Wednesday, March 16, 2011

Back into the swing

On Mondays and Wednesdays I volunteer to watch kids while their parents (moms) are in a seminar. I have way too much fun every week. To date I am the only male volunteer they may have ever seen. No one has ever commented on it, though. Last Monday there was a little girl who came in and was a bit fussy after her mom left. The other volunteers tried to calm her down, but who succeeded? I did!!! She was my buddy the rest of the time. So cute.

Today we had three boys, no girls. So easy. There is one lady who is the overseer of the volunteers. When she saw that the other volunteer and I had those three in hand, she left us to it. They were so much fun to play with. I found out after we finished and the moms came back in that the other volunteer was a marching band girl. After the ceremonial band nerd greetings were exchanged, we all took off. It was a great day.

One more odd happening: at BYU there is a small cadre of Psychology professors who are adamant about how broken of a discipline Psychology is. One of them came to my class today and gave a presentation outlining his basic points of contention. I quickly took issue with him (more than I did before), because of his use of persuasion techniques. Some of his points were valid and well-founded. How he got the class on board with him, though, was not okay with me. He over-simplified his argument to statements that any good Mormon "has" to agree with ("Do you believe God is important in people's lives?"), and said that if we agree with those we must agree with his assertions ("Then you must believe that we need to use God in psychotherapy."). The rest of the class was eating out of his hands. That peeved me. My Doctrine and Covenants teacher tends to use similar teaching techniques.

Well, my suggestion is to look up KT Tunstall: