I’m running a bit late today, because I’ve been getting stuff put together for my Spring semester, which starts next week with a rash of meetings, followed by classes starting on the 8th of January.

My position in the department is an odd one, because I’m in a Behavioral Sciences — think Psychology/Sociology/Human Services — department at a small regional midwestern college. The oddness is that, although I have many classes in sociology and psychology and some in human development, my degree is neither in sociology or psychology. My degree is in family and consumption economics, which means I study families’ relationships with time and money and things related to time and money. In effect, it means that I’m highly versed in many of the items that human services deals with — resources, decision-making, basic human needs.

The classes I teach show a glimpse of the odd position I’m in in the department. I teach a behavioral economics class — behavioral economics is actually a thing where psychology tears down the belief that consumers are rational (i.e. the basic belief of economics) with lots of experiments showing exactly how irrational people are with their money.

Another class I teach is a human services class, Intro to Case Management, which comes naturally as well, as I have taught resource management classes for years. It’s all about how to build a rapport with the client, help the client plan a set of goals toward getting toward their new life, and arranging linkages with professionals and other services that will help them toward their goal. In other words, it’s all the steps of resource management with a client.

The third class I teach, I only teach in the spring, and I believe I teach it because nobody else wanted to. It’s a really fun class, despite the name — Personal Adjustment. It’s a hardcore psychology class about theories of … happiness and well-being. Because it’s a hardcore psychology class, I need the students to remember that Seligman is attached to the concept of the “Good Life” and signature strengths, Csikszentmihalyi developed the concept of Flow activities, and Diener was the guy who did the beeper studies where he’d randomly ask subjects to report what they were doing and feeling. (I was a student of Diener’s as an undergrad and I so wanted to be in that study!) But I studied quality of life from an economic viewpoint in graduate school, and so now I teach it from a psychology viewpoint.

Do I believe everything is interrelated? Yes, most certainly! I see myself as standing in the middle of a universe of information and pulling out stars and comets of information as I see them (please hold off on the “center of the universe” jokes). I braid the strands of information together, and search for more information to continue the braid into a whole concept, a theory, or even a metaphor. 

Everything I’ve ever learned is in that universe waiting for me to remember it. Nothing is too random to keep — not Existentialism, nor food garnishing, nor the significant of slow blood refill when you squeeze someone’s thumb, nor how soap works, nor Becker’s third theorem in A Treatise on the Family, nor the first snowflake I’d ever seen …

I need to keep learning for the rest of my life. I’m not done at age 54 with a PhD in Family and Consumption Economics from 1991 (Shout out to those of you who weren’t born yet!) I need to learn for my job, I need to learn for my writing, I need to learn for the thrill of standing in the middle of that universe of information…

Ironically, I may get a chance. Higher Learning Commission, our accrediting body, suggests that I need to take 21 hours in a psychology-related field because I’m teaching Psychology without a degree in Psychology.

I’m thinking of a certificate in Disaster Psych, which would add many interesting comets to my universe.