The Wackness in Education

I love independent films. I went to one last night called “The Wackness” about a drug dealer kid in NYC in 1994, who falls in love for the first time and finds himself and whatnot.

My favorite scene was when he and love interest are having a deep talk and she says, “You know what’s wrong with you? I always see the dope-ness in life and you always see the wackness.”


1994-lingo aside, it was an interesting way to describe pessimism and optimism. Readers who have been with me a while know that I like to focus on the positive and even try to be optimistic when my car is stolen, but not burned. But there are certainly times when enough “wackness” in the bureaucracy of public schools gets to you. This is one of those times, in which one must vent a little. May I present to you:

An Open Letter to “The System”

Dear Public Education System,

I am writing to express my dissatisfaction with your bureaucratic ways. I am not working in your System this summer, and yet you still plague me. As an aside, are you, “The System,” a close relative of “The Man?” Do you meet on a bi-annual basis and discuss ways to keep people down? Is there a secret password to get into this meeting, or is there some sort of top-secret retinal scan situation?

I am writing because I have been receiving endless letters highlighting your dysfunction all summer and with each one, I think, “Aha! That’s where the money for public education goes!”

First, I have been receiving letters from a school district I haven’t worked for in several years, threatening to suspend me if I don’t get my “I’m free of Tuberculosis” paperwork in. You have threatened on 3 occasions to put these letters “in my file” and suspend me. You do that, System. You suspend me from that job I left years ago. By the way, my new district only lost my TB paperwork once. Take that!

Second, I haven’t been paid for my work from April and it is now almost August. Thankfully, as a civil servant, my paycheck from February more than covers living in the Bay Area for 5 months (cough cough). Each day, I hope for that check, and today, I was so excited to see a letter with your name on it in my mailbox! Alas, it was not my wages, but rather a giant, important packet about the System’s position on Northern Ireland. I promptly returned my signature that I will indeed abide by the MacBride Principles in the event that I do business with Northern Ireland. You know, for all those cross-continent business dealings I do working in the local public school.

Third, my sick days are still inaccurate from a year ago. I really don’t know how I can take .047 sick days anyway. Could you please move the decimal point sometime this millennium? Please refer to the 47589475983473 prior communications on fixing this simple error that could ruin my life when I want to take maternity leave someday. Oh! And by the way, thanks for considering motherhood an illness.

Lastly, I want to thank you. I don’t want to be a Negative Nancy all the time, now do I? I want to thank you, The System, for improving my angry letter writing skills (the final draft of this letter will have some angry looking font, like maybe Ariel Bold Italic). I also want to thank you for the Bureaucratic OCD I have developed in documenting everything in triplicate. One thing You have taught me is that if it isn’t in writing, it didn’t happen. And finally, thanks so much for giving me a way to fill my summer vacation hours!

Yours Truly,

Rebecca

P.S. Someone once said to me that sarcasm is rooted in anger. What? Me? Sarcastic? Never. I love everything about public education.

Find Your Path

I love educational psychology conferences. I love the big fat program with 10 million presentations on some obscure facet of learning that I can file away under “Empirically Proven!” in my mind. Then, at cocktail parties or in my practice, I can merge all these facts and espouse something interesting about child development. (I do recognize that “Interesting” is a subjective term.)*

A few years ago, I helped put together an interesting conference, held in a secluded nature setting in Northern California. The conference theme was predetermined by my place of business as, “Exploring The Roots of Educational Service.” It was all about self-discovery and reflection about why you are an educator. As an empiricist from a research-oriented graduate school program, this was a challenge for me. What? No regression analyses with p<.05? But, I aim to please, so I helped put together the following sessions:

1) Discovery Hike
2) Interpretive Dancing**
3) Labyrinth
4) Reflection Pool
5) Sacred Object

I could write a post on each one of these, but will spare you. I will write about the Labyrinth, because I know you secretly want to know what that’s about. Hey, it’s summer, what else are you educators going to do?

This Berkeley-esque woman I’ll call “Katie” brought a giant Labyrinth printed on a giant plastic sheet that covered the whole room. We were each asked to walk through the Labyrinth and reflect on our journey or something. Katie encouraged us to “find our own path” and “be authentic with ourselves.” Of all the luck, I got stuck behind Katie, who took FOREVER to find her path. At each turn, she did an extra turn/leap whilst moving her arms about like a weeping willow in a Category 5 storm. Hurricane Katie, with eyes closed, also hummed a little song to boot. I stood there, tapping my foot with Labyrinth-Rage, thinking, “MOVE IT! Just get to the end! GO!” When she finally reached the end, she curled into a little ball at the center and stayed there for like 20 minutes, reflecting. I took the fastest route out of the Labyrinth so I could move on to making sure I had enough pebbles to distribute for the reflection pool activity.

YEARS later, I still remember this Labyrinth when I am feeling frustrated with meeting my goals as an educator. I want my students to MOVE to the next reading level quickly. I want to GET TO THE END of this RTI talk and just do it now. I always have to GO! GO! GO! on to the next activity/meeting/crisis. As much as I hate to admit it, Hurricane Katie’s path of enjoyment and patience along the way to the goal may be the way to go. You can’t rush development. Systems move slowly. As an educator and psychologist, I’ve come to learn that we should judge each day not by the harvest, but by the seeds we plant.

But you’ll still never see me twirling down the hall or balled up in my office reflecting. I’ve got work to do, people.

*I recently got photos of my wedding gown and want to keep them secret on my computer from fiancée. My friend suggested I put them in a file called “Interesting Studies in Education” because who would want to look there? (Besides me, of course).

**I’m super glad that YouTube was not invented at the time of the interpretive dance.

NFTSP Spam-Fest!

I don't know if anyone else who subscribes to my blog got spammed this morning, but I sure did. Yes, I subscribe to my own blog. I swear, I'm not narcissistic, I just like to see if it is being delivered properly. And I got 25 delivered today to my inbox. Hm. Apparently, blogger felt that you all should read them again. Sorry!

Reflecting on the Reflection of My Reflection

Anyone who has been through graduate school in psychology or education knows that the standard pedagogical practice in most classes is to reflect on what you have observed or read. This reflection* is thought to bring you closer to the material and improve your practice. In my brother-in-law’s Education Ph.D. program, he had to reflect on an on-line reflection journal and comment on others’ reflections on his reflection. Wait, what?

In any event, it is summer break, so I actually have time to reflect on my work in the schools and with my students.** I work part-time in the public school and part-time in private practice, so I am constantly doing a compare-contrast essay in my head. On any given day, I have picked up my voicemails and heard:

1) Hi, this is Judy from the Psych Department. We have an emergency. We had another shooting of a student on campus, so we’re calling out Crisis Team #8 again. Call me.

2) Hi, this is Janice from Snooty School. We have an emergency. McKayleigha has once again failed to turn in her homework. Call me.

It is so difficult to reconcile the differences between the types of emergencies that ensue in each of my roles. To each caller, there is an emergency. And each caller is seeking my help. My rational side wants to arrange some sort of Freaky Friday situation in which broader perspectives are gained on what an “emergency” is. My compassionate side thinks that you cannot compare suffering; each person’s experience and perspective is real and valid, because it is his or hers.

As I reflect this summer on what kind of school psychologist I want to be in the Fall, I can’t help but think of the students I have worked with in both urban districts and elite schools, each with their own set of challenges and strengths. I feel equally efficacious helping the student who is melting in a pool of anxiety because she failed a test as I do helping the student who just lost his father to community violence and is anxious about retaliation. I have seen students shed their perfectionist ways and become happier and I have seen students come to terms with their grief and bounce back in ways I cannot fathom. For all the bureaucracy in the public schools, there are equal challenges working in the private sector.

At this point in my career, I want it all. I want to work with all kinds of students. I could be the type of psychologist who eventually finds a “niche” with a certain population of students, but right now, my reflection is telling me that’s not going to happen. I don’t want to become myopic about education and learning, because every school has something to offer.

And can someone please remind me of this in August when I return to Bureaucracy-Fest and Elite-a-Polooza 2008?

*You must say reflection softly, with italics.
**Please forgive the penguin reflection photo. It's the best I could come up with before my morning coffee. The other pictures I saw resembled those inspirational posters that never seem to actually inspire me. Oh! An Eagle Soaring! I feel just like that Eagle now, only I'm soaring over adversity! Not so much. The penguin is at least cute.

Psychoeducational Part VI – Visual Processing

I see a group of fuzzy hairs attached to a medium sized four-legged creature. A large pink object attached to a smaller portion of the figure is approaching my face. And it is my dog, licking my face at 7am.*

What I’ve just described is the process of visual perception. I see a bunch of parts and assimilate them to make meaning of them. The same process goes for learning to read. I see little squiggles and perceive them to be letters, combining into words. When you think about the process of visual perception in depth, it is actually quite complex. The same goes for assessing if a student has a “visual processing deficit” that constitutes a learning disability. I have never seen two children with the same “visual processing deficit.” That term is really an umbrella for a number of processes, in the same way “auditory processing” encompasses so many different things.

At the risk of oversimplification, here are the main things a school or educational psychologist may look for when assessing this area of processing:

1) Accurate Vision: One would think that is goes without saying that if a student has not passed a vision screening test that it would be impossible to accurately measure their visual perception. One would be wrong. I constantly refer families for vision evaluations before I test their child’s perception. Remember, you must be able to accurately see something in order to perceive (make meaning) of it. To take it to the extreme, it would be like showing a Rorschach ink blot to a blind person and asking them what it looks like to them.

2) Visual Perception: This one is the fodder for every Intro to Psychology course. What do you see in this picture:



If you said a young woman, you are correct. If you said an old woman, you are correct. Depending on what features you look at, it can be either. Go on, try again. Finding the old woman always takes me a minute. I’m not ageist, I promise.

So basically, visual perception is taking the parts and assimilating into a whole in order to make sense of it. A student with visual perception problems may take more time to perceive visual stimuli. To simplify, a student may misperceive a “b” for a “d,” have difficulty reading a graph, struggle with taking in lots of visual information, have difficulty putting together puzzles, and/or have to exert more mental energy to scan for important pieces within the whole (such as locating something on a map, finding the section in the book you need, or finding that stupid little Waldo guy in the midst of many similar Waldo-esque objects). There are a number of tests that one might use to discover which aspect of visual perception is impaired.**

3) Visual Memory: Okay great, let’s assume your brain has accurately registered what you are seeing. But can you remember it? Can you remember the details of a picture in your mind and call it up later? Can you remember that this thingy b is called “b” and it’s a line with a bubble on the right? If you can’t, then your visual memory may be impaired. Visual memory is usually measured by showing a student a shape s/he has never seen before and then showing a bunch of similar shapes and asking her/him to find the one they saw.

4) Visual Sequential Memory: This is the same as visual memory, only you not only have to remember what you saw, but also in what order. So I would typically show a student several shapes in a row and then ask them to remember the order in the midst of several choices with similar orders. If you think about it, this process can be involved in reading, as you must remember that these squiggles bed mean something different than theses squiggles deb.

I should note that though most “classic” learning disabilities are auditory in nature, at times, visual processing is the processing deficit that is preventing reading. More often, visual processing deficits affect math and science. Why? Because there are a lot of symbols involved as well as visual representations without language (think of those plotting numbers on the X and Y axis). Sure, it has a verbal label, but the process involved in doing something like this correctly involves far more visual processing skills.

And because nothing is ever straightforward when it comes to psychoeducational assessment, visual processing deficits taken to the extreme, can affect social perception (is that a mad face? What does shrugging shoulders mean?). When there are social impairments too, one has the unique challenge of figuring out if the student also has a Nonverbal Learning Disability, which is sometimes considered a disorder on the Autism Spectrum.

* Puppy apparently did NOT get the memo that it is summer break and mommy doesn’t have to get up at 7 every day.


**For those interested, send me an email and I’ll tell you my favorites. rebeccabell@studentsgrow.com