Dr. Arrastía-Chisholm: Professor Mom

It's the 5th week of school and by now we have covered behaviorism and operant conditioning in all three of the classes I teach. I teach that we reinforce productive, desirable behavior before punishing undesirable behavior, and that removal punishment (taking away a privilege or object) should be used before resorting to presentation punishment (scolding or a negative consequence). This is counterintuitive, especially because many of us were raised in environments in which corporal punishment was normative. Discussion is always freeform in my classes and comments are encouraged. I present concrete situations from real life, like my daughter drawing on the wall or a student not being able to stay seated during on-task time. Inevitably spanking comes up in these educational psychology discussions. "If you just pop them, then they will stop immediately... If I got hit, I never did the thing again... little kids are too young to understand other consequences..." As a mot...

It's only the second week of classes and students are asking for make-up work, to take exams early, and to excuse absences. I have also met with a number of students this week to discuss serious life decisions, dropping classes, and even managing serious mental health issues. On top of all this, my daughter has been waking up several times in the middle of the night so my husband and I have been taking turns comforting her. So much happening! In other words, thank goodness it's Friday! It's never too early to discuss preventing burnout . How do you destress? How do you take steps to prevent burnout at work or home? One suggestion in this  article  is to take time off . I teach five days a week this semester so taking a whole day off isn't really an option. Instead, I got away between office hours this week to take a two-mile run during some mild weather. Below is a photo from the Azalea Trail that runs through the Valdosta State University campus. When I was applying ...

Today is the last day of the first week of the spring semester at Valdosta State University . Every Friday we wear red to show school spirit. I went ahead and just bought red glasses to make things easier! This semester I *get to* teach two sections of an introductory educational psychology course, called Exploring Learning and Teaching, along with an online section of Educational Psychology for Teaching Adults. These are not new preps; in other words, I have taught these classes before and get to have fun with them. This first week is just an introduction so I chose to try out this empathetic syllabi review exercise from the blog, Faculty Focus . In my face-to-face sections, I asked students to bring in their syllabi and critically review them for missing information, as well as mark important dates in their calendars (paper or electronic). This then facilitated a discussion about why some instructors may leave out due dates or points for each assignment. This is my attempt t...