Dr. X's Free Associations

Can Critical Thinking Be Taught?

In a recent post, James Hanley expressed frustration over the difficulty cultivating critical-thinking skills in his students:

A recent study found that 45% of college students don’t learn critical thinking skills during their time in college. I admit it. I don’t think I managed to teach any of these students how to think critically. It’s impossible to do so if they skip class regularly and don’t bother with the assigned readings. I’ve even shown students the percentage of “F”s I’ve given in the same class over the prior two years, and it has no effect on student performance. I’m going to spend the next couple of months doing a major revamp of some of my classes. Not just adjusting the syllabus, but radically restructuring how I’m teaching them. What I’m doing isn’t working. Maybe it never has as well as I thought, and I’m just now learning how to really recognize it.

 

Vintage Photos: 1937

Lumberjack and two "attendants" in Craigsville, Minnesota saloon (Russell Lee)

Shame (the movie)

I was also planning to write about the movie Shame, with Michael Fassbinder and Carey Mulligan, but I haven't gotten to that either. Briefly, Fassbinder and Mulligan play a brother and sister who obviously share a deeply traumatic past. The film alludes to sibling incest that served defensive emotional functions within the thick of their unspecified family nightmare. Both brother and sister are presented as having borderline level personality organizations, with Fassbinder being a hypersexual, hypomanic type who cannot bear intimacy in the slightest, and Mulligan, who has a more histrionic-dependent style in which sexuality is a device to prematurely seek intimacy and to secure relationships with people who ultimately can't bear her need.

Not a great movie, but good. Something you should NOT watch with the kids, but interesting if you're interested in this stuff.

Hugs in therapy

Cheryl Fuller has a post discussing hugs in therapy.  I've been planning to get my own post up with some additional observations, but I haven't gotten to it. So rather than delay further, I'll just recommend that you head over there to check it out. I agree with everything Cheryl writes in that post.

Death Anxiety

Elizabeth Preston, via Sullivan:

A new paper published in Personality and Social Psychology Review looks over the accumulated evidence and concludes that thinking about death can make your life better. Previous terror management research has focused on the dark side of our psychological protections: Psychologists say that reminders of death can make us more hostile toward people we see as outside our own group. But researchers led by Kenneth E. Vail III at the University of Missouri, Columbia, say the perks of morbid thinking are too great to ignore.

Coping and defense mechanisms that have both adaptive and maladaptive dimensions come into play when anxiety is triggered, so there will inevitably be upsides and downsides to the way we react to thoughts of death. At the individual level, habitual patterns of defense, and the flexibility or inflexibility of coping and defense mechanisms, significantly influence the adaptive value of our thoughts about death. From the psychodynamic perspective, this is true for all psychological threats, which is also why individual patterns of coping and defense are central considerations in understanding personality.

Diagnostic soft signs in baseball

I predict substance abuse and fatherless children in this man's future or, at the very least, a nasty hangover.

66 years ago today, near Chicago

On April 26, 1946, the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad's Advanced Flyer, stopped in the Naperville, Illinois Railroad Station, was rammed by the Burlington's Exposition Flyer coming through on the same track at 80 mph.  Forty-seven people died and 125 were injured in the wreck. Charles Cushman happened to be in the area with his camera. He began shooting 15 minutes after the wreck occurred. News account

Removing the injured and killed from the wreckage. Click photos to enlarge.

Remnants of the smashed steel dining car.  LEFT-CLICK photos for larger view.

The police and the mentally ill

Chicago Tribune:

Christina Eilman was arrested for erratic behavior at Midway Airport in 2006. Police commanders ignored instructions to take her to a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation, and instead she was transported to the Wentworth District lockup in one of the city's highest-crime areas.

The next evening, after hours of apparent psychotic behavior, police released her with no assistance or direction, several miles from where she had been arrested. She wandered aimlessly toward a high-rise of the Robert Taylor Homes, where she was sexually assaulted before plunging from a seventh-floor window. She suffered a severe brain injury, a shattered pelvis, collapsed lung and numerous other injuries.

I find it utterly unbelievable that the cops didn't know exactly what they were doing when they released Christina Eilman. Instead of protecting this very ill young woman, the police threw her to the wolves.

Now it looks like her family will finally get their day in court.

 

 

Vintage Omaha: 1938

Man in front of saloon in stockyard district, South Omaha, Nebraska. Photo by John Vachon, Farm Security Administration.

Regarding bank cards and dishonesty

Eric Zorn has a more positive story than my own posted earlier today:

Somehow, I dropped my Visa card on the way out of the grocery store after running a quick errand this morning. When I discovered it missing two hours later, I performed a quick, fruitless search then called the store.

They had it. I'd somehow dropped it by the door on my way out and a customer had picked it up and left it with a store employee.

Very nice, but not surprising. the rest