Psychology courses in winter semester

In January, Wenzhou—Kean University “Sun Tree” Counseling Center opened winter psychology courses for freshmen, with an aim to enrich their general psychological knowledge and boost their psyche well-being. The courses were divided into three parts: 1.life and death, 2.self-development, 3.sex and love. Those three courses were performed through group counseling, workshop and activity.

In the first week, the theme for the courses was life and death. On Jan. 5th, Teacher Su Yi held the workshop named “Talking about life and death” in room D401. She led students to discuss about life and death based on the question “why do we take part in this workshop?”. It is a topic deal with instinct, religion and culture, etc. In the end, she concluded that life and death are tightly connected. On the second day, she encouraged the students to act as a person who was in trouble and led them to discuss why he or she needs to live, thus demonstrating to students the nature of living. This activity enabled students to understand death in a deeper way and quest the meaning of life and death, rather than fear and avoid it instinctively.

In the second week, “Sun Tree”CounselingCenterorganized thematic group counseling and club activity which were “My orange” and “The Lesson of the cocoon” respectively. The main purpose of the group counseling is to reach individual’s self-understanding. It started with self-introduction then group sharing. In addition, everyone got an orange and was told to observe it for five minutes. Then, everyone was asked to take turns to describe their oranges’ characteristics which relates to their own personalities. For example, one student said that although his orange is ugly he still love it because it belongs to him. As for the club activity, students were presented with many games, such as “Water”, “Guess who got the Lemonade”, “Answer the question according to a video” and “Walking blindly”, etc. Students learned the skills of self-growth in an entertainment way. In a word, the activities in the second week enabled the students to understand themselves, reflect themselves and develop themselves, and the insights they gained would certainly help them in the future.

The theme for the last week was about sex and love which was extremely popular among the students. In order to introduce the topic, the “Sun Tree”CounselingCenterprepared the warm – up game “Tearing Brands – Protect the Princess”. Then the first lesson mainly focused on the topic -The Different ways of expression between males and females. Teacher Su Yi asked the students to discuss about it first then extended the gender differences into various levels which stems from physiology differences, family background differences and social standard differences. Moreover, she explained the meaning of Chinese Hanzi “sex”. On the coming workshop-“Why not give up if you do not love me”, students were asked to think objectively towards premarital sex. In the same way, Teacher Su Yi explored the issue through the perspectives of religion, value systems and gender difference. Besides, she stressed about the importance of self-protection and safe sex, demonstrating the right way to use condom. The name for the last workshop was “Love’s gender” which is about homosexuality. After the workshop, students gained the correct homosexual knowledge and realize that true love exists between gay and hetero and what matters most is how you value this kind of love, thus helping to eradicate the possessed misunderstanding. These three courses were primarily targeted on spreading the scientific sex knowledge and sex culture which challenges the students to think critically and objectively, which is very important to them.

Finally, the whole winter psychology courses ended on 22nd, Jan. The courses were like cool wind, blowing away the mist in their growth path as students opened up their eyes in these three areas and gained whole brand new insights.