more on my "favorite" professor

Since I've started writing about my beloved Psychology 150 professor, I've decided to share the rest of the strange yet highly interesting lessons he's been teaching. (The guy's a riot!)

First of all, our class is supposed to be a class on personality. Other classes with the same course outline have been talking about Jung, Freud, and all the other major contributors to personality theories but as expected, my class hasn't even touched those topics. I want to learn! I want Freud! I want Jung! I want a normal professor who would talk some sense even if only for a maximum time of 5 minutes! But with the luck I have, I got the ONLY class, imagine the chances, with the professor who refuses to teach about anything remotely related to the syllabus.

Okay maybe I exaggerate. All our classes are based on theories on personality. However, the method with which he teaches us are so unorthodox, not to mention a wee bit loony, that it's rather hard to take any of it seriously. During one of the more productive periods in class, we talked about the validity of the claim that an unconscious mind exists. Being the brilliant mind that my professor is, he rushes out of the classroom in mid-sentence. He comes back quite proud of himself whilst holding in his hands tiny crystal balls attached to pieces of string. And the excited gleam in his eyes slowly spelled out T-W-I-L-I-G-H-T-Z-O-N-E.

What was his brilliant plan you ask? Simple. We hold the free end of the string to which the crystal was attached and we sort of suspend it with our arms stretched straight out in front of our body. Now, with all the concentration we could muster, we would will the crystal to rotate clockwise and then counter clockwise without moving the string physically. When this tiny feat was accomplished, we would ask a question about ourselves (something we know about ourselves) and if the ball swings backwards and forwards, the answer is yes. When the ball swings from left to right, however, the answer is no. Hmmmm...And the plot begins to thicken...

So we're all kind of in this state of is-he-serious-i-think-it's-time-to-drop-this-class, when he instructs us to ask the ball if we could talk to our unconscious mind. (I could only just supress the nervous laugh arising from my throat) If the answer was yes, we were to proceed to ask it questions about our future. We spent the next hour and a half consulting a fake crystal ball, which he apparently bought for 15 pesos, about the most important decisions that would affect our future. Perfect.

If there's one thing I'll get from this class, it's experience as a fortune teller, which if I'm lucky, I'll be able to add to my resume.