The Writer's Poke

Attention Psychology Instructors and "Nature vs. Nurture" Lovers Have your heard of the 7-Up documentary series? About 42 years ago, some British psychologists began to follow the lives of a group of children -- male, female, rich, poor, black, white. Every seven years, then, they do a follow-up interview to see what's going on in their lives. This, year, the 5th follow-up documentary was released, entitled 49-Up. I'll be watching it over the weekend, but I have previously viewed the other documentaries in the series -- 7-Up, 14-Up, 21-Up, 28-Up, and 35-Up. Good stuff. Do you need to watch all of them? Probably not. They repeat some of the same footage in each of the follow-up documentaries, so I wouldn't recommend watching them all at once... However, it's good to watch the earlier ones to see how the documentary style has changed over the past 40 years. Also, some of the people in the study have dropped out, and you need to watch the early ones to see who th...

What motivates you? How do you make sure that your students are motivated? I'll be leading a workshop on motivation in a couple of weeks, but I'd love to incorporate your ideas, too. Drop me an email -- fish1861@aol.com Bret

Attention: Philosophy Instructors and Armchair Philosophers I don't know if you've heard of this book -- The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten: 100 Experiments for the Armchair Philosopher -- but I'm currently reading it, and it's pretty darn good. I'm thinking it might be a cool way to introduce students to some of the most important philosophical and ethical questions ever analyzed by Western philosophical minds. There are 100 questions, if you will, and the book is only 300 pages. So it's good for those with ADHD, but it would also be a cool way to start a class discussion on a topic. Each "question" or section is also cross-listed, so you can easily refer to related questions/sections. Bret