Making Lemonade, Blog Posts, and Whatnot

I accidentally got up at 6am today instead of 7am, and did not realize it until I was fully dressed, ready to go to school. Super. So in the interest of being a good time manager, I bring to you, my monthly post.*

I was recently assigned a new school, which I will affectionately call Stepford Elementary School. Now, I am typically assigned to the schools no one wants, by request. If someone makes a face like they are smelling something bad when I say the school’s name, all the better. I like being at cocktail parties and saying, “I coaxed a child wielding a knife down from a flagpole today. (Sips cocktail) How was your day?" I enjoy working with high-needs populations because I feel like I can make a difference. I can see kids whose parents are well-intentioned, but overwhelmed, and can not take breaks from their 3 jobs to take their child to a counselor or learning specialist. Sure, there is a lot of “action” at these schools, but I have seen principals work tirelessly to make these schools better for the kids, and there are a lot of really innovative ideas and programs that inspire me on a daily basis.

So you can imagine my surprise as I walk up to Stepford Elementary and hear a parent out front say, “You know, Douglas, I just really didn’t like the colonial architecture so we didn’t buy the 4-bedroom.” Where am I? Is this the same town? I had never this high up the hills of my urban district before. I was not in Kansas anymore (read Kansas with a Latino accent, please).

I am greeted by the secretary and directed to a fancy schmancy sign-in computer that logs your time of entry and prints out your nametag all pretty for you. For a non-educator, that doesn’t sound fancy, but trust me, usually there are 47 binders for signing in and you can’t find the one you need or a pen. I’m taken to my office, and there is a computer, an Internet connection, AND! AND! an electrical outlet. At my other school, I engage in this long trip wire situation across the auditorium to plug in my little space heater. It keeps it warm, and it keeps the kids from sneaking up on me.

As I visit classes, I hear the following:

“That homework was the funnest EVER!”

“Yea! Long Division!”

“This bookmark I’m making is for my business, AJ’s Bookmarks. EVERYONE has a business these days. Check me out at my website.” (from the mouth of a 10 year old, mind you)

“The PTA raised 2 million dollars for that building.”

“We have an emergency. Clara in second grade wrote something offensive.” (I read this offensive thing. I think I was using the wrong lens to interpret it because I was impressed that a) she wrote it on PAPER, not on public property! And b) she used correct punctuation in replacing the “g” on $%@$ing with an apostrophe. Good for you, Clara!)

And most peculiar of all: No one locks anything. I asked for the key to my office and they looked at me funny. The teachers just LEAVE THEIR PURSES BY THEIR DESKS. Envelopes collecting money are left on the doors of the classroom. Kids are raising their hands and politely saying brilliant things and making connections like, “This reminds me of when I lived in China for the summer and saw a Bengal Tiger.” What is going on here?

I felt like a kid visiting her rich aunt and uncle for the first time. Ooh! They have a POOL! (They do, by the way, also have a pool. The school. Not my aunt and uncle.). How can this school be in the same public school district as the others where I work? I obviously knew that some schools’ PTAs make up for the lack of district funding and can deliver better services, and I knew there was a difference between private and public, and yes, I've read 8 hojillion articles on the disparity in education, but I had forgotten how stark the contrast is until I saw it again with my own two eyes.

Sigh. Now what? I guess I’m off to my other school now to try to help my students achieve the same high standards even thought they didn’t have equal developmental conditions and they certainly don’t have equal schools.

Bitter, Party of 1? You’re table is ready. Who me? I’ll have lemonade. I’m going to figure out a way to make it better. No hero complex here. But if I start playing “Gansta’s Paradise” on the way to school and start fancying myself a Michelle Pfeiffer who will use radical teaching methods such as “listening”, in an effort to save the poor children, do slap me.

*I don’t mean to have a monthly post! I have been going down a shame spiral for not posting. But remember how I said if you didn’t hear from me for a while, I was probably not unlike that kitten hanging from a branch?

Free To Be You and Me (and Pee?)

A big part of my job is doing observations of kids in their learning environments. I find it shocking that there are psychologists who don’t visit the kid’s school when they are testing for learning disabilities, or any disability for that matter. To me, it seems like common sense that if you want to see how someone learns you go to where they learn all day. It would be like someone whose never seen you at work evaluating your job performance at your doctor’s office. There’s no context and you act differently. Recently, I had a school refuse to let me observe a child in their classroom when the referral is about the child’s attention problems in the classroom and classroom performance. Okay…I’ll just guess how he's doing in the classroom? *sigh*

However, another school allowed me to observe a little gal this week and I learned so much. Almost TOO much.

For all of you non-California, non-Bay Area peeps, there are some areas (coughcouchBerkeleycoughcough) and schools that really believe in letting children be free. Some of their schools are set up to be overly child-centered (read: permissive). I’m all about letting kids play and learn without super rigid regulations, but there are some rules needed. Kids need boundaries.

So you can imagine my surprise when I was observing a private school Kindergarten class playing on the schoolyard, and a little girl drops her pants and pees in the garden by the play structure. I was not even sent there to observe that girl, but clearly one’s eye gets drawn to a child squatting at recess. I turn to the director standing next to me, in horror, and she simply says with a neutral expression, “Oh, she’s peeing.” Doesn’t say a word to the girl, then, in the next breath, tells me how much the children love to “get messy here and just play in the dirt.” Right. With the urine. Neat. And with that, the little girl pulls up her pants and gets back on the swings and the director tells me it’s time for snack.

Well alrighty then. You just can’t get this kind of information when you see a kid in your nice little therapy office. Hm. I wonder why this other little gal I was observing at this same school has difficulties following rules at home...I mean, her parents must have some crazy rule that she has to pee in the toilet or something. Sheesh.

Finding the Proper Motivation

My dissertation was on adolescent motivation for school, and it has been read and enjoyed by ones of people. I was told when I graduated from UC Berkeley that every time someone downloaded my dissertation, I would get $1 in royalties. I have, to date, received $1.*

Because I am feeling generous today, I will give you the results for free, in one sentence. I will spare you the 118 beautiful pages of pure data and analysis that has riveted one reader to date.* Guess what?

Adolescents with positive relationships with their parents have better grades regardless if they are Mexican-American or White.**

Someone please, ALERT THE MEDIA about this.

I’m allowed to put the “dis” in my dissertation, because enough time has passed that I won’t take it personally that it could have been published in the Journal of Duh. But what I will say is that the results do influence my beliefs about my students. Sometimes, we think of adolescents as more influenced by their peers, but I’m here to tell you that even your most snarly disgruntled moody teen still wants his or her parents’ approval. I do this activity with adolescents where I give them a survey of things that might motivate them to do well in school. I swear, the number one “reward” or "motivator" they pick, no matter what age they are, is a positive call home to parents.

I know! So cheap! So easy! Why don’t we educators do this more often? It makes the kid feel good, and if you can manage to block the school’s number (so the parent picks up), and you can manage not to get hung up on when you say, “This is so-and-so from your son’s school…” (because they think their kid did something bad), it really works. Go on, give it a whirl this week.

And if you need more ideas for what makes a kid tick, try my fancy, non-researched-based, but helpful, Adolescent Motivation Survey with a kid and see how it goes.

Student: ____________________ Date: _________
Different students like different things. As your teacher/counselor, I hope to get to know you individually. This survey will help me understand what you like and don’t like about school, so I can work with you/your teachers to make school more enjoyable for you. There are no right or wrong answers, just complete the sentences with your ideas

1. In my free time, I like to….
2. If I had $5, I would buy…
3. The thing I like most about school is…
4. The thing I do not like about school is…
5. When my teachers pay attention to me…
6. When my classmates pay attention to me…
7. When I am frustrated, I like when teachers…
8. My favorite subject is…
9. My least favorite subject is…
10. I wish my teachers knew that…
11. After I finish my work, I like to…
12. When my teachers call my parents…
13. When I don’t want to do something in class, I…
14. You can tell when something is too hard for me because…
15. The behavior I am working on as a part of my IEP is…
16. The rewards I would like to earn are…

You might just be surprised at what you find. Last time I gave this, the kid had a Behavior Plan where the reward for doing his work was “praise from teacher” and he wrote “When my teachers pay attention to me….I hate it because my friends think I’m a teacher’s pet.” Not so rewarding. I guess it’s like giving black licorice as an incentive for increasing class participation.*** It could work for some people, some might find it absolutely vile and repugnant and not know why someone would think that nasty stuff would be consumable or desirable and thus would never raise their hand to participate. I think you know which category I’m in. Bleh.

*Thanks, Dad.
**My dissertation committee argued for a long time what to call the White kids. White? Euro-American? Caucasian? I didn't care. Call my people "Pigment Challenged" for all I care, just sign off on the thing so I can graduate already.
***NFTSP does not endorse candy motivators. Except when they really work.

Call the Fire Marshall, I Need a Nap

In the spirt of last year's post Back to Work in the Public School, By the Numbers, I shall give an update one year later. And because I love data, I have calculated the percentage change over time. Nerd alert.

Number of Icebreakers: 0
This number is down 7000%. How did I do it? How did the ice get broken without me this year? How did I get away with no trust falls or snap cups? I'll tell you. I got married and changed my email and I missed the emails about the retreat. I would not recommend this strategy to others. I secretly missed the snap cup. And I just don't know if I can trust anyone on my school site to catch me if I fall off the auditorium stage wearing inappropriately high heeled shoes, like I did last year. (Yeah, no post-link to that, I was too embarrassed to write a post because I had just warned the 8th grade girls about high heeled shoe dangers.)

Number of Schools Assigned to Me: 2
Down 33%! TWO? Seriously? How is this possible? Most school psychologists have 3-5 schools. I cannot tell you my secret, or I fear I will get another school assigned to me.

Ratio of School Psychologist (Me!) to Students: 1:700
Less schools, more students. Go figure.

Number of Dead Rodents/Swarms* of Ants Discovered in Office: 0
100% decline. Hallelujah!

Number of Crying Children Consoled: 5**
This ratio is up because we have two new Kindergarten classes this year at one of my schools. It is a Spanish immersion program so there is NO ENGLISH at all in the classes. I want to spend every day in there to practice my Spanish, which is intermediate at best. I have imagined the following conversation between me and my principal:

P: We need to talk about how much time you're spending in the Kindergarten class
Me: But I'm learning so much! Today, we read a story about a frog and I learned how to say "jump!"
P: *Sigh* Yes, but I'm getting complaints that you are raising your hand in class and blurting out answers to the teacher's questions for the children.
Me: I just want to LEARN!!!

Perhaps I should enroll in some sort of class. But the Kindergarten pace is so perfect for me. I felt for the little ones who didn't speak any English. They kept saying to me, "Why are you talking in Spanish? I don't understand! I KNOW you speak English!" What gave it away? My Lithuanian-Irish tan?

Number of Quotes that Made Me Wish I Was a Kindergarten Teacher: 8539573489

This group of girls was sitting at a table drawing and I asked on of the girls, "Hablas Espanol?" She said, "I speak poquito Espanol" and her little friend got so excited and said, "Me too! I speak mosquito Espanol too!"

This one little guy was clearly exhausted at the end of the day, with all the lining up, following new rules, and all that drawing and singing and playing, and he said to me (In the forbidden English): "Dang. I wish the fire marshall would come and tell us there's too many kids up in this school so I could go home and take a NAP." Amen, brother. Kindergarten is exhausting, especially when you're trying to figure out what everyone is saying all day. But for the first time in a long time, I came home energized, not totally wiped out. Why? Because spending time in Kindergarten evokes all my fantasies of primary prevention of school failure.

(whips out soap box)

So much of our profession is build around the "wait to fail" model of service delivery, in which we must label children as "disabled" in order for them to receive special services. Not all kids who have learning problems have learning disabilities. But when special education is the only intervention, we school psychologists get to be the evil gatekeeper of what is perceived as the only way to help a kid learn to read.

(steps down).

Whoa. Where was I? Ah yes, cute attack. There was this one little girls who spent the first 45 minutes of class crying, and periodically weeped throughout the day, when she realized she was STILL THERE. She said not one word all day (and she spoke Spanish, so it wasn't that). At the end of the turned to me as she was leaving and looked up at me with her big brown doe eyes, hugged my leg, and said, "Hasta Manana."

To take a phrase from Mrs. Mimi, I DIE.

*Or is "swarm" only for bees? Nest of ants? Family? Pod? Hm. Either way, yea for sanitation!
**My new friend, Michaele has posted a faboo list for parents and teachers about How to help kids transition to Kindergarten

It Aint Easy Being Green

Every year, I get to be a mentor to a new school psychologist in my district. I really enjoy doing it, but I have to fight the urge to give them a little notebook and say, “Write that down” after everything I say. Wouldn't that be fun? I got to do it one time before in my life, the day before I got married and my sweet sweet friend, Leigh would write down all the last minute things we had to do before the big day. "I forgot to get a guest book! Write that down." It was so fun, but I suppose it’s a tad much for people who don't know my sense of humor yet. See also: "Get me coffee! Just kidding. Not really."

ANYHOO. After my first day back in the school district the other day, I came home and told my husband I got assigned my new mentee! He said, “You got assigned one of those underwater animals that are kind of like whales but almost extinct?” Not MANATEE, silly. Mentee. Husband is so precious.

So the next day my manatee and I were talking about all the fun that is my school district (Yes! You really do get to use a 1960s card catalog to find student folders! You’ll feel like a secretary in Mad Men! Isn’t that why you got your Ph.D.?), and she got quiet for a second and I thought I’d taken my sarcasm too far. I can do that from time to time. Then she said, “You know, I just realized that you are the one who writes that school psychology blog. Um, you’re not going to write about me on your blog are you?” Of course not, sweetie. Only I am.

But rest assured, I will not write about her, per se, but perhaps just some general tips for brand new school psychologists (and teachers!). So, here are my top three mantras for all the virtual manatees out there, starting out their first year. Repeat after me:

1) My work will still be there tomorrow. It will never be “done” because kids are never “done” learning. Don’t make yourself crazy by working so much overtime that you burn yourself out. I’m not saying don’t work hard and be one of those “my contract says I only have to work 7 hrs” people, but don’t kill yourself trying to do more than humanly possible.

2) I must free myself of “Why” if I want to work in a school district. Why do we still use card catalogs? Why do I have to log the same information in 6 different places? Why are we waiting for kids to fail enough to be eligible for special education? Young Jedi, you will make yourself crazy asking why we do all the ridiculous things we do in bureaucracies. The better question is, “What can I do to get around this dumb policy to really help the kid?”

3) Consult, Consult, Consult. And also: Consult. Knock Knock. Who’s there? Consult. Seriously. It’s not a sign of weakness to ask for help. Plus, people like to help. You like to help, right? Guess what? So do others. If you are thinking about a problem with a kid, parent, staff member, lesson, assessment, anything late at night, wondering what to do, that is your cue to consult with someone.

And in the interest of being green, I shall also recycle a few tips for new teachers and school psychologists. Recycling. So hot right now:

What to Post on Your Classroom Walls to Support Positive Behavior

Checklist for New Teachers

Making Positive Reinforcement Your Best Friend

Dealing with Oppositional Kids

How I Survived my First Year as a School Psychologist

Wow. Saving the manatees and recycling all in one post. Perhaps this post was brought to you courtesy of my training at Berkeley. Now it’s your turn, people—any tips you wish someone had told you in your first year teaching or school psychologizing*?

*New verb. Just decided. Write that down, young manatee.

Can I Get a What What for My Internet Best Friend?

I have a secret Internet best friend. It may be a bit premature, but I have ordered the “Best Friends” heart necklace, in which one of us gets half of the heart saying “Be Fri” and the other gets the half that says “st ends.” No need to alert my husband of my inappropriate Internet relationship, it’s strictly work-related. I am talking about my good friend, Mrs. Mimi, teacher and author of the blog, Its Not All Flowers and Sausages (linky thing not working: here it is: www.itsnotallflowersandsausages.blogspot.com)

Not only is she fabulous, but she has just written a book about her adventures in teaching 2nd grade that made me miss not one, but TWO train stops when I was reading it on my morning commute. I give it a TWO MISSED STOP rating*. My highest yet. Let’s put it this way, I only missed ONE stop in reading my favorite book of all time, Jane Eyre. So basically, it’s better than a classic, at least if you are an educator. It captures all the delicious nonsense in schools that I so enjoy writing about on this blog, mixed in with tales of the joys of working with such wonderful little friends every day in schools.

And just to show off how we are BFFs, the book, entitled "It's Not All Flowers and Sausages: My Adventures in 2nd Grade" hasn’t even come out yet….nerdy me got an advanced copy through a twitter contest. I swear, I’m not stalking this woman. We just share a similar love of writing about finding the lighter side of working in the public schools.

You can get your copy now on preorder, and it comes out September 1st—just in time for a good laugh as you return to school. It’s available here at Amazon.com.

Just be prepared to miss your train stop or embarrass yourself laughing out loud.


*Incidentally, I could also give it a 47 laugh-out-loud-and-have-commuters-stare-at-you rating, if you prefer.

Must. Write. About. Kittens.

As promised, this post involves kittens.

Okay, so it’s T-minus 2 days and counting until I return to work in the public school. I am one of those people who has always been in school, or been working in a school, so my new year always starts in August. I buy the August to August calendars, and think of the beginning of school as a good time to make New Year’s Resolutions.

1) As per last post, I am vowing to Be Positive! in the face of dysfunction. This year, I will put the “fun” in dysfunction! For those who have been following my Facebook Fan Page, I have been trying to keep things light in fighting a Bureaucracy Monster, who requests me to do such tasks as going back into time to get a tuberculosis shot. I will not let The System keep me down.

2) I vow to keep my office décor fun and friendly, yet making it clear that I work in an inspirational animal poster-free environment.*



Ah….why are you so friggin’ CUTE little kitten? This one will be difficult.

3) I vow to try and be less sarcastic when confronted with bureaucratic nonsense that keeps me from working with students. I’m told sarcasm is rooted in anger, and is a sublimation of aggression. Well then. Isn’t that great. I guess then, that I just love all the paperwork involved in working in special education. What? My resolution doesn’t start until Wednesday. Just had to get it out of my system. *Sigh* I guess this means I can’t use this poster to decorate my office this year, as it would be a double-violation (animal poster and sarcasm):



4) I vow to keep my blog up to date. But if I disappear for a while, know that I am holding onto a branch somewhere, looking cute and hanging in there.

* Also, hoping to start this school year in a dead animal in office-free environment.