Screening the Psycho-Dynamics of Learning to Teach: A Study of Depression in Teacher Education

Screening the Psycho-Dynamics of Learning to Teach is a psychoanalytic study about the status of depression in teacher education. How do films that depict depressed teachers and students offer educationalists a resource for working through depression in pedagogy? I suggest that the interminable process of learning to teach requires teachers to encounter loss, vulnerability, and sadness. Yet, the ubiquity of these emotional conditions means that depression, as a psychical defense against strong emotions, pervades the profession of teaching and prevents teachers and learners from thinking creatively. With the problem of the teachers depression in mind, I turn to three recent films about depressed educational subjects, Monsieur Lazhar (2011), Half Nelson (2006), and Mona Lisa Smile (2004) to examine both how popular representations of education depict depression in teaching and how these representations may be used as a resource for making significance of the extraordinary and mundane emotional conflicts of learning to teach. I frame my discussion of depression using the psychoanalytic theories of the dead mother (Green, 1980) and the dead teacher (Farley, 2014) in order to think about how new teachers (lost) desire affects teaching and learning relations. In each chapter, I analyze one film using one psychoanalytic concept that is relevant to pedagogy: transference in Half Nelson, identification in Mona Lisa Smile, and melancholia in Monsieur Lazhar. Alternatively, these chapters each analyze one depressed figure who haunts the scene of education: the teacher in Half Nelson who is in transference with a caring student repeats the unconscious fantasy of the emotionally dead mother; the new teacher in Mona Lisa Smile identifies with feminist historical fantasies in order to sustain her teaching desire for the depressed student(s); and, the depressed teacher in Monsieur Lazhar finds a surviving maternal teacher through whom he learns to symbolize and mourn his losses in teaching. The final chapter turns from visual analysis of the films to a discussion of the films as sites of viewer pedagogy. I suggest finally that viewer emotional responses to the films often repeat the psychodynamics of pedagogy represented on screen. Film pedagogy thus creates a space for viewers to remember, repeat, and work through the emotional conflicts of teaching and learning

Trying to see, failing to focus:near visual impairment in Down syndrome

The majority of individuals with Down syndrome (DS) do not exhibit accurate accommodation, with the aetiology of this deficit unknown. This study examines the mechanism underlying hypoaccommodation in DS by simultaneously investigating the ‘near triad’ – accommodation, vergence and pupillary response. An objective photorefraction system measured accommodation, pupil size and gaze position (vergence) under binocular conditions while participants viewed an animated movie at 50, 33, 25 and 20 cm. Participants were aged 6–16 years (DS = 41, controls = 76). Measures were obtained from 59% of participants with DS and 99% of controls. Accommodative response was significantly less in DS (p < 0.001) and greater accommodative deficits were associated with worsening visual acuity (p = 0.02). Vergence responses were as accurate in DS as in controls (p = 0.90). Habitual pupil diameter did not differ between groups (p = 0.24) but reduced significantly with increasing accommodative demand in both participants with and without DS (p < 0.0001). This study is the first to report simultaneous binocular measurement of the near triad in DS demonstrating that hypoaccommodation is linked to poor visual acuity. Vergence responses were accurate indicating that hypoaccommodation cannot be dismissed as a failure to visually engage with near targets, but rather is a consequence of underlying neurological or physiological deficits

Import, export, and recycling of dissolved nutrients in the Ogeechee River estuary (Georgia, USA)

We constructed an empirical mass balance model of nutrient fluxes in the Ogeechee River estuary (Georgia, USA) from eight surveys of seasonal estuarine nutrient concentrations during 2015 and 2016. The model results indicated a net removal of dissolved phosphorus and a net production of dissolved nitrogen (N) within the estuary over an annual cycle. During summer and autumn low flow periods, much of the dissolved N discharged to the ocean seems to be recycled into the estuary in the form of phytoplankton biomass. As a result, the outwelled N is not new nitrogen fueling coastal production but is nitrogen trapped within a recycling loop across the ocean–estuarine boundary. Higher flows in the fall and winter lead to direct discharge of nutrients with minimal recycling. A balanced N budget for the Ogeechee River estuary requires that estuarine N-fixation must exceed burial and denitrification losses within the estuary

Controller Order Reduction with Guaranteed Stability and Performance

In this paper we consider the problem of controller order reduction for control design for robust performance. In practical control design it may be important to have low order controllers. For example, one may want to gain schedule a series of LTI (linear, time invariant) controllers, or give simple physical interpretations to the control dynamics. When solving practical design problems using, say, H∞ software it is common to produce controllers of high order - equal to the sum of the order of the plant plus each of the weighting functions. However, there may be lower order controllers which stabilize the plant and provide satisfactory H∞ closed loop performance. The objectives of a method for controller order reduction within the H∞ framework, then, should be to find low order controllers which stabilize a given plant and provides satisfactory H∞ performance. Ideally, the method should apply to a large class of problems, be easy to implement and be guaranteed to work

When is classical loop shaping H∞-optimal?

This paper examines conditions under which a given SISO LTI control system is H∞-optimal with respect to weighted combinations of its sensitivity function and its complementary sensitivity function. The specific weighting functions considered are defined in terms of the sensitivity and complementary sesitivity functions. We show that a large class of practical controllers are in fact H∞-optimal, including typical stable controllers

The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching and Learning

IMPACT: The Journal of the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning is a peer-reviewed, biannual online journal that publishes scholarly and creative non-fiction essays about the theory, practice and assessment of interdisciplinary education. Impact is produced by the Center for Interdisciplinary Teaching & Learning at the College of General Studies, Boston University (www.bu.edu/cgs/citl).How do our students learn what it means to be a human being, with all the attendant responsibilities and joys? How do we learn to teach in a truly interdisciplinary manner? These are some of the questions that preoccupy this issue’s contributors

Design examples using µ-synthesis: Space shuttle lateral axis FCS during reentry

This paper studies the application of Structured Singular Values (SSV or µ) for analysis and synthesis of the Space Shuttle lateral axis flight control system (FCS) during reentry. While this is a fairly standard FCS problem in most respects, the aircraft model is highly uncertain due to the poorly known aerodynamic characteristics (e.g. aero coefficients). Comparisons are made of the conventional FCS with alternatives based on H∞ optimal control and µ-synthesis. The problem as formulated is particularly interesting and challenging because the uncertainty is large and highly structured