I am beginning to have some doubts about my Friday Psych 1100 class.

We are going through so much material so fast that I can’t possibly keep up, and I am super good at that. It seems the breakneck pace of last week’s case is the norm. And if I am have trouble keeping up… what about the kids?

Now, admittedly, the reason I can’t keep up is that I am taking notes. I am taking notes because she has told us again and again. that not everything we’ll be tested on will be on the slides or in the text. And she’s made good on that. Most of what she tells us is not on the slides.

It might be in the text, I don’t know yet, I don’t have the text yet. I sure hope so.

The other reason I am madly taking notes is that I usually make notes of things which I find interesting and this is psych, so it is all interesting to me. I doubled my knowledge of the brain today. But the information came at a blistering speed.

She told us that if we thought she was going too fast, we should tell her. At the time I scoffed internally. Master Student Moi, thinking someone was going too fast? Usually the problem is the exact opposite, and teachers that others think are going too fast are barely interesting to me.

Bt Holy Hannah she goes fast. And this is meant to be an introductory course. There is no lower level Psych course at Kwantlen than Psych 1100. We are supposed to be learning about basic psychological processes.

Instead, we seem to be getting a hyper-accelerated course in how to do research psychology. I have no desire to ever do research psychology. If I pursue psychology as a career, it will be as a counsellor. I want to help people directly. I want to be the light in the darkness for people who desperately need it.

I am not looking to ever work in a lab. When it comes to science, I am a theorist only.

And I can’t help thinking that, as utterly adorkable and loveable as she is, she might not be the person to be handling 19 year olds. She is going at her speed, not ours, and I am worried that the other students are getting freaked out like I am about the sheer amount of info she flings at us at top speed.

I bet that, like me, a lot of my fellow students are wondering how much of this stuff is going to be on the test. Actually, I am wondering how much of this stuff can possibly be on the test without the test being twenty pages long. The prof has assured us that the test will be multiple choice, but multiple choice can be brutal if designed that way, and she seems like the sort of person who, in all innocence and completely without malice, would want to give us “interesting” problems that tested us on as much of the material as possible.

And then there was today’s mock peer review exercise. That was a nightmare.

The idea was that we were given a short bit of psychology type writing and use her “rubric” (a word she has never explained but uses all the time, along with “heuristic”) to rate the writing.

But here’s the thing. I am not good at turning my impressions of something into quantifiable terms. If the task was simply “read this and write an analysis of it”, I would do that happily, and the analysis would be deep, thorough, thoughtful, insightful, and unique in perspective.

But ask me to rate the piece of writing on a scale of 1 to 5 on vague criterion as “accuracy” and “cohesion”, and I am totally lost at sea. Especially when I have only three minutes to do it, and the countdown timer is right there on the screen.

I do not do well with short visible time limits. Like I have said a million times before, I don’t do sudden well. I think fast in many ways but not in the sense of being able to make complex decisions in the heat of the moment. I need time to sift through the facts and put them into some kind of functional structure before I can make any sort of rational decision about it.

And I only do rational decisions. That is both my gift and my handicap.

Perhaps I just think about these things too hard. I don’t know. Maybe the rest of the class is doing fine and I am the old fat slow dude now who needs everything slowed down for him.

But I don’t think so. I think she is going way too fast. And that can only mean one thing : it will be up to me to tell her. I am certain none of these “excellent sheep” kids are going to do it. Who wants to volunteer to be the person who risks looking like a moron to the prof by saying the class is going too fast for them?

From what I have read, the kids these days don’t have that kind of backbone. Seeing as, so far, I tend to be the only person in my classes who asks questions and one of the few that answers them, I am inclined to believe this is true.

Then again, it was the same back in UPEI. Maybe I am just bolder than the average student and, and this is the important part, I have way less fear of being singled out and separated from the comfort of the herd.

Plus, of course, I am a total ham and I love attention. That has to figure in somewhere as well.

Anyhow, I am going to give myself some time to think about it, and decide whether I should email her about the speed issue. She is going crazy fast for a low level course.

I mean, I know she’s very enthusiastic about her favorite subjects, and I love that about her, but that doesn’t mean she can do what I would be tempted do in her place, which is run through the subjects at the speed of my love of the subject matter.

I would be tempted, but I wouldn’t do it, because I have sufficient theory of mind to know that people learning something need a radically slower speed than those who already know it.

Seems my psych prof does not.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.