The Bucket List

It is not often that I am at a loss for words. I know, you are surprised, right? But recently, I did an assessment with a 15-year-old boy who was in a special school for kids with emotional disabilities, and part of this assessment was to interview the parent. Now, I try my best not to be judgmental about parenting.* I mean, lets face it, it is a ridiculously difficult job, especially if your child has special needs.

So I was interviewing the mom about what she thought were her son’s strengths, and she replied, “He ain’t got none.” Wow. No strengths? I tried to guide her to some non-traditional strengths in case she thought she could only answer about academic strengths (he was significantly below grade level).

Me: Um, okay…what about hobbies? Does he like to do anything special? Is he good at a sport or a hobby or something?

Parent: He likes basketball, but I don’t let him play.

Me: Erm, uh

Parent: I don’t let him play because he does too bad in school.

Me: Well, I’ve seen him play basketball here and he seems like he’s pretty good!

Parent: Not really.

Me:

Parent:

Me: Ummmmm. Well, sometimes kids are not always the best athletes, but they feel good about themselves when they improve, or when they are having fun with their friends playing basketball.

Parent: Are you saying that he has no self-esteem because I won’t let him play basketball?

Me: No, I’m just saying that kids tend to do better when they feel good about themselves in at least one area, and it doesn’t have to be school.

Parent: Oh.

Me: Let’s see, other strengths…sometimes kids are not strong in school, but are street-smart and get along well with others. How would you describe your son, Jared?

Parent: Street smart? HA! He’s street dumb. I tell him all the time.

Me:

Right. I was speechless. How could you not think of ONE single strength?

At the meeting, after I tested him, it turned out he did have some strengths. He was an artist. He made beautiful drawings. He learned well visually. He had a friend at school that he was kind to. He was also pretty resilient for having such a negative parent. I gave my schpeal about self-esteem:

Let’s imagine this table has a bunch of little buckets on it, and each one is a part of self-esteem and we can fill them up. Now, there isn’t just one single bucket called “Self-Esteem” because there are a lot of different types of self-esteem. If we want to help Jared feel good about himself, we need to think of all the buckets we can help him fill up, like “Self-Esteem in Math,” “Self-Esteem in Basketball,” "Art Self-Esteem," or “Friendship-Making Self-Esteem.” Then, if you aren’t very good at one thing, maybe reading, then you have all these other buckets that you can rely on to feel good about yourself.

Parent: I know, I am always telling him how smart he is, how great he is in basketball, and all that.

Me:

Sigh. I really hope she does.


*I had a recent slip up in being a Judgy Judgerson in the Apple store though, when a parent was screaming at her 5 year old child that she was going to “break his finger if he flipped her off again.” I wanted to intervene, but thought the mom might not appreciate my card at that moment.

Educators: Want to be published and fancy???

Hi Educators and fabulous blog-readers!

A while back, I mentioned that I was editing a book called "The Teachable Moment" and sent out a call for stories. For a while, I even had a fancy Amazon link to the book from this blog. Then, the economy tanked and they put the book on hold. Boo.

But you know, me, I'm all about the silver lining, so the good news is now I can extend the deadline to the end of the summer (August 15th, 2009) for getting new stories to add to the anthology! You should write something! Here are the deets:

"The Teachable Moment" is one book in a series that Kaplan Publishing is starting on books for teachers by teachers. It is a compilation of about 20-25 stories from the field about certain themes. My theme is the Teachable Moment, which is that moment when a kid finally "gets it" or has that "aha!" moment. It doesn't have to be all "Carpe Diem!" and the kids all stand on chairs to salute your greatness as a teacher, it can be a tiny, special moment when you make that connection with a student. It's more of a story we educators would tell each other, rather than an essay on teaching. It can be funny, serious, or a bit of both.

If you're interested, submit a 4-5 page story in a word document to my email (rebecca@studentsgrow.com). There is some money in it for you too (in addition to being fancy and published!) but I'm not sure the exact amount. If you have a good teachable moment story, but you aren't sure if it would be good for the book, you are welcome to submit a story idea and I can help shape it into a story with you.

I mean really, what else are you going to do until August? Rest? Recover? Recharge? Nah, you should always REFLECT on your REFLECTION. That is what we do.

Awkward Conversation #247

As a school psychologist, I get many little notes in my mailbox when I enter my school building. They are usually cryptic and anonymous:

Check in with Darius. He’s sad

Susana wrote in her journal that she wanted to hurt herself. Can you see her?

Not signed. No last names. Detective Branstetter is on the case.*

One I got the a while back made me dread the day I had ahead:

Jim thinks he’s retarded. Can you tell him he’s not?”

Ug. The problem was, Jim was borderline mentally retarded, so he was kind of right. He is in that group of kids who are smart enough to know that they’re not as smart as other kids. Jim was a 9th grade student with an IQ of 72 (below 70 is the technical cutoff for mental retardation) and low daily living skills (how he uses his intelligence in the community, like getting around on public transit, communicating with store owners, using money, and having hobbies or leisure activities with friends). These are the kids who you don’t quite trust to go to the store by themselves. By all other accounts, they look like “normal” kids, but they have pretty slow processing and they don’t problem-solve well (academically or socially).

Right. How do I explain this one to Jim in language he can understand that won’t make him hopeless? Ladies and Gentlemen, I present to you, “Awkward Conversation #247”:

Dr. B: Hi Jim! Would you like to take a little break from class? You’re not in trouble.

Jim: Okay!

Dr. B: (small talk ensues) Then: Jim, I heard a teacher say that you had some worries about…erm….uh…[In my head: Don’t say retarded yet. Don’t say retarded yet]…that you had some concerns about how well you are doing in school.


Jim: Yeah, I’m retarded.

Dr. B: Who told you that you are retarded?

Jim: My brother tells me all the time. Kids call me “retard” in class.

Dr. B: Would you like me to explain what our testing said about your learning?

Jim: Okay. It will show I’m retarded.

Dr. B: [In head:Urg. It kind of will]. Let’s see!

At this point, I take out a big piece of butcher paper and lay it out on my desk. I draw a number line with numbers ranging from 0 to 100, representing IQ. Keep in mind, Jim got a 72. I make marks at 20, 50, 70, 85, and 100. At 100, I put “average” and explain that most kids without any learning problems get scores of 100.

Dr. B: Where do you think your score on how well you learn is?

Jim: Like here [points to 0]

Dr. B: Actually, it’s here [Points to 72]. Kids who are severely “retarded” and can’t take care of themselves or learn well have scores here [points to 0-70]. Kids who can learn but it takes more help from their teachers and parents are here [points to 70-85].

Jim: You mean I’m not retarded?

Dr. B: [In head: Blerg. Borderline…should I even say it? What benefit would come from telling him he’s “almost retarded”? But I want to be honest and realistic…] No, you’re not “retarded” because your score was not in this range [points to below 70]. But your score is not as high as other kids in your class and that’s probably why you feel different.

Jim: Oh.

Dr. B: You can learn, but you were born with a brain that takes a little longer to learn new things. Once you learn them, you can do well. Can you think of something you know now that you didn’t know in middle school?

Jim: Nope.

Dr. B: Urm...er....what about in math? Did you learn anything new this year?

Jim: Uh, [longest awkward pause in the world] I guess fractions.

Dr. B: [In head: Thank God he thought of something] There you go. If you were retarded, you may never have been able to learn fractions.

Jim: I guess. Can I go back to class?

So there you have it! So awkward. Not sure if he totally got it.

Then, a few months later, his therapist came to me and said, “Thank you so much for talking to Tim. He came in a few weeks ago and drew me a number line and totally explained to me where he was, and was SO excited to show how he wasn’t down there in the 0-50 range.”

Huh. Who knew? It stuck. This is the job of a school psychologist. You plant a seed and hope it grows. You don’t often get “proof” your seed grew and actually helped the child very often. Every once in a while, you get some positive feedback like that, and it keeps you going.

*Weird to use my new last name. A kid told me that “Dr. Branstetter” sounded “meaner” than “Dr. Bell.” Yes! Perhaps the kids won’t tease me anymore. Plus, no more rhyming “Bell” with Hell! Or Smell! Just try to rhyme with Branstetter! Marriage is great.

The Greatest Assessment on Earth!

For those of you who don’t know what a school psychologist does, a big part of our job is to assess children for disabilities. A popular referral question is: “Does my child have Attention Deficit Disorder?” An assessment for ADD is often the most complex of all assessments because there is no “test” for ADD. It is a process where you assemble of tons of data, including psychoeducational assessment, executive functioning tasks, observations, interviews, and rating scales to see if signs point toward other disabilities, or if it is a true disorder of attention.

You have to show there are severe behavioral symptoms such as lack of focus, disorganization, memory difficulties, difficulties with sustained attention, distractibility, and the like, that are unusual for the age (a 3 year old is distracted all the time and that's normal). The symptoms need to have started before school entry, and need to be pervasive (meaning you can’t have ADD only during math class, or only in school and not at home). Sounds pretty straightforward until you think of all the other reasons you could have symptoms of inattention:

-A learning disability that makes it difficult to concentrate, organize, or learn
-Emotional or social problems that deflect your focus (ever try to do work when you’re really upset?)
-Situational factors such as being in a disorganized environment
- Auditory processing/language deficits that make it hard to focus (just think of having to be in a foreign language class all day when you don’t know what the heck anyone is saying. Hard to stay focused.)
-Anxiety (you are preoccupied with worry thoughts, and thus can’t focus)
-Depression (you don’t have the energy to focus)
-Being gifted (you get bored easily!)

And the list goes on. But testing for ADD is one of my favorite assessments to do, because it is like being a detective.

One time, I was asked by my school district to assess a student for ADD during my spring break. At first, I resisted. I mean, it’s called a “break” for a reason, right? Then, I found out that the child was not enrolled in the public school, but was in Circus School, and happened to live in our district. There was a time crunch, and it would have to be done ASAP. I thought about saying I couldn’t do it, but c’mon, it was Circus School!

Now, you’re probably thinking (as was I), “How on earth do you test a kid for symptoms of inattention in Circus School?” What would that write up look like?

Caroline appeared distracted by the TIGERS JUMPING THROUGH FLAMING HOOPS.

I couldn’t wait to see what this Circus School was all about. It was worth sacrificing my spring break. Caroline was a 9-year old girl, specializing in contortionism.* She was indeed quite flexible, but she did kind of seem like she wasn’t listening to her trainer. But seriously, what child could focus in this environment?

I ended up testing her and she came up fine on every test, with some difficulties in visual-motor planning and impulsive answering. No anxiety or social-emotional problems. Her focus was fine one-on-one, but that’s not too unusual, even for kids with ADD. Her circus teachers* rated her “at-risk” for attention difficulties, and her mom rated her as the most unfocused child on the planet. Ug. I didn’t have enough data to say for sure what was going on.

Then I hit the jackpot. I found her cumulative folder that included teacher comments from preschool through 2nd grade, prior to enrolling in Circus School. And there were comments all over the report cards about her lack of focus, distractibility, and not meeting her potential. There was enough data to tentatively diagnose her with ADD, with ongoing monitoring of symptoms.

So for all you teachers out there, who are spending this week writing a zillion report cards, seek comfort that years from now, you will be helping some school psychologist make better diagnoses! Here’s where I normally would pull this posting together with a lovely metaphor about contortionism and circus arts, but it’s Sunday and I haven’t had my coffee yet. I guess there would be something about “disentangling” symptoms or "jumping through assessment hoops."

Please excuse me, I’m going to need to go to Peet’s Coffee now.

*I feel like I’m making this up as I write, but I swear I am not.

Guest Writer: Debbie Downer

You ever have one of those days when you find out a 14-year-old former student murdered another student? Erm. Me neither.

But if I did, it would be awful. And there would be guilt about not doing enough. And there would be scanning of all interactions to see if there was something else I could have done to prevent it. There would be major cognitive dissonance. He was a nice kid. He had potential. He got sucked into a gang. He didn’t have the skills to think through what would happen if he actually shot another kid. I know that most people file “gang member” under “evil misfit” in their minds and move on with their lives, but it’s far more complex. He was a sweet kid. He was vulnerable to influence. He didn’t have many successes in school and was looking for a way to feel connected and powerful. I think there are two victims. One is gone at the age of 13 and one is in jail for the rest of his life.

There is a “spidering” of retaliation that is happening amongst my students, their older siblings, and their families. Some of my students say they admire the shooter. Some of my students are in danger. I feel powerless. I know I try to keep things light here at Notes From the School Psychologist, filling the blogospere with warm fuzzies, but I don’t want to sugar-coat how hard it is to be the person people go to when these things happen and ask, “what do we do?”

I was okay with my crisis intervention role when I got the call that I needed to go to the nearby middle school because of a shooting. It certainly wasn’t the first time my crisis team number had been called to do grief counseling. And I put on my objective psychologist hat* and grabbed my kit of crayons, paper, empathy, and crisis management skills.

In my team of other school psychologists, I saw all the kids coming in to mourn the 6th grader who was killed. They said things like, “He was really funny” and “He never came to class, but when he did, he made me laugh.” He was clearly in a gang. The kids said, “It’s so dumb he died for a color.” I processed the confusion, sadness, and anger with his friends, and sat with a girl who cried and clutched the kid’s beanie hat, as a last reminder of her friend. She wasn’t going to the funeral because she was afraid of retaliation. Then she said the shooter’s name. And my heart sank. It was one of MY kids. I knew him last year before he transferred out of my school. No longer an anonymous gang member, I was no longer that effective in my objective psychologist role. I managed to pull it together and see more kids that day, but I told my supervisor I didn’t feel like I would be effective in that role for the following day. I mean, how can anyone have empathy for a killer and grief counsel the victim’s friends at the same time?

A week has passed. No media coverage at all of the tragedy, except one blip on the 10 o’ Clock news the day after. Looks like the media has also filed it away under “evil gang members we can’t do anything about.” I wonder if this had happened in a fancy part of San Francisco, if Time Magazine would be all over it, opening a discussion about youth violence. It angers me.

Interestingly, I had JUST gone to a seminar on Student Threat Assessment, and we spent two days talking about how rare these events are, but how it’s our job to take every threat seriously. We can’t predict who will be a killer, but we can take steps following every threat. This kid never made a threat that I could have followed up on. But I knew he was vulnerable and interested in gangs. I wish I could have done more.

Debbie Downer would like to conclude with a sad fact that you can’t save everyone in this field. You do your best, and sometimes, the outside influences are stronger than you. You can clean the air inside your school, make it nurturing, follow up with kids who need help, and do your best. Sometimes it seems like the front door of your school is a screen door, and all the negative community influences just come right in and there’s nothing you can do. Except your best.

(Insert Debbie Downer noise here)

*It’s not actually a hat, but if it were, it would be like a Sherlock Holmes hat, I think, to symbolize the objective taking in of data/clues. See, humor is my defense mechanism from trauma. You probably noticed that already.

Teaching Tip Tuesday: Put Some Stank on It

Cough cough…sputter….sputter…what’s this? Ah yes, the return of Teaching Tip Tuesday!* For those just joining, this is a chance for all you lovely people to submit a link to your blog postings that you think will help teachers and parents and mental health professionals work better with children.

Today’s example comes from when I joined a Hip Hop dance performing troupe a few years ago.** I was super stressed out from my job, and needed an outlet. What better way to relieve stress than to exercise and challenge myself to use an unused part of my brain? I was so focused on trying to coordinate complex moves, get over my fear of looking like a lame white girl with no rhythm, and meet a new group of people. And that was just what I needed. For a few hours a week, I didn’t think about how there were way too many kids on my caseload, way too many crises, and not enough time to do my job as a school psychologist in my urban public schools.

I have a dance background. I was one of those kids who took tap, jazz, ballet, funk, hip hop, cheerleading, circus (really), and gymnastics and wanted more. I hadn’t danced in a while though, and somehow I suspected that the “robot” was no longer cool in hip hop.*** Anyhoo, I auditioned and made the team as an “alternate” meaning I could train with these professional dancers.

I worked my a** off trying to keep up, lost 15 pounds in the process, and then totally hit a wall and was not progressing. I even got the “Most Improved!” award, which we in education all know means “You suck just a little less than just a month ago!” We had these “Feedback” sessions in which you would perform in front of the other members of the troupe and each person would tell you what you were doing well and what you needed to work on. Well, after performing a classic piece to E-40, the head dancer gave me the following feedback:

“You’re a good dancer, but you need to put some stank on it.”

Right. Some stank. I’ll get right on th…wait? What?

The feedback was clearly not specific enough for me to do anything with it. Did she mean my facial expressions should be more stanky? Should I hit the moves harder? Lower? Faster? Not shower? WHAT?

And this is the problem with general feedback. Students don’t know what to do with it. When I was at Berkeley, my advisor once told me, “This is the worst dissertation prospectus I’ve ever seen in my 30 years at Berkeley”. NOT HELPFUL. Now if she said, “I am concerned about your Methods section and we need to rework your statistical analyses,” I would have known what to do. So as you go about your day working with kids, remember that specific feedback (and specific praise, for that matter) are much more useful for getting a kid to change his or her behavior. Even “Good job” or worse yet, “Good boy!” is far less helpful than “I like how you used a topic sentence.” Then the kid knows what was good about the performance.

And here’s the fun part. Good, specific feedback alone can change behavior. It’s like those speed monitors they sometimes put on roads where people speed, that let you know you are going 37 miles per hour in a 25 mile hour zone. What is your instinct when you get that specific feedback? You slow down. Now imagine it said, “You’re doing it wrong!” You wouldn’t know what to do.

One final point: always try to sandwich negative feedback in between two layers of positive feedback. If I were that head dancer, I could have said:

I like how you made a stanky face when you hit that move so hard. Now I want you to take that same attitude during other moves, because you look like a cheerleader. Don’t hit the moves so stiffly, loosen up.

Now that’s good feedback.


*I know it’s Wednesday. Shhhhhhhh.
**Perfectly normal thing to do.
***It actually has made quite the comeback. I could have been the first to revive the retro coolness of it.

Crisis Management

I promise we will return to our regularly-scheduled blog about education, psychology, and all my little friends in the public schools after this last wedding post. I'm back from the most amazing wedding and honeymoon, and have been sloooooowly returning to civilian life. It's weird, at work, no one wants to hug me, take my photo, tell me how beautiful I look, and give me a gift for being in love, like at the wedding. Weird.

I am compelled to write one last post about the wedding, especially since the last one gave the impression that it was all smooth sailing. And as my kids say, I'm keeping it real. So, you know those shows where the bride freaks out over a miniscule detail and you roll your eyes at how lame she is? Well, I finally get it. I was that bride for a moment. I am somewhat ashamed to admit this, since my work as a school psychologist should have MORE than prepared me for any wedding crisis, great or small. In my work in urban public schools, I have dealt with the following crises:

-Female teacher being arrested for sleeping with one of my 8th grade students
-Drive-by shooting of school
-Police shoot-outs in front of school yard of students
-Multiple bomb threats (by PARENTS of the school, mind you)
-Stray cat population with ringworm invading school on state testing day
-And so much more...

So one would think I could handle an itty-bitty wedding crisis. Especially since I was Bride-chilla), right?

Well the problem was, I didn't take the advice that I usually give out to others about not taking on too many things at once. So in addition to planning a 3-day destination wedding, I also foolishly selected the weekend before said blessed event to take the final board certification exam to be a clinical psychologist. This is essentially the Bar Exam for psychologists, which is the final, final, little flag we have to plant on our mountainous journey from Educational Psychologist (specializing in school-related problems) to Clinical Psychologist (specializing in any problem, for any age). And if I didn't pass the exam, I would have to wait another 6 months to take it. No pressure. The good news is, I passed! Then, I had the rest of my week to simply run around town doing everything else for the wedding. I was in good shape. Or so I thought.

Three days before the wedding, I went to the bridal store to pick up my gorgeous gown, on the way to picking up the rings, meeting fiance for final dance lesson, and packing for the wedding and honeymoon. I was on a military-precision time-line. Picking up the dress was the fun part! And yet, when they opened up the bag to show me my dress, I had my one and only bridal melt-down, Bridezilla-style.

There was a spot on my dress.

I know, not that big of a deal, right? WRONG. I apparently hadn't been following my own advice and had been bottling up all my stress, because I just burst into tears.* The bridal staff moved into Defcon 2 mode and started talking into their wrists all secret-service style, "Um, we got a 210 in progress--crying bride. Go! Go! Go!" They mobilized the platoon of staff around me and the dress, got out the tissues and the haz-mat-style gloves and began the inspection as I sobbed. Every solution they offered was not acceptable. They offered to try to get it out further, but there was no guarantee that it wouldn't make it worse. They offered to try to sew a fold over the spot in a way that fit the style, but that would have taken time and potentially gone horribly wrong. I said, sarcastically through tears, "why don't we just iron on a jean-patch on my designer dress if we're going to do that!" Keep in mind, this was a minuscule little spot, but all my stress morphed into that spot, staring at me with it's .01% imperfection. Sure, 99.99% of everything else was going well, but I couldn't mobilize my crisis management skills and left the shop in tears.

I managed to get to my dance lesson and collapsed into fiance's arms, but when I started telling my story of trauma, it became clear that it wasn't about the spot. It was about dealing with imperfection on a day that I wanted to be perfect. On the actual day, I couldn't even really find the spot again, perhaps it was a stress mirage. In any event, I survived the great spot crisis of 2009, and the wedding went perfectly. I can't even put into words how amazing it felt to see all the hard work pay off into a beautiful day of love and happiness with friends and family. Okay, maybe I can put it into words, but no without sounding like a big cheezeball. And for future brides, or anyone going through several life transitions at a time, do as I say, and not as I do:

1) Rely on your friends and family. Delegate the things you don't really need to be doing yourself. It's hard if you tend toward perfectionism. But trust me, you can't do it all yourself.

2) Remember, at the end of the day, no one will remember if you had roses or tulips, or the small details. They'll remember how happy you were to be getting married. Say to yourself, "All I need is an officiant and my partner, the rest doesn't matter." And as my friend said, "And if the officiant doesn't show up, I'm sure someone can get their internet reverend credentials on their iPhones real quick."

3) Don't put too much on your plate at once. Confucius once said, "You cannot go in all directions at once." Smart guy.

4) Helping professionals: don't be afraid to be HELPED. People like to help. You like to help, right? So do others.

5) Express your stress and continue to utilize your coping skills during stressful times, especially exercise. Even if it is a 20 minute walk. You'll tell yourself you don't have time. C'mon. You have 20 minutes.

6) Elope. Just kidding.


*It reminds me of the first time I cried at work. My principal had never seen me lose it before and she was so surprised and didn't know what to do. My fellow counselor friend just clapped her hands and squealed, "Yea! She's human!" If you want to be a school psychologist, be prepared to check your perfectionism at the door. It's a messy field. Took me YEARS to figure that out. Years.