I started teaching in 1998 at 30 years old and with a 2 month old PhD. My first class was an introductory adolescent development class with 200 students. I was bright eyed and bushy tailed. They were not. I did not do well at engaging them in discussions. They did not do well on my exams. I tried to share my enthusiasm for research, but it rarely worked.

And at some point (10 years later, to be exact), I had been teaching for a decade. My undergraduate courses were relatively large, ranging from about 200 students in a general education course to about 60 students in an upper level advanced adolescent development course. I was around 40 years old, and I was already jaded on teaching, with decades left in my teaching career. At that point, my jaded self would go into the first day of class with almost a me-against-them mentality, waiting for them to be too demanding or too whiny or for me to disappoint them somehow. They annoyed me. I prepared for revolts. When they came up with excuses, I was intolerant and unbending. It was not a healthy way to approach teaching. In addition, it was not a good way to earn students’ respect or admiration. Looking back on it, I don’t even know that I’d now argue that my perspective was unwarranted. I had dealt with a whole lot of plagiarism, cheating, lying (e.g., I couldn’t come to campus because of a snowstorm in my home town, when a quick search demonstrated, 0 inches of snow in that town), disrespect (at the time, reading newspapers in class was the equivalent of being on one’s phone today), and generally bad attitude.

I don't think I have many turning points in my life, but my teaching turning point was when my sister, 23 years my junior, started college. She was bright eyed and bushy tailed, though I imagine she doesn't appear that way in many classes.   Sometimes one event can shake us up, and for me, Ryan starting college did it. That personal experience brought a whole new level of empathy to me as an instructor. Ryan was someone I knew and loved and respected. But she was also some who, I am sure, sometimes skipped class or handed in assignments late. She was, in many respects, a normal 18-year-old trying to figure out who she was, and to figure out the balance of using her transition to adulthood to learn things in the classroom while also having a social life, making friends, and sleeping among other things.
 
Suddenly, my students weren’t a room full of young people out to game the system or get away with things.  They were real people, with human faults just like the rest of us. I went in wanting to figure out how to inspire them. I wanted to teach them things they could use beyond my exams. I wanted to connect to them. I think as faculty we feel as though students don’t see us as real people. But, the same is often true in reverse. It’s easy for us to forget that students are real people too, just lots of them at once, each with their own competing demands for their time and attention. Just like us, they have competing demands, whether those demands are things we might think of as “worthy” like caring for a sick parent or working three jobs to pay for college, or not-so-worthy, like staying out too late partying or oversleeping. But whatever the reason, they are human.
 
That semester, when my sister started college, I walked into the classroom with a whole new attitude. I didn’t walk in feeling it was me-against-them. I went in thinking about how they are each unique people with their own strengths and weaknesses and quirks. And I went in thinking about how they were people whose parents and siblings and other family members love them for the people they are. It completely flipped my attitude, and as a result, I believe, made me a better teacher. Even when a student emailed me about missing class, I tried to remember they were human, and sometimes humans oversleep. It doesn’t mean I automatically let the student make up the missed assignment, but I did try to have more empathy and compassion in my response.

I still ask questions and sometimes am met with blank replies. I joke about how I need my water bottle for awkward silences. Once I jumped on a table and threatened to stay there until someone answered my question, reminding them how clumsy I am and that my life was in their hands. I still get frustrated at times, when they do worse on a quiz than I think they should, or when someone emails me the day before an assignment asking me basic questions that are answered in the assignment guidelines. I had a student who failed my class the prior semester because she never came (not even to the exams). I emailed her at the start of the next semester expressing my concern, and she came to most classes and earned a solid B. I know that another semester I had a student who wanted to miss the class on abuse in relationships because she didn't think she can handle it. Sometimes students miss classes due to health problems. One semester another student's grandmother died -- really died -- and given that she had lived with her, she had been busy with her role as executor of her estate (and debt).  
 
I sometimes see myself slipping back into my former perspective. Last semester I had 290 students in an intro, general education course. There was a lot of management of excuses and missed assignments, and by the end of the semester, I probably had less compassion than I should have. It helps me to remind myself that any of those students could be my sister – someone who really does want to learn in college, who genuinely is a “good” person (whatever that means), but just like any human, trips up at times along the way. So on the first day of class this Fall semester, I’ll try to walk in and feel love for all of these students, and hope I maintain some form of general positive will through the semester.
 
“How I Became a Better Teacher When my Sister Started College first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 28, 2018.”

Lefkowitz, E. S., Waterman, E. A., Morgan, N., & Maggs, J. L. (2016). College students’ perceptions of the links between alcohol use and sex. Emerging Adulthood, 4, 272-283.
 
Alcohol use can lead to impaired decision making and risky behavior, but emerging adults generally perceive the short-term outcomes of alcohol use positively. Similarly, although sexual behavior can lead to unwanted outcomes such as pregnancy and STIs, emerging adults view sex as predominantly positive. Thus, emerging adulthood is a period of exploration and heightened risk-taking, when alcohol use and sexual behavior are normative, but present potential negative consequences. Residential colleges in particular provide an environment that encourages heavy drinking and sexual exploration. However, this contrast between potential negative consequences and emerging adults’ positive perceptions of alcohol use and sexual behavior presents a challenge to creating relevant and effective prevention programming to reduce alcohol-related sexual experiences, or to minimize their harm. 
 
In this paper, we considered college students’ perceptions of how their own alcohol use is linked to their sexual experiences. We used open-ended questions to understand whether college students perceived these sex-related risks of alcohol use, and, more broadly, their most salient perceptions of the links between alcohol use and sexual experiences.
 
In their opened-ended responses, the most common theme was that alcohol was associated with sexual arousal, pleasure, and/or performance. The second most common theme was to explicitly state that their alcohol use and sexual feelings were not associated. Discussing alcohol’s influence on sexual behavior in particular was the next most common theme, but rarely considered aspects of risky behavior. Sexual assertiveness and/or sexual decision making were mentioned by less than 10% of participants. Only two participants’ responses were coded as indicating that alcohol use was associated with sexual aggression, and neither response clearly indicated that the participant had been the perpetrator or victim of a sexual assault. Finally, no participants mentioned condoms, contraception, or STDs. 
 
In terms of gender differences, more women than men described alcohol as relating to sexual arousal, pleasure, or performance. There were also differences by recent heavy drinking. In particular, recent heavy drinkers were less likely to state that alcohol and sex were not related, more likely to see alcohol use as related to sexual arousal, pleasure, or performance, and more likely to see alcohol use as related to sexual behavior, than students who did not recently drink heavily.
 
Even though we know empirically that alcohol use increases sexual risk outcomes, students in this study did not spontaneously report such outcomes, suggesting that unprotected sex and sexual aggression are not a salient part of their conceptualization of alcohol use’s influence on sex at this developmental stage. In addition, our participants clearly viewed alcohol as a social lubricant that increases disinhibition. Alcohol myopia theory posits that after consuming alcohol, individuals will focus only on proximal cues and ignore more distal ones. If alcohol-induced myopia is caused by decreased cognitive capacity to consider all pertinent information, particularly more distal and abstract goals such as health maintenance or general well-being, then myopia should be primarily present while drinking. Myopia should not be present the following day when students are sitting at a computer while presumably sober describing their experiences. However, students also evidenced myopia in their responses, describing increased arousal, increased disinhibition, and increased experiences with sexual behavior, with little mention of negative outcomes. Thus, alcohol myopia may not only be a result of decreased cognitive capacity, but may be due to students’ own orientations or personal framing around how they prefer to consider alcohol’s influence on sexual experiences.  
 
This study demonstrates one of the difficulties of developing successful interventions for alcohol use and sexual behavior among college students: students either do not perceive a link between these behaviors, or perceive the link as positive. People who design prevention and sexuality education efforts must consider emerging adults’ positive attitudes toward experimentation and risk-taking, including alcohol use and sexual behavior. Finally, our results suggest that young women may use alcohol’s known role as a social lubricant to enhance or provide permission for their sexual desire and/or arousal. Comprehensive sexuality education, preferably before college, should consider teaching women that having sexual feelings and desires is natural. Such education may make women less likely to rely on heavy drinking to validate or excuse their sexual desires, and thus aid them to be better equipped to make decisions about sexual behaviors that are consistent with both their short-term and long-term goals. 
 
“College Students Mostly Perceive Alcohol’s Influence on Sex as Positive first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 26, 2018.”

Many academics have switched from having printed notes we used during presentations to instead using the notes feature embedded in PowerPoint. Doing so decreases the fumbling through pages in our hands and can move our gaze from down to forward (though does chain us to the podium area more).
 
But, we’ve all been to the job talk where, as someone’s laptop is first connected to the projector, or their file is first opened, we can see the notes on their first slide that may something like, “I enjoyed meeting many of you during my visit so far.” Don’t be that person.
 
Previously I discussed one way to avoid this problem – saving your slides as a show. In general, I recommend that you use the save-as-show technique, particularly if you are giving a job talk or another high stakes presentation. However, I confess that I rarely take the time to use this technique anymore. And, there is a situation where this technique is not very useful – when you are presenting on a panel and the organizer wants to pull up everyone’s slides and paste them all into one shared document.
 
An alternative technique is to save a duplicate copy of your title slide, but delete the presentation notes from the first version of it. Then, when someone pulls up your slides, it will look like this, with a blank notes page:

But when you go up to present, you can seamlessly advance to your second copy of your title slide, which has your notes on it. 
 
Very simple, but can save you potential embarrassment.
 
“PowerPoint Trick: Duplicate Your Title Slide first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 21, 2018.”

Lam, C. B., & Lefkowitz, E. S. (2016). Male role attitudes and self-esteem: A 3-year longitudinal study of heterosexual college students. Emerging Adulthood, 4, 427-435.
 
Research on masculinity provides useful perspectives for understanding individual development. Two approaches or studying masculinity are a trait approach (the degree to which an individual has characteristics that are considered masculine), and a normative approach (the degree to which an individual agrees that men should have these characteristics). Prior longitudinal research has examined the development and correlates of masculinity personality traits. However, most work on male role attitudes has used cross-sectional data on White men. In this study, we examined developmental patterns of male role attitudes on four occasions over a 3-year period in an ethnically and racially diverse sample. Models revealed that, although men’s male role attitudes became more traditional in the first 2 years of college and then more flexible toward the end, women’s male role attitudes did not change over time.

 Within-person variation in male role attitudes was negatively linked to men’s, but not women’s, within-person variation in self-esteem. That is, men felt more positively about themselves during semesters when they endorsed more traditional attitudes about male roles. Overall, finding suggest that men may focus on gender typicality early in the transition to adulthood, but that as they gain more romantic experiences in college, they may become more flexible.
 
“Trajectories of Gender Role Attitudes and Self-esteem first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 19, 2018.”

Recently I discussed how I work with students to easily follow the edits they make between drafts. Today I wanted to write about how to provide students feedback in Word in ways that will provide them with scaffolding around writing.
 
In my first year of grad school, I handed my second reader a copy of my masters thesis proposal. About a week later, she returned it to me covered in red ink. She said, that’s the last time I expect you to make any of those mistakes. I’m certain I didn’t magically drop all of those errors in future writing, but I did pay close attention to every word she circled and marked up to figure out what I had done wrong, and to get a sense of how to write better the next time.
 
When I started as faculty I always handed students drafts in hard copy. Usually we would sit together and go through my comments, page by page. I even had a list of editing shorthand that I used, things like AWK for awkward and TS for tense switching.
 
Now I almost always email students a copy of their paper as a Word document with track changes and comments. I have mixed feelings, however, about simply correcting things in track changes. You know how you grade students’ exams, spending substantial time explaining where you deducted points and why? And when you hand them back you realize they are just looking at the grade on the last page? Well, with student theses and manuscripts, I am concerned that sometimes, some students simply accept all of the changes without actually going through and seeing what the suggested changes are, or trying to figure out why I wanted to change it.
 
So, depending on the student and where in the editing process we are, I may handle this process differently. If we are early in our time working together, I try to mark things carefully and write a lot of comments explaining what I think needs to be done. If there are errors that happen frequently, I may correct it the first few times it happens with a note, and I may even write “I stopped correcting these errors after this one. I marked some of them, but you should reread the whole paper carefully for more instances of it.” After that, I either just write a comment (e.g., tense switching) or simply highlight it for them to figure out what the issue is.
 
Similarly, if there is a lot of awkward phrasing, I may rewrite a couple of early ones as examples, and then just start marking awkward phrases/sentences. Or if, for instance, the student is reporting on 10 betas in a regression, and they are all written unclearly, I may rewrite the first one, and tell the student to rewrite the remainder using the one I rewrote as a model.
 
If we’ve been working together for a while, and the student makes an error that I know she commonly makes and I’ve corrected on prior papers (or drafts of this paper), I likely will comment on the first one, explaining it’s another instance of error X that we’ve talked about before.
 
There are times that I don’t use editing as a teaching moment. If, for instance, the student has defended her dissertation (and thus isn’t a student anymore!) and we are trying to get it published, I may spend more time editing the text outright and less time explaining or asking the student to fix things herself. At that point I’m an author of the document as well, so I’m more comfortable with inserting my own writing.
 
Good, clear writing is such a critical skill in academia. We as mentors have to make sure that, no matter what medium we use, we do not treat the editing of student work as if we were a book editor “fixing” things for someone else. Instead, it’s essential that we use this opportunity to teach students how to be better writers.
 
“Giving Students Feedback in Track Changes While Still Teaching Them to Write first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 14, 2018.”

Wesche, R., Espinosa-Hernandez, G. E. & Lefkowitz, E. S. (2016). Gender’s role in misperceptions of peers’ sexual motives.  Sexuality and Culture, 20, 1003-1019.
 
Men and women consider different reasons for having sex, likely in part influenced by the sexual double standard. The sexual double standard also likely influences perceptions of peers’ sexual motives. In this paper, we tested the possibility that perceptions of peers’ sexual motives align with the sexual double standard.
 
Ethnically and racially diverse college students answered three questions about sexual motives. First, they received these instructions:
When deciding to become sexually intimate with someone, people may consider different things such as personal beliefs, partner’s characteristics, how well people know each other or the situation, to name a few.
 
Then, they answered three questions:
Self-motives: What do you consider necessary/most important when deciding to have sex
with someone?’
Male peer motives: What do you think a male student at [name of the university] considers necessary/most important when deciding to have sex with someone?
Female peer motives: What do you think a female student at [name of the university] considers necessary/most important when deciding to have sex with someone?
 
We coded these responses for themes related to male and female stereotyped motives.
 
Supporting prior research, young men were more likely than young women to report male-stereotyped self-motives for sex, and less likely to report female-stereotyped self-motives for sex.
 
As we predicted, individuals were more likely to attribute a male-stereotyped motive to male peers than to female peers and more likely to attribute a female-stereotyped motive to female peers than male peers. In addition, young men misperceived their same-gender peers’ sexual motives in a manner congruent with sexual double standard beliefs, but young women’s misperceptions of their same-gender peers’ sexual motives did not correspond to the sexual double standard. Finally, young women misperceived men’s sexual motives in a manner congruent with sexual double standard beliefs, but young men’s misperceptions of women’s sexual motives did not correspond to the sexual double standard.
 
These findings suggest that when we simply examined perceptions of one’s own motives, or compared students’ perceptions of female peers to male peers, individuals seemed to rely on the sexual double standard. However, when we compared individuals’ own self-reported motives to their perceptions of peers’ motives, both young men and women were more likely to attribute a female-stereotyped motive, and less likely to attribute a male-stereotyped motive, to themselves than to others. Thus, although individuals sometimes rely on the sexual double standard to attribute sexual motives to others, misperceptions of peers’ sexual motives may also be influenced by other stereotypes, for instance, hookup culture stereotypes. These perceptions of the motives of potential sexual partners may influence behavior in sexual encounters.
 
“Attributions of Peers’ Sexual Motives first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 12, 2018.”

In what contexts do you use the phrase “I’m sorry”?
 
I have found that people – probably more likely women, though I don’t have data on it – tend to use the phrase “I’m sorry” in contexts other than when they are actually apologizing.
 
[As a side note, I did just in a quick search find evidence that women apologize more than men do, because women believe they commit more offenses than men do. That’s relevant to my second major point here, so stay tuned.]
 
My general advice is that in professional (work) contexts, if something happens and it’s not your fault, don’t apologize. As an example, if you are meeting with a student who plagiarized, don't say, "I'm sorry this is happening to you." Even if it feels natural to say it. It's not your fault, so don't apologize. You can say, "It's an unfortunate situation" or "I know you must be feeling disappointed." But using “I’m sorry” implies that you are somehow to blame in this situation, when the student is the one who plagiarized – you are not actually sorry that you have a policy against plagiarism. Or that you plan to enforce it.
 
I frequently notice young women (often graduate students) apologize in these types of situations, and I don't think it helps their interactions. Of course, if you are at fault, do apologize. People often get defensive when they are actually at fault, and a swift apology can avoid a prolonged game of blame hot potato.
 
When I posted this idea on social media a few years ago, someone responded by saying that the phrase “I’m sorry” has many different meanings in the United States, and that we often use it to express compassion. I agree, but I also think that’s part of the problem. We often DO use “I’m sorry” to express compassion. And that’s fine in certain contexts where it could not be interpreted as accepting blame – for instance, if a colleague tells you they are sick and you say “I’m sorry to hear that.”  But the other meaning of “I’m sorry” Is “I did something wrong,” and that can be misperceived. Thus, I recommend avoiding it in situations where it could all be perceived as your fault, and thus, accepting any blame. That’s why it’s helpful to think of other phrases, such as “I know you must feel…” or “I imagine you are really upset about it…” Those phrases express compassion without taking on any blame.
 
More generally, I recommend avoiding apologizing when you feel inadequate. Again, apologizing makes sense if you wronged someone (e.g., you missed a deadline) or possibly if you disappointed them (e.g., you have the thesis draft for the deadline, but you really didn’t spend as much time as you should have). But don’t apologize just because you aren’t feeling confident. I initially received related advice during my first year of grad school. The four first year grad students in our cohort presented our thesis ideas at proseminar and each starting with "I'm sorry I'm not very far along" or "mine's not as interesting as hers was...". A professor told us never to start a talk with an apology, but to be strong and confident in our ideas. I believe she pointed out that we were all women standing up there starting our talks with an apology rather than presenting our ideas with confidence. Of course, in this instance, we likely all WERE intentionally taking on blame, in that we all DID feel bad that we weren’t far along or that our ideas weren’t as developed as someone else.
 
But why start a presentation, or a lecture, with an acknowledgement that you could have done better, or that you aren’t proud of what you’re about to say? That sets the audience up to think you have somehow failed.
 
I know how easy it is to default to apologizing. One year at SRCD I had confused the days of my 2 talks and had not at all prepared for the talk I was giving.  I had spent the last 2 days practicing my other talk. My instinct was to start the presentation with the story of what had happened, and an explanation/apology for not being as polished as I would like to be. But instead, I just gave the talk. It was certainly not my best presentation ever. But it also wasn’t terrible.
 
Just this week, I met with a job candidate. I was toward the end of her schedule on day two, and I imagined that my colleagues had asked her similar questions. So I automatically said something like, “I’m sorry that you probably have had to answer these questions already.” And then I realized, actually, I do not need to be sorry about that. It’s my job to evaluate this candidate, and she likely expects to answer some of the same questions in different meetings (in fact, how much harder would interviews be if each half hour meeting contained completely new questions?).  
 
In summary:

• If you have wronged someone somehow, be quick to apologize.
• When you didn’t do anything wrong and you don’t want the other person to think you are taking on blame, don’t apologize.
• When you think you are less than your best (or others’ best), try to suppress that feeling and instead be confident.

 
Follow these guidelines, and when you truly do apologize, it will mean that you are recognizing you are at fault for something, and that apology will not be empty.
 
“Don’t apologize unless you did something wrong first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 7, 2018.”

Lefkowitz, E. S., *Vasilenko, S. A., & *Leavitt, C. E. (2016). Oral vs. vaginal sex experiences and consequences among first year college students. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 45, 329-337.
 
In my continuing efforts to consider sexual health and wellbeing from a normative perspective, we examined how consequences of oral sex differ from consequences of vaginal sex in an ethnically and racially diverse college sample. From a risk perspective, consequences of sex can be reinforcing. From a normative developmental perspective, consequences provide information about how individuals perceive different sexual behaviors that may play a role in building their sexual sense of self or satisfaction.
 
Most prior work on consequences of sex focused on vaginal sex consequences. Work that did compare vaginal to oral sex generally used a between-person model, comparing people who have ever engaged in vaginal sex to individuals who have ever engaged in oral sex. In our study, we examined consequences at the daily level, comparing days individuals had vaginal sex (with or without oral sex) to days they had oral sex (without vaginal sex).
 
We also considered gender differences in perceived consequences, given sexual double standards that suggest sex outside of marriage or committed relationships is more acceptable for men than for women.
 
Here are the frequencies of the positive and negative consequences:
 

Students were much more likely to report positive consequences than negative consequences of both oral and vaginal sex. However, both positive and negative consequences were more common on days that students had vaginal sex than on days they had oral sex. Specifically, students were less likely to report feeling intimacy, satisfaction, and worrying about their health on days they had oral than on days they had vaginal sex. Thus, oral sex may play a different role in normative sexuality development, potentially leading to less change in sense of sexual self and mental health outcomes than vaginal sex. 
 
We also found that gender played a meaningful role in these associations. Female students were less likely to report feeling intimate with their partner and feeling physically satisfied as a result of sex on days they had oral compare to days they had vaginal sex, whereas the difference was smaller for men. For men, these two types of behaviors may be more similar experiences than for women, perhaps because the sexual double standard places a high value on female virginity. In addition, although oral sex resulted in less worrying about health than did vaginal sex for both female and male adolescents, the difference was greater for female than for male adolescents. Because women may experience pregnancy as a more immediate concern than men do, vaginal sex may have more health salience for women than oral sex does.
 
Overall, the findings contribute to our understanding of oral sex as a normative part of sexuality development, with consequences distinct from vaginal sex.
 
“The post How Consequences of Oral Sex Differ From Vaginal Sex Consequences first appeared on Eva Lefkowitz’s blog on June 5, 2018.”