3 Things I Learned in Grad School This Week ~ Feb 19 2017

Critical and Sensitive Periods! Poetic Transcription! And Ippon seoi nage! Here are the three things I learned in Grad School this week:

Ippon Seoi Nage
I was going to look into Sovereign Power in Gentrification but I have to write a paper and I know too little about this to delve deep. Instead, I got my ass handed to me last week with the most basic Judo throw, called an Ippon Seoi Nage – or, more simply, a seoi nage (pronounced roughly as: say na gee). After a week of drills with the seoi nage, I pulled two muscles in my quads, rolled an ankle, and landed poorly on my neck. Judo is a lot of fun and I have at least 18 more basic throws to learn but I am inhaling ibuprofen in the process.
 
Critical Periods and Sensitive Periods
In class I said: “the most interesting part to me was that if you do not get appropriately socialized at the right ages you lose the ability to socialize appropriately for the rest of your life – if you don’t use it, you literally lose it.” This was in response to a reading called The Nurture Assumption by Harris where she says that peer groups in childhood are more important for a person’s development than a parent’s influence. This idea of being locked in to a lifetime of maladjustment was baffling to me – I had never heard that; it goes against the belief I have that we can reinvent ourselves endlessly. Apparently not. In Developmental Psychology there are these points in our life called Critical Periods and Sensitive Periods and they relate to skill building. Critical periods are necessary and sensitive periods are more extended with less necessity to acquire a skill for use. Some folks say there are no differences between the two and others make more distinctions. According to Wikipedia: “critical period is a maturational stage in the lifespan of an organism during which the nervous system is especially sensitive to certain environmental stimuli. If, for some reason, the organism does not receive the appropriate stimulus during this "critical period" to learn a given skill or trait, it may be difficult, ultimately less successful, or even impossible, to develop some functions later in life. Functions that are indispensable to an organism's survival, such as vision, are particularly likely to develop during critical periods. "Critical period" also relate to ability to acquire first language.”
 
These ideas make more sense to me with ensuring vision kicks in or acquisition of language but it is somewhat scary to me that it applies to socialization, behavior, and psychological development. I suppose that this is what a lot of therapy is based on: reworking maladjusted, learned behaviors as best as possible within the boundaries of your limited self for the best opportunities for success. It means you can’t fix it but you can give yourself healthy coping mechanisms and skills to fight the results of the limitations you have. Damn.
 
Poetic transcription
I love poetry. In some ways, I got my undergraduate degree in studying it. But this week we learned Poetic Transcription and it makes me feel icky. The idea is that you create a poem from the data you collect in an interview to pull out the most important aspects in a concise and coherent way.
 
Sidenote: I love poetry but I think the reason it makes me feel like slugs are crawling up my neck is because I hate bad poetry. Like, aesthetically but also somatically repulsed by bad poetry. I don’t know why this is the case but I cringe when hearing someone share a bad poem. And, making a good poem out of someone’s drivel seems difficult.
 
I digress. I see a use for Poetic Transcription for helping to make sense of the chaos of a 90 minute interview. I did this for the first season of Pelecanus and it helped in not only editing our episodes but also in understanding the subject matter better. The idea is create new insight through emotional intertwining of various and sometimes disparate concepts of someone’s interview.