Mark Melo 91563460 Preface: My diary is very long, but it's not long for the sake of being long. I know that this diary is used to evaluate participation and engagement with the course material. I did not speak in class much, but I did note what was said and I did fill in this diary weekly. I want it to be known that I take this class seriously, as I do with any other class. All the responses include the corresponding question number. I don't always include the question prompt, sorry. Jan 10 Week 0 I came into this class expecting very little. Honestly, it sounded like the worst part of the honours degree, even worse than stats. But the intro today filled me with some hope. Alan cleared up some of his harsh wording in the syllabus; so, it seems that if circumstances are so, a quiz can be missed. Without a canvas page I was a little worried, but it seems like I and the class will be organized regardless. Alan just said the class won't be 3 hrs. He said 7:30ish. Hopefully in this class the material will be enjoyable enough to actually have the motivation to prepare some notes for discussion. I don't see any participation marks in the syllabus ... but I'm hoping that that won't matter. Jan 16 Week 1 Last week I prepared a lot of notes for discussion. But I didn't share them. In highschool I used to share a lot in class. But ever since coming to university I feel that either my ideas are not developed enough to be worth sharing or that my ideas wouldn't be appreciated by others. I also tend to disagree with many points made in class discussion or feel that my point of view is typically different. I know that my ideas can't be terrible, but the fear of rejection overwhelms me. It is easier to engage by just thinking about what other people say, by sharing my ideas I just make myself vulnerable. However, if someone calls on me I will respond, I always have something to say, I just don't say it. That sounds sad, but there were some memorable points made in class today. Simon made a rebuttal to someone else's comment that happiness was measured by proxy so one could never get at the truth. The original comment was that since happiness was intangible and subjective it could never truly be measured. Simon argued that gravity was also intangible, but there seems to be agreement on how gravity works, at least locally. There was a huge issue in the conversation last night, people were arguing about getting at truth without ever defining truth. Once truth was somewhat defined, the conversation was moved to whether or not psychology was a science. In my opinion, it doesn't matter if psychology is a real science. If you are honest about what you're studying, then you are doing the right thing. I've come to