During the second semester of my freshman year at Longwood University, I took the opportunity to take an Intro to Psychology and this page will be on perspective on this class.
I first decided to take this course because I have a deep passion and love for learning about the human body so I thought learning about the brain would be fun. I have never been good at remembering the parts of the brain or anything to do with psychology so I wanted to take this class to get a deeper understanding of of that realm of knowledge. The material I learned in this class was interesting and fascinating to explore. I learned how the brain develops throughout the life span of humans, how different mental disorders affect the brain, how people learn from their environments, how some mental abnormalities have positively impacted our society. Although I have positive reflection on all of my classes (I genuinely enjoy all of my classes), This class I did not enjoy one bit….
Before I give my reflection of this class, please know that these are my personal thoughts, interpretations, experiences, and opinions. In no way does this reflect poorly on the course as a whole. I learned quite a lot from this course that I will use in my career as a nurse.
The biggest complaint I have for this class is the professor. Typing this feels really weird because I genuinely tend to like all of my professors, but I truly did not like this one. I really did not like her teaching style. The biggest reason was that when introducing a new unit, she would assign a reading in the textbook over the weekend for her students to read, and the first day of class that week she would give an assessment on the material read. After this quiz, she would then proceed to begin teaching the material for that unit. This really bothered me because if you failed the quiz, you have no chance to show the professor whether you learned anything from the lectures. If you got a 100% on the quiz, you then have to sit in the class for the rest of the week learning material you have already learned. These quizzes were given at the beginning of EVERY week. I did phenomenal on some and very poorly on some so I had a mix of both feelings in the class.
Another complaint I have about the professor’s teaching style is that she was VERY quiet. In my experience, I have had a few quiet professors but she sounded like she was whispering half the time. She would also explain concepts in weird ways that were difficult to follow and when asked for clarification, she would explain it in the same way. This was very frustrating because I would have to strain to hear her quiet voice and I would also have trouble following her logic.
Something else I did not like about the course was that it felt like I was in a high school class. You would walk into class, sit down, shut up, take notes, and leave. Every single day. It felt like nothing ever happened in that class. My intellectual growth felt stagnant in this class. There were no activities for the students to learn in a different way. The only alternatives to lectures were very long YouTube videos of scientists speaking monotone about a certain subject.
My artifact for this class is a research project that we were all tasked with completing. Although I did not enjoy this class, it was fascinating to conduct my own research. My research project was about “Anxiety in the Classroom” and I researched the factors that contribute to stressful events, what causes anxiety, genetic and environmental predispositions, and how anxiety in the classroom can affect students’ performances.
Although I had a rough experience with this class, please take into consideration that this is only one students’ opinions and experiences. If you would like to take this class, DO NOT LET THIS DISCOURAGE YOU! Go out and take this class if you would like! There were a number of students who did remarkably well in this class and who have very positive opinions of this class.