English Recordings

Pressure Makes Perfect
Steering yourself away from conscious monitoring is easy enough when you are reciting a
speech or playing a piece in your living room, but keeping optimum focus in front of a crowd
or review board is another animal entirely.
The best way to make a performance situation feel like rehearsal, says Raôul R. D. Oudejans,
a psychologist at Free University Amsterdam, is to subject yourself to the same anxietypacked
conditions during practice that you expect to encounter during your moment in the
spotlight. In a 2008 study Oudejans rounded up a group of Dutch police officers and asked
half of them to practice their marksmanship skills by shooting at a cardboard target; the other
half trained by firing shots directly at one another (the cartridges contained soap, not bullets).
After three one-hour training sessions, the “performance” was on: an officer-on-officer shootout
using the dummy cartridges. The officers who had practiced on cardboard targets caved
in this new tension-filled situation, whereas the group that had trained under the same
stressful conditions thrived, notching much higher accuracy ratings than the other group did.
These results indicate that turning up the heat from the very first day of practice may be one
of the most effective ways to immunize yourself against blowing it. “Performers train and
train, but it’s not that common to specifically train under these kinds of psychological
constraints,” Oudejans says. “They’re trained in how to play their game, but they don’t train
under pressure, so they fail.” Training in such situations minimizes the possibility of freezing
up for the same reason that letting spiders crawl all over you makes them less frightening:
your brain gradually adapts, so that circumstances that once would have made you uneasy no
longer feel novel or threatening. “The more exposure you get to these high-pressure
situations, and the more you succeed [despite them], the less likely you’re going to get that
whole affective experience,” explains Art Markman, a psychologist at the University of
Texas at Austin. In other words, the more comfortable you feel, the less likely you are to be
affected by pressure.

The players sailed through the second trial with flying colors—except the ones who focused
on multiple aspects of their putt, according to the results published in the January 2008
Psychology of Sport and Exercise. “When they were focusing on the three representative
mechanical processes, that was when their performance dropped,” Gucciardi noted. Similarly,
in 1999 psychologist Lew Hardy of the University of Wales found that performers who think
about a concrete, detailed set of rules during their moment in the spotlight (“keep skis high in
the air” and “keep body streamlined” for a ski jumper, for instance) are more likely to
succumb to pressure than are those who do not have such a specific set of rules in mind.
On the other hand, the golfers in Gucciardi’s study who focused on holistic single-word cues
actually performed best in the pressure-packed putting round. Gucciardi thinks the degree of
focus involved in fixating on a one-word mantra—not too much, not too little—could account
for the difference between the three groups. “Our thought is that if you use the one word, it
prevents you from regressing into conscious control, but it’s still enough to activate the
schematic cue to get that motor program running,” he says.
The upshot? If you scrutinize your performance too much—trying to control, for example,
the natural inflections in your voice as you present an important finding to your office
mates—you will be priming your cerebral cortex to trip over your cerebellum, leaving
yourself at a loss for words. But if you focus on a single word or idea that sums up your
entire presentation (“smooth” or “forceful,” for instance), you will be best equipped to
prevent your brain from getting in its own way.

A:It would've been nice to take Ms.Barns out for dinner before she left.

B:Too bad we're out of town.

Each Day is new beginning.
A chance to make new Choices.
A chance to try and begin again.
To take another step. To try and think Positive.

Life is full of Beautiful Miracles.
You want to see one right now?
Go and Look in the Mirror.
You. Are. Amazing.

Believe in You. Have Faith.
Stay Strong .. and Have a Beautiful day ♥

to decry
to cast down
to refashion
to discountenance
to vie with each other
to stagger
to fend off aggression
to repent
to gauge the public reaction
to snatch off
to incense
to kindle
to contemn death
to shelve
to recount
to derive from
to shun
to rip off
to deploy
to inch
to cry down
to groan under
to dwindle with the years
to hound
to appropriate
to subvert
to surmount
to dispense with one’s services
to oust
to track down
to exacerbate
to accede to
to brim
to repine
to flare up
to confer with

Life has many ways of testing a person's will, either by having nothing happen at all or by having everything happen all at once.

The high percentage of A grades given at Bentley could certainly signal grade inflation, but it also illustrates that the school is focused on pleasing students. The biggest factor in pleasing students is pleasing them through good grades. Students avoid teachers who are rumored to “grade hard”. Joe Castaldo, a professor at a Canadian University, describes the struggle of pleasing students: “the simple solution was to make the tests easier. Students would be happy, I would spend less time marking, and there was no risk of alarming the university administration with low grades.” (1). Teachers lower their standards in an effort to please the university and avoid attacks from students. Therefore, the quality of work is lowered, and the degree received upon graduation is worth less.
Colleges are trying to cut costs while increasing the quality of education, but how many students actually care about the “value” or “quality” of their degree? Shouldn’t it be worth just as much as their parents forked over for tuition? As it seems today, students care more about the face value of graduating and moving past college rather than the “hard” work they’ve done to reach this goal. The ASHE Higher Education Report confirms that “individual students, their families, and the society invest tremendous resources in higher education. In turn, they expect colleges and universities to maximize student learning and personal development and to advance societal well-being” (5). The parents and students both are seeking satisfaction from a college education in several areas, but the only tangible measure of this satisfaction is the grades the students receive.
Students are more like consumers than students, customers that seek to be pleased by their education rather than challenged by it. Students get their consumer mindset from the media-infused culture they were born into. From television, radio, magazines – the message is the same. The ASHE Higher Education Report affirms that shifts in the social, cultural, and political environments can affect the overall pattern of changes in college grades (45). The media message teaches them more about life than perhaps do the teachers at universities: never be satisfied. There is something that could always be better than what you have, so do anything you can to get it. Students can exercise this control when choosing a particular college, and do not hesitate to hem and haw over the advantages and disadvantages of particular institutions. They are only consumers, after all. Once they arrive and settle in at whichever college or university they do choose, many students are hesitant to transfer. Instead, students manipulate their environment so as to gain the best advantage, to get what is “better”.

Grades are important to students because they’re what allow them to market themselves to grad schools and businesses where the students’ futures lie. Students will attend colleges that offer them the best chance at achieving their goals for the future, but allow them to “enjoy themselves” while they do so. That’s why colleges and universities the world over are now engaging in marketing schemes to attract these marketable students. As Edmundson writes in “On the Uses of a Liberal Education”, colleges don’t have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments (437). It seems like a vicious cycle, colleges marketing to students so students can market themselves. As a result, teachers are beginning to educate students in such a way that they will be happy consumers, so students and their parents will continue to hand over their thousands per year and not transfer to another school. Therefore, university culture is changing.
Institutions focus less on educating students and more on offering them entertainment and diversion from their seemingly difficult course study. Campus tours focus less on the achievements of alumni and faculty and more on how far away Dunkin’ Donuts is from the dorm rooms. Educating students is now becoming second best to appealing them with flashy facilities and fancy classrooms. At Bentley, it is heralded that 99% of graduates are guaranteed employment after graduation. A grade transcript is most certainly related to a business’ desire to employ the student. It is therefore interesting to wonder: does grade inflation occur at Bentley College, or are students who attend the institution simply the best and brightest of today?

to vouchsafe
to denude
to redress the balance
asunder
clear-cut choice
outmoded
to digest
to emanate from
teleological
undone
prizefighter
in haste
aspiring
a low-down trick
unrelenting
to slug
liberal dose
vintage
halcyon
equilibrium
introspective personality
discerning
frailty
dearth
interposition move
to rebut
to plod
concession
to throw someone for a loop
to jam up
a plethora of
to chop down
to aver
to plunk down
to equalize
to placate
to tangle up
futile
keynote

Yet transhumanism seems almost misanthropic in its zeal. Proponents appear to argue that if human beings as we know them are eliminated, so much the better. We're a pretty rubbish species anyway, so if our successor species is better, why worry about preserving the one we have? Take Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics at the University of Reading. Having implanted several electronic devices into his body, he has begun to claim (perhaps hyperbolically) that he is the world's first cyborg—part human, part machine. “I was born human,” he says, “but this was an accident of fate, a condition merely of time and place. I believe it’s something we have the power to change.”
I'm not sure what to make of all this. But perhaps we are too ready to dismiss innovations such as superintelligence as distant possibilities. We may also be too quick to underestimate the pharmaceutical and genetic technologies that could impact who and what we are in the nearer future. For that reason, it is worrying that Bostrom admits that transhumanists haven't given much thought to the question of what sorts of modifications would simply enhance us and which would be so transformative as to, in effect, destroy humanity as we know it and create a new transhumanity in its place.
It's time that changed. There are questions about what it means to be human—and what we might want to protect from innovation—that need answering. To paraphrase Marx, until now, the philosophers have only interpreted the self; the point now is how, if at all, to change the self.