The final paper

My grandfather just died, at the age of 87. It's relevant, I promise.

This past summer, when I started teaching "Human Growth and Development", I borrowed some ideas from a fellow professor's syllabus because I wasn't sure what to expect or what the best way to "bring home" the ideas was. One of the elements of this syllabus was two interviews. The first: To interview someone who was raising, or had recently raised, a teenager. The second: To interview someone in late adulthood (65+). This usually ends up being a grandparent of theirs.

At first I thought it was just a neat idea, so I adopted it for my courses. In reading these interviews, I have really been surprised by the multi-functional purposes that such a simple assignment can serve. First, the questions are student-generated, so they get to pick the topics they ask about. When you are speaking to someone who has lived so long, it helps the concepts, discussed in neat packages in our lifespan textbook, become more continuous and real. Second, it serves as a way to force students to have a conversation with someone they might not normally talk to. I noticed in the summary paragraphs, some of the students said that the interview was the longest conversation they had ever had with their grandparents. Third, it helps combat the feeling that sometimes the elderly may get when they may feel ignored or that "kids these days" don't interact with them in a meaningful way. Last, in opening the doors of conversation, it might give the students more ideas about other topics they may want to pursue in future conversations and may even be an "accidental" relationship builder.

Which brings me back to my grandfather. Last summer, before his health took a serious turn for the worse, I sat down with him (and my other grandmother) and asked about their families and what it was like when they were growing up. Since both of my still-living grandparents grew up in other countries, I have never met any of my great-grandparents, didn't know their names, their occupations, or what life was like for my grandparents as kids. To be honest, I was also asking so that I could develop a family tree and also to think of potential family names for my kids (I was pregnant at the time). I am so glad I had those conversations and took notes - my grandparents lived through some really interesting changes in history and it made me appreciate how much they had to experience in order for me to even exist.

I can see that some of my students are experiencing similar epiphanies in their interview projects. That makes me feel like this project was a worthwhile one, and I wholeheartedly recommend this to anyone looking for a student project to assign.

Movie Extra Credit

When most of my students begin the Introductory Psychology course, they have got some preconceived notions about psychology: therapists, lobotomies, Prozac. By the end of the course, they have had a lot of exposure to a lot of different ideas and topics. Some of the time, we can use examples from TV and movies to illustrate the disorders or conditions. Some of the time (and even better), the students themselves can remember how the disorders or conditions played out in something they watched on the big screen.

For instance: Memento or 50 First Dates (anterograde amnesia), Monk (obsessive-compulsive disorder), A Beautiful Mind (schizophrenia).

Toward the end of the semester, I like to offer as extra credit an assignment where the students can choose a movie from PsychMovies.com. This site is currently undergoing some renovation, but it does have a compiled list of movies and the psychological topics they cover. It also has a page for teaching resources, and lists the movies by topic (developmental, psychopathology, etc).

The assignment usually is required to be about 3 pages long and asks for a synopsis of the video, followed by an analysis of how the disorder or condition was portrayed and whether the portrayal was accurate based on our readings from the textbook. I also ask them to say what they would do differently if they were to have some input on the movie they watched. This is usually a popular assignment as extra credit -- students see it as a way to have fun *and* do homework at the same time.

The ones that are popularly reviewed include A Beautiful Mind, but last semester I got some old ones like All About Eve and Sybil, and then some crazy ones like Fight Club and What about Bob?.These are always fun to read and even sometimes clue me in to movies that I haven't watched that I can add to my Netflix queue.

Have you done any assignments like this with your classes? What kind of requirements did you include? What are your favorite psychological movies?