needed to take a break. I can’t believe how easy it is to replace the word “sin” by “genes” just about everywhere.

So it was break time, I needed to stretch my legs a bit, so I was standing by a door, reading a Piper book entitled Seeing and Savoring Jesus Christ. A girl passed by me, obviously looking at my book, then she stepped back and took a closer look at the cover. She then proceeded in asking me, “Are you interested in him?”, so looking at the cover together I said, “You mean, Jesus Christ or John Piper?” So we started talking just to find out she and I were Christians. It didn’t take long before she said, “You’re a Christian eh?”. Crazy. Anyway, I just praise God for this little blessing He’s given me. Just to know that there is someone else who probably has the same kind of perspective on this psychology cheered me up for the rest of the class. We didn’t get to talk so much but I’m sure we’ll get to know each other a bit through this, now brighter, psychology class.

I kind of like my psychology course this semester ’cause it’s the one I should have had before the one I got last semester, thus everything is more simple. What I also like about the course is the fact that I am the only person from my cohort taking it, that means that I’m the only fourth year student in a sea of unknown faces in a big auditorium. It never happens. Some of you know that I’ve got issues with psychology, even when it’s taught by Christians, so it’s obvious that I got major issues with psychology taught by university professors and most specifically when you spend three hours learning and discussing “Evolutionist Psychology”. That’s what we did this afternoon.

I simply couldn’t believe a thing I heard in class today. I just couldn’t. I don’t usually swear but that class made me feel so strongly upset that I kept replying “Bulls**t!” to most things I heard (well in my head). Sorry for my bad language. So here’s just an example of what I heard:

So, we know that our society is dealing with the problem of obesity. People are overweight. Do you know why people are overweight? It’s because they eat too much sugar. Do you know why we tend to love sugar so much? Well, we don’t know exactly when, but probably hundreds of millions of years ago, human beings found themselves in a time and place where food was scarce and they realized that when they got to eat food that was sweet,  it sustained them longer (because of a greater amount of calories). So our “ancestors” developed this need and hunger for sweet food because sweet food was highly valued in such a context.

I just wanted to raise my hand and ask the prof what he meant by “sweet food”, hundreds of millions of years ago, what kind of “sweet food” was there? He wasn’t talking about carbs here. But that’s kind of a trivial question. What I really wanted to ask the prof was: “So… does that mean that we are not to be held responsible for over-eating?” Because that’s what this theory is teaching. We are what we are today because of what happened in the past and how we learned to adapt to certain conditions at that time and those “adaptations” are still with us today. I couldn’t believe it.

Another things the prof said that really shocked me was the following:

Genes that are different compete against each other. The more similar our genes are and the more friendly we are toward each other. For example, genes that are most similar are found in families. That’s why parents would be willing to put themselves in pretty dangerous situations to save their child and the same goes for brothers and sisters but less with cousins and even less with strangers. A parent will want to protect his/her genes that are in their child, there is little to no gene competition here. But when it comes to strangers, genes are so very different that strangers won’t care or won’t help or won’t be compassionate toward other strangers because they have genes that are so different, thus are in competition for the fittest and the strongest.

He also talked about a “help others gene” that some of us possess, which allows an individual to be readier to help and care for people outside of his family. Isn’t that just crazy? Again, my interpretation of Evolutionist Psychology says that we are not responsible for our behavior because it is programmed by our genes. It’s all our genes’ fault.

That’s what I learn at university. Fun eh? What saddened me the most is to look around and see how students seemed to drink in the prof’s words and asking questions and realizing all sorts of stuff about why we act the way we do in certain context: Our genes! Ah man, where is this world going.

“For although they knew God, they did not honor Hims as God or give thanks to Him, but they became futile in their thinking, and their foolish hearts were darkened. Claiming to be wise, they became fools.” (Rom. 1:21-22)

“If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is crouching at the door. Its desire is for you, but you must rule over it.” (Gen. 4:7)

My fourth year of university just started today with two classes. One was in the evening and was terribly painful. Even though the teacher is to blame to a certain extent, he was not the only one making these three hours painful. The fact that I have a cold didn’t help ’cause it’s getting up in my brain (really). There’s also the fact that the room was packed full. There was no empty seat left, serious. I had never seen that. And because the room was so  full, well it was pretty, pretty hot in the room. On top of that, the content of what was taught was not interesting, it was more an overview of some grammar terminology long forgotten (well, to a great extent anyways… I personally have issues with grammar terminology, I simply don’t see the point of it all, but anyways).

But I remembered one thing the teacher said. I don’t know why but he was talking about language and how it must have taken so long for human beings to create language, maybe millions of years and how extraordinary an exploit that was and how language allowed us to think in time, that is how at the beginning we only thought in small terms about time, mostly about the present and the very near future (the next seconds) and how slowly we were able to think about the future in greater extents, and then the past  and finally relaizing that we can think about the future going on forever and also understand our past, our origins and how we now know that the earth is six billion years old and such. As he was talking, he drew a timeline on the board, the earth’s timeline. On the “future” side, he drew the infinity sign to show that we now were going forever in the future and he als, to my surprise, drew an infinity sign on the leftside, our past. That was a mistake. On the one hand he was saying that the earth had a beginning and on the other hand he drew a sign that was saying that earth had no beginning. I thought it was interesting. I thought his picture was a great picture of our humanity’s timeline actually.

Departure from Montréal will be on Tuesday June 16 and arrival in Sherbrooke will be… on June 16, just two hours later. It’s kind of nice to think that I’llget to spend my summer again in Sherbrooke, away from the city. I would spend my life away from the city actually but it seems that it’s where universities are so I guess I have to live in the city.

Talking about university. I finally finished my winter semester on June 9. Sounds funny? Yes it does. I started my summer course (distance learning) on June 9 and I’m glad to say that I’ve already started my first assignment, not even a week after starting the course! I’m putting in a lot of my time so I can get as much as possible done before I really start working at day camp on June 25. So if you wonder what I do in the evenings and weekends this summer, don’t be mistaken, I’ll be reading and writing for that course all the time, ah and I’ll be planning my daily English lessons  for camp too.

I don’t know how much I’ll be writing here this summer. Hopefully you won’t read the same kind of stuff I wrote last summer. I remember writing about flat tires a lot… I hope this time I won’t have trouble with that.

Ok, I’m a bit too random now. Take care.

After six full weeks of strike, the professors agreed to the university’s offers. It’s my second strike in three years and I can now say that I’ve lost almost a semester’s worth of time because of strikes. Last year we were on strike for two months and this time they were on strike for six weeks, if you add everything up, it’s almost as long as an entire semester. We obviously had to go to school after the strike so it’s not a total loss of “university time”. Last year we managed to finished early May. This time it wasn’t as easy and the timing was different from last year, so I should be completely done my “winter” semester in the beginning of June. Isn’t that unbelievable? I am usually done by the end of April. I was supposed to be finished last week!!! This is kind of frustrating, but what can I do?

Enjoy your day and remember Jesus Christ.

I knew there was a general assembly of my faculty today, but it was only today that I got the email telling me that they were going to vote on a strike. The professors were on a quiet strike (one day a week) for about four weeks and two weeks ago they voted for a one-week strike that continued for a second week, which is right now. Our faculty today voted for a strike and the next time we’ll get to talk about it will be next Tuesday. I haven’t figured out yet which of my courses are still given since I’m pretty bad at finding which faculty gives what courses (I have curses from at least three different faculty this semester), but even if some of them are from a different faculty, if they’re given by a professor… they’re on strike. So the trick is to have a course given by any other faculty than mine and that is taught by a teacher, not a professor. We’ll see what happens quite soon. It reminds me of last year’s strike and the eight weeks we wasted on strike and the tons of hours I spent playing Tetris and Vortex on my iPod during the general assemblies only to be able to vote against the strike.

My life is pretty … eventless. And it is fine by me. Or maybe what you would call an event I would call unimpressive, I don’t know. All that to say that I had two (not events but) intresting happenings today.

Number 1. Some of you are aware that this week the professors at university are on strike. Thursday, my faculty is on strike also. So it leaves me with a week off (maybe that is why you find more posts than usual in such a few days). Not entirely off as today I headed to university to meet up with colleagues to work on an assignment together, only to find a bunch of teachers and students blocking the subway entrance of the university. We could not get in. Nobody actually, going to his/her 2pm class could get in (through that entrance). My friends and I figured we’d simply get through a different entrance. Obviously, they couldn’t guard the doors of every single entrance to the university. It seems that there are strikes every spring at my university. Either from students or professors and it’s always because of money. How surprising?

Number 2. I thought I hadn’t put a picture here for a long time. I don’t take pictures these days (months!)… probably ’cause my life is eventless. I was looking in some baby stuff I have in a storage bin I have. I found something not babyish at all. I found my grandma’s old tuque! I remember she had quite a few of these and I kept one ’cause I thought it was cool instead of getting rid of it. So here’s a picture of my beautiful face (one has to encourage oneself every once in a while… hahaha just kidding) with my grandma’s tuque. It’s quite warm.

Oui, j’ai d’l'air d’une twitt.

I got a phone call from my cooperating teacher at the school I am a student-teacher at. She asked me how the afternoon had been (she was away) and then scared me. She said, “Does your family know that you’re in an internship?” quite seriously. I had no clue why she was asking the question, I felt a little nervous. So I said, “Yeah… why?”. She then proceded to tell me that a pavilion at my university was closed because people had heard gunshots-like sounds and found shell casings. Professors and students were told to lock themselves up in their classrooms and offices and wait. Right now, the pavilion is being evacuated. Interesting eh? She wanted to make sure that my family was not going to worry about me since they knew I was not at university but in my internship at a school.

So family and friends: I am well.

It reminds me of another event at Dawson a few years ago. People were emailing me from Saskatchewan to make sure that was not my school and that I was alright. Oh well.

My internship is almost over!!!  I only have half a day (or rather, one class) to teach, tomorrow morning and then off I’ll go! We have a university meeting in the afternoon, but really I’ll be on vacation already. I am so happy that those five weeks are finally behind me. They went by so quickly, but it’s nice to think that you’re on vacation.

Alright, I should go, I have exams to correct.

I am so glad I only have two more weeks to go in my internship. The first week I was observing, so it was quite boring. The second week I got my first bite of the teaching sandwich I had for this internship. Some days were good, some were … not that good, all depending on how students behaved. I couldn’t change much to what I had to teach even though I believed it was not interesting for the students and me. I thought that I didn’t need to use my teacher’s techniques to keep the students in line since I didn’t like them. But I soon realized I had no other choice since I could change what I taught (if learning is interesting, then students usually behave well, when they’r not interested the teacher has … headaches). The third week went ok. I used my teacher’s tips, although I didn’t see much change. I kicked a total of three students out during that week, lots of fun when you have to call the parents later on. On Friday my university supervisor came to evaluate me. No fun. The kids were bored and didn’t want to stop talking. It turned out good though because my supervisor got to talk to my teacher about giving me permission to make lessons more interesting. Nice. I had tried to convince her to let me entertain the kids a bit more, but she was reluctant to let the students enjoy themselves, it was a dangerous task in her mind. So this week I’m trying to make classes more human and interesting. It’s tough since I still need to stick to the book I’m teaching, but hopefully it’ll bear fruit.

I’m looking forward to being done though. Things would be more fun and easy, yet more complicated if I would be a real teacher… I’ll get there one day… maybe.