bad sunday

so i had to work this morning. and i was t-i-r-e-d. i put all my effort into doing the treatments, and then at 11, i went to starbucks waikele to work on my stinking paper. last night, i'd gone through the readings once again to take notes on things i could possibly write about...

here's the thing about comparison/contrast papers. they only work if there's some similarity between the two things you're writing about. if they are fundamentally different, what have you got to say? sure, you can talk about the differences/contrasts, but that's pretty obvious. so what happened with the paper was i started making "forced comparisons." it- FELT- ugly.

here's the deal. skinner's a behaviorist, piaget's a cognitive theorist. behaviorists by nature tend to discount all "internal psychological workings", because they are not objectively observable (scientific) phenomena, and they are not typically subject to the sort of rigorous experimentation that behaviorists like. cognitive theory, by contrast (jeez, i feel like i'm writing the paper all over again), is directly concerned with the "inner workings of the mind," particularly as they relate to the development of (piaget's term) schemata.

what i eventually did was this: i compared skinner (and all behaviorists) to pruners or hedge trimmers: not concerned about the health of the tree, but concerned about the shape. not in control of where a given branch grows, but in control of whether or not to cut it or let it grow out.

then, i compared piaget to what i called the gardener; someone who is aware of each plant as a vital and active organism, motivated to "equilibrate" (piaget's term) the various conflicts it experiences...

... so it's over. for now. finished the paper at about 9:30 (due at 11 tonight).

on the way, there was a lot of carnage in the immediate family. because lynn worked till 6, and because i was working on my paper, we didn't pick up willow and aiden from my parents until late. so the kids were pretty wild and misbehavin'. my parents tend to be very liberal with the kids, to the point where they don't supervise them at all. kinda bad. what's worse, they didn't take a nap, which always sprinkles crankiness into their dispositions.

so willow had a pretty bad tantrum this evening. we eventually were able to calm her down and attempt to reason with her. but all in all, i'd say it wasn't exactly a happy ending for her.

or for us...