Author Archives: Kyung Eun Lee

There is a reason the bed is not called a chair

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In my sophomore year of high school, I learned that the bed and chair are not interchangeable items. Sometime in my tenth grade, something happened to my brother’s chair and I ended up giving him mine. I’m not entirely sure of the incident but that was the end result. The main point is that I gave him my chair not really because I wanted to be nice, but because I wanted to use my bed as a chair and this was the golden opportunity with the perfect excuse that the heavens sent from above. At that time, I thought that this was the greatest idea I ever came up with in my entire sixteen years of existence. I rearranged my entire room and it looked pretty nice. My bed-as-a-chair plan was fun and extremely comfortable. After going online or doing my homework, I didn’t have to move to get back to my bed because I was already in it. This was an act that expressed epitome of laziness. However, this ultimate plan of mine actually backfired because at some point, I associated my textbooks with the feelings of sleepiness.

I am one of those people who fall asleep after lying down on a bed for a couple of seconds. During my-bed-is-my-chair plan I would study and do homework while lying in bed but because they weren’t really fun things to do, I would fall asleep not even halfway through finishing reading or doing the homework. It couldn’t be helped in my opinion because first of all, homework and studying is boring and secondly, if I’m in bed of course I am going to be sleepy. So this pattern kept going and going until at some point, I would fall asleep in class just because I was reading the textbooks I read before falling asleep. Apparently I classically conditioned myself to fall asleep whenever I looked at my textbooks. Classical conditioning is when a person correlates a behavior with an external stimulus that is originally unrelated to that behavior. Through repetition, the person eventually starts associating that external stimulus with that behavior and they become linked. In my case, I linked sleeping to my textbooks. This occurred because every time I read my textbooks, it was while I was in my bed, which is where I fall asleep without any effort. Eventually, my brain associated textbook with sleep and as a result, I would fall asleep whenever I looked at my textbook. My bed was the unconditioned stimulus and the feeling of sleepiness was the unconditioned response. The neutral stimulus was my textbook, but became the conditioned stimulus as the conditioned response to this stimulus was to sleep. I may have struggled to stay away in class, but on the Brightside, I learned that year I got a nickname: the one who is always sleeping in class.

Changing Study Habits

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The concept of memorization and the different types of rehearsals and processing associated with learning was discussed in lecture. Memory is actively learning something, and then storing that information just like you would store the old stuff toys that you played with as a child. Remembering is when you retrieve that stored information and rebuild it within your mind. With memory, you first use your sensory memory and that information will either be short term memory and long term memory. Whether it will enter the long term memory storage or the short term memory storage is dependent on how that information was processed. This lecture was a particular interest to me because I am taking a couple of courses that is really memory based and for some reason, I could not get any information to stick to me. I admit it; I do cram however, only for some classes and when I do cram, I try to cram about three days in advance.(Still no excuse I know)However, it is really frustrating for exams that I have been seriously studying for but when I take the exam, all I have in my head is a blank slate. I also went through the tip of the tongue phenomena, which is knowing that you know something but not being able to recall that information. I tried changing my study habits as well as reviewing the notes on a daily basis, so less cramming, yet still the changes didn’t show on my exam grades. Obviously I wasn’t doing anything right, but at the same time, I did not know what I was doing wrong. Not knowing what was wrong made it really difficult. How can I change something when I don’t even know what to change? Apparently it was a couple of things. It was my habit of listening to music while studying as well as the daily review. First of all, the music was blocking the effective processing of information from the start. Even though I was not listening to the words, my brain could still understand the words and basically my brain was split in two since it was trying to process the music lyrics and the actual words that I was trying to learn. In the end, I was not efficiently learning anything and adding work to my brain. The daily review was only maintenance rehearsal. Maintenance rehearsal is just repeating the information over and over again until you memorize it, however, after a certain period of time you lose that information because that memory enters the short term memory storage. It really was an eye opener. I started listening to music that had no words to it and when I reviewed the information on a daily basis, I made sure to go over the information, really try to understand it and make sure I learned it so it had some meaning to me (web of association) and then recalled that information. When I study in my room, I try to reteach the information to myself. I recently took one of my exams for a class that I REALLY needed to do well in, and got an A. If only I knew this earlier.

Things You Learn

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The Sociocultural Perspective

I grew up in a community which was made up of a variety of people (not as diverse as Penn State of course) and in school, I was able to meet people from a variety of backgrounds, lifestyles, sexual orientations, ethnic backgrounds and beliefs. Because of such a diverse group of friends and peers, I believed that I was a pretty open minded person. However, my experience at Penn State and the new people I met here showed that I was not as open minded as I thought I was.

During my fall semester sophomore year, I moved into a new hall, new room and new floor mates. There was one particular floor mate whom I became close with and her name is Erin. She came directly from China and it was her second semester here. Even though we only just met each other, people thought that we had been friends for years by the second week of the semester. During that semester, not only did I meet a great friend, but I also went through this non – official cultural exchange. I took a Chinese 001 course and she would help me with the homework and I would help her with the English that she couldn’t understand in her classes and just in general. We spent time in each other’s room talking about the things we missed about home; she would talk about China and I would talk about Korea. Through these talks, I learned much about China. For example, there are huge differences between North China and South China: food, language and even the guys. South China prefers the spicier dished and the North has a little more “r” sound in some of the words. Talking with her also reminded me of my own Korean heritage. Korea and China are different countries but they share many of the same festivals, same cultural norms and overlap in many of the foods as well. She helped me remember what I had slowly forgotten over the eighteen years that I have lived in America. I also learned about the differences in American culture and Asian culture. She showed me that the things that I think are normal are not normal in everyone’s eyes: what I didn’t understand about China, China also didn’t understand about the States. She made me really see the cultural boundaries that I did not notice before and she helped me break that barrier. For example, in China and in Korea actually, it is normal to see little children and many women hold hands while walking. I didn’t know that. If I went to China, I would be just as confused as she was when she saw that people here didn’t hold hands here.

The sociocultural perspective is a mixture of social psychology and cultural psychology. As a result, this perspective takes into account the study of social groups, roles and social relationships as well as the study of cultural norms and expectations. This type of perspective allows the comparison of different types of people and the culture and social settings that they bring with them. This comparison teaches us as people to understand and embrace the differences that exist in this world. For anyone who looks at the world through the sociocultural perspective, a whole new world is understood and your understanding of the world is changed as well. It opened my eyes, let me learn about another’s culture, and reminded me about my own.