A new face for Mt. Rushmore!

I'm sure that there is a theory in psychology that describes the process I go through with authority figures. Whenever I start a new job or meet a new teacher I am immediately enamored with them. They are what I want to be when I grow up. Then time passes and they slip up. They are human, after all. But they make a mistake and accidentally use a wrong word when speaking or write "who's" on your paper when they should have written "whose". And that's it for me. My illusion is crushed. Are there no more heroes in this world?

Since catching onto this pattern of mine I have tried to stop constructing monuments in the image of new instructors the moment I meet them. Likewise, I have also tried my hardest to not let any minor err on their part result in the complete destruction of respect I had for them. I've tried implementing this with 4 different instructors this semester and the results have been pretty good so far.

It's hard to say a lot about the instructors of my two online classes since our relationship is inherently much less personal. My Ethics class is an online class. This is the class I was most afraid of. My only other experience with an online class resulted in my lowest grade achieved in college so far (A "B"). I had good grades on my tests, a perfect score on my final paper...it was my contribution to the online discussions that got me in trouble. The class was "Anthropolgy of American Culture".

I made some good points in my arguments, but it turns out that "arguing" doesn't work really well online. My intentions were good. I wanted a good debate. I was open to ideas. I wanted to back up statements not made clear in my original post. But, I was new to the forum of online bulletin boards. What I have since learned is that in a standard online debate nobody becomes enlightened. It's just some flaming here and there. The instructor actually posted to the whole class that the point of making posts is to summarize, in your own words, what you think the author of the text you are reading is saying. My inner thoughts were "well, if 82 other people before me have done that then what the hell am I contributing to this discussion? Everyone has said the same exact thing!". That's the rote part of school.

Thankfully my Ethics class instructor is more accepting of our discussions. For instance, we have already discussed capital punishment and abortion and I have only enraged, like, 8 people so far. But for all of those 8 people there are many more that force me to flesh out my arguments. Can you believe that I have actually changed my opinion in one case (I will not say which here since I really wish to not exclude any of my readers). So, of the class I feared most, I have been quite relieved. I think that early learning experience of my anthropology class was valuable since I have held my tongue quite a bit since then.

In a related note, I took a silly little test in the workbook that came with the textbook for my current psych class. It's to see how argumentative you are...

DH can attest to the results.

I ranked high on the scale of argumentativeness.

Ok, don't let me forget. I need to tell you about my English instructor. I love her. I am so totally going to carve a likeness of her face into the canyon walls at Whitewater Park!