Gilmer

Poor seal!

How he suffers!

courage2

I had a college teacher once who gave me an F in his course "as a personal statement" -- his exact phrase. It had a significant effect on my life, coming at the time it came. I resented it for years and still will never forget it.

I think of him a couple of times a year, when it's my time to turn in my students' grades. Is that a time to include the personal and the emotional? Or not?

How would you as a student feel if your teacher graded you based on his/her feelings about you personally rather than your academic performance?

Aellyce, how do you as a grant-writer feel about a review panel that makes a decision about your submission based on their emotional response to your work?

Maybe you'll all say, hey, I'm fine with that, it's part of human nature. But when the judgment goes against you, won't you want reasons?

Gilmer

That is so unprofessional, Courage!

I'm apoplectic just thinking about it!

It seems, then, that one kind of emotional decision--that of mercy and clemency--is far superior to an emotional decision based on malice.

Overall, though, it is important to carry out justice on behalf of those who have been legitimately wronged. An emotional decision to cut Ted Bundy a break because he was handsome and charming would have been a gross miscarriage of justice!

I guess it takes wisdom to make decisions well. You accumulate the best data you can, then humbly do your best.

I imagine even the most considered decisions are disputed by someone,

As a judge, one might strive to be good, honest and faithful--but it would be impossible to be flawless.

courage2

Mebbee. I was an a-hole. He became a professional ethicist. But maybe his experience w/me turned him that way?

May I put that in my professional signature, Gilmer?

Gilmer

Sure!

fini

Cracking our moral code: How we decide what's right and wrong - Home | Ideas with Paul Kennedy | CBC Radio

haha, that's what was on the radio last night, oh so aptly.
i listen to 'ideas' every night while knitting , on the couch. sober. feels like utter luxury.

and it was an interesting program, worth listening to.

of course i take issue with the beginning statement that we all have a clear sense of what is right and what is wrong. if we had such a clear 'sense' (and what is meant by 'sense' here???), we wouldn't go through decision-making processes.....and agonies.

Aellyce

Grrrr! I've written an extensive comment re: reviewing and other things, and lost it! Oh well, I'll try to reproduce it sometime later. For now, I will second Gilmer's comment, it is probably the best summary one can come up with about this topic:

I think often the problems arise when we stop making our own effort but still expect it from others. That is the best recipe for unfair emotional judgments, projections often fueled by resentment towards ourselves and our own lack of discipline, driven by internal cognitive dissonance.

LostManhattan

Bunny,

That happened to me once although it wasn't so up close and personal. It was my year of living dangerously with recreational drugs. Big.Fat.F. Prof reneged on what grade you get in my comprehensive final is your grade. It was comprehensive, I got a C. Didn't challenge it due to my guilt over my slackerism.

I think we are of the same age when some profs felt they had license to mess with your head just you were a 'girl'. Maybe I'm off base here but sometimes it was a struggle.

Modern chestnut but yet can't let the toxic rent space in your head, although I totally understand. You are you - grade without past.

courage2

Hey LostinManttan! I hope you're well I <3 that you call me bunny -- not many of the people who do are around anymore.

Maybe the grade thing *was* a male prof-female student mind-f***. I never would have thought of that then -- like you, I was pretty much out of my mind on drugs, and really young. I covered gross naivete with a hard attitude. Then later the "hard" swamped everything

I try to not get self-righteous about experiences like that -- who am I to cast stones? I made a lot of bad judgments myself, & hurt others. Who knows? Maybe he was a poor suffering alcoholic. I only brought it up as an example of something otherwise so abstract.

Aellyce, please tell use what you're referring to here. I'm mad at myself so I take it out on X? I think I'm in the right but find out that I'm really wrong or inadequate so I lash out emotionally against someone else?

We should make a rule on this thread: words of 10 letters or less. Anglo-Saxon rocks!

LostManhattan

You used to be Snark Bunny.

Maybe it was Cow who gave you that moniker.

Sometimes you & end game & aellyce are way above my pay grade, but I do enjoy the intellectual porn (plz take that with a big smile)

BrendaChenowyth

I want to clear this up.. You point out that the Bible says "judge not lest ye be judged"..Matthew 7:1 is very commonly quoted out of context. The Bible is a really big book, it says a lot of things and it all has meaning in context..

It goes on to say that when you judge others, you should be mindful of the fact that in the same way that you are judging them, you are also being judged in that way. It doesn't say that you should not judge, but it warns against being rash to judge before first considering your own merit or lack thereof. It advises us that if we are going to help our brothers and sisters to correct their sins, it's best to fix ourselves first, then we can be in a better position to help them. Take the log out of one's own eye first in order to see better to help the other person remove the splinter from theirs.

It certainly doesn't mean to tell Christians that they should not judge one another. There is something called discernment, I like that term better than judgment. Without discernment, I would not be able to choose an item off of a breakfast menu, any more than I would be able to choose between right and wrong courses of action. I also have to be able to discern or recognize right and wrong behavior in the people around me, because if I don't practice that, I am going to get hurt.

Mountainmanbob

A good true point made above but, the ones that haven't studied the bible have been loosely throwing that verse out for hundreds and hundreds of years.

The Bible also tells us to examine ourselves and our brothers and sisters.
Makes a lot of sense.
For how often do (we all) stray?

M-Bob

courage2

I'm still snark bunny. Yes, Cow started that. I like it -- keep it up, please.

Sometimes I get worried I've lost my snark.

And, I'm no intellectual, just a high-verb worrier.

fini

didn't you get that name when you had the bunny avatar. which I loved. always meant to ask or google if it was Duerer...but didn't.

Dee74

courage2

I've had a lot of rabbits. It's the whole courage thing. The Dürer was my first avatar. I think this was the one Cow liked, but you'd have to ask her:

Aellyce

I just checked back into this thread so apologies for the delay. Will give an example. I sometimes get really lazy and procrastinate things, let's just talk about work. Will distract myself with all sorts of things that seem more appealing in the moment (posting on SR and the internet in many ways can be one)... and won't make enough effort to progress with work that is otherwise important to me. But I do want the progress and can sometimes hypocritically pester my colleagues and especially more junior people, demand updates and advancement from them and express frustration if it does not come and if they are equally distracted or prioritize differently. But I am usually highly aware of this and feel bad about demanding from others progress while I am stagnating, it's double standards really - hence the cognitive dissonance. Extremely anxiety-provoking and undermining self-esteem. But instead of resolving my procrastination and frustration with myself and getting into action, I sometimes project it onto others. I think needless to describe how this pattern can become extreme in active addiction - where it started for me. I try not to do this sober but still a long way to go. I tend to feel and sometimes preach how much I despise unfairness and injustice, but there is this... If this is at least in part what "snarky" implies, I think I could definitely attach that to my name sometimes as well.

Hmm I think in general I should set a rule for myself, posts of 10 sentences or less

courage2

Thanks for that post, Aellyce. It came across very clear & very honest.

One challenging thing about teaching yourself not to project procrastination etc onto others -- there are so many people out there for whom the shoe appears to fit. In fields where a lot of the work is in the head, it's easy a) to look at someone else's apparent inactivity and call it procrastination when it's really development, and b) to really procrastinate and hide behind a curtain of fancy language. Basically we all look like slackers to the rest of the world LOL.

& I'd never use snarky to describe you.

Aellyce

This is great advice, thank you courage! I definitely agree and the "hiding behind a curtain of fancy language" is very accurate. I just sometimes don't understand why I hesitate to project it into my numerous official writing projects, I always have plenty. Okay maybe just developing

But seriously,