The Best of 2010 (Plus Shameless Cute Dog Video)

Husband and I have been home the past week for the holidays and have discovered many channels on our U-verse that we didn't even know we had. I have been sucked into the Smithsonian Channel (nerd alert!), as well as many of the Animal Planet-esque shows. I'm noticing there are ton of "Best Of 2010" shows on lately. Yes, I even recently watched America's Cutest Dogs-2010 with husband. I love break. P.S. I voted for this dog and he won. Do ignore the lame commentary and focus on the cuteness.



To quote my Internet BFF, Mrs. Mimi: And I die.

So, in the spirit of countdowns from 2010, here are the most popular blog posts of 2010 on Notes From the School Psychologist. I suppose I could have tried to understand my sitemeter statistics program to determine most viewed, but that would require more patience than I can muster, so here they are, month by month, by highest number of comments. Next year, I'll get fancier on you and analyze it properly. So if you missed any of these, enjoy!

January: Awkward Conversation #249: Telling a Parent her Child has Mental Retardation. I still cringe when I read this. So hard. So awkward. *

February: (by default, my only post in Feb because I was swamped with retention referrals) March Madness Comes Early This Year. A post on (not surprisingly) grade retention.

March: You Got Served. This post got picked up by Brazen Careerist, so I think that drove up the comments. It is one of my favs though, because this kid I work with is so awesome. He got served.....by math.

April: You Are My Fire, People. This post is about the cutest music video project with developmentally disabled adolescents, which illustrates the difference between concrete and abstract thinking. Also, a confessional from me about The Backstreet Boys**

May: From the Emailbox: The Top 5 Questions I Get as a School Psychologist. This post has saved me so much time answering emails from prospective school psychologists. I love emails though, keep 'em coming. :)

June: Well Hello Summer Break, I've Been Expecting You. This post is on how to relax over break. I know, it should be easy, but it isn't. June was a great month for me. My book, The Teachable Moment: Seizing the Instants When Children Learn came out in June and I felt like my book baby had finally been born. And she was gorgeous. Except I hate the cover. Other than that, gorgeous.

July: Did You See the Memo About Interventions? I was a little afraid to post this one at the time, because it was pretty heavy-handed on pre-referral interventions and I didn't want to seem teacher-blaming. Teacher blaming was very hot this year. It was meant to get people thinking about how special education is seen as the ultimate intervention, and often, it just isn't.

August: This Week, With Debbie Downer. This post is in response to Teacher-Bashing-A-polooza-Fest 2010 that was happening on all the Sunday morning talk shows in August. Grrr.

September: Lessons from My Tea: Experience.Totally a default winner, because September was back-to-school madness, and I only had time for one post. But, I still like this one. It reminds us to be as patient with ourselves as we are with our students, and has tips for working with perfectionistic students.

October: Trapped. This one was when Mommy was in the New York Times discussing the hazards of telling people on a plane trip that you are a psychologist.

November: School Psychology Awareness Week: Monday. Apparently, detailing my day by the hour is interesting to folks. Who knew? That whole week, I kept referring to School Psych Awareness Week as SPAW week, and hoped that people would think I was saying "Spa" week and get me a gift certificate to a spa. No such luck.

December: Too early to tell, it's a tie, but I'm gonna go with Sleep. So Hot Right Now because I am on a one-woman fight for appropriate sleep for children. My teenage clients are so annoyed with me right now, I'm sure. Plus, I have been taking my own advice and banking sleep for 2011. It's delicious.

Here's to a fabulous 2011! Thanks for all your support and readership. A special thanks to all my frequent commenters on the Facebook page for the blog. I love hearing all your perspectives on our fine profession!

*Close runner up, one of my favs: The Softer Side Of Sears. In this post, I share ill-fated wardrobe decisions.
**Coming to concert soon with NKOTB. Squeeeeel!

The Parent Trap: How Much Monitoring is Too Much?

In graduate school, study after study I read linked parental involvement with school success. So shouldn’t more parental involvement lead to even more school success? Not necessarily. Consider the following two situations I experienced this semester:

Scenario 1:

A fourteen-year-old girl is failing all her classes. She has a language-based learning disability that is so severe, she couldn’t figure out how an apple and banana were similar. Yet in class, they were studying the foundations of democracy. It was no wonder she hadn’t turned in any work. At the assessment, I found that she was strong in nonverbal/visual learning, and recommended a more restrictive, yet more intervention-rich environment that could support her learning. I rarely lay it on super thick for parents, but in this case I presented the situation as dire, because it was. This girl was on the track to illiteracy because she couldn’t make any sense of the material given to her. After my impassioned speech for changing this girl’s placement to a special class with trained staff to support her, the mom, who has another kid at the school, said, “I don’t really feel like driving to two different schools, so I’ll keep her here.”

Scenario 2:

A seven-year-old girl is struggling in reading sight words. The school is providing her with a reading specialist three days a week, just to make sure her skills are strong. After assessing her, it turns out she is average in all areas of reading, including her sight words. She is above average in everything else. I think its time to celebrate the power of early intervention and keep her in the school program just to reinforce the skills. Parent is worried child will never get into Harvard, where both parents attended, if she does not get ahead now. Parent elects to pay a hojillion dollars to send her to an outside specialist for intensive intervention after school every day. Parents decide to sue the school to get her into special education with a one-on-one teacher aide in the classroom to support her and challenge the results of my assessment with an expensive outside evaluation. Additionally, the parents change the name of the family dog to a sight word she is struggling with, so she can really learn how it looks—on a collar, on a dog bowl, on the dog’s jacket—etc etc.

Talk about a tale of two parents. Surely there is a happy medium, no? I saw my role with parent #1 to educate her about the class, help her tour the class to feel comfortable sending her daughter there, and to try to problem solve the transportation issue, if indeed that was the real issue. I also get the inclination for parent #2 to do absolutely everything humanly possible to help her child. I do. Every child is someone’s precious baby and they want the best for them. But can there be too much parent involvement? I would think that “Once” the dog would say yes.

I often see too much parent involvement backfire not in the early elementary years, but in the middle and high school years, when teenagers are striving for independence and autonomy and they have the opposite. I have parents who know every assignment, every detail, and everything about their teenager’s schooling. I shudder to think of my parents, when I was in high school, knowing when my Great Gatsby essay rough draft was due, or if I had finished math homework 2.7, problems 35-52. I would have been so annoyed. Sure, did I stay up way too late reading the cliffs notes for the Great Gatsby in high school and suffer through a bad grade as a result? Did I spell his name “Gatspy” throughout the essay? Yes. Did I scramble to finish problems 35-53 in the passing period before math class? Yes. Did I learn from my procrastination? Yes. Big time. If my mom was hounding me to read the book and start my outline, I may have finished the book and done better on my essay, but would I have learned how to manage my time better?*

I have also seen parents give too much independence to teenagers who still need parent support, because they shift their focus to helping younger siblings. I don’t have the answer about what is the “just right” level of parent involvement, but I do know the extremes. I also know that the way kids interpret parent monitoring—as either caring or controlling—can make a difference in motivation.** I have sat across from teens complaining their parents are too controlling and then later sat across from the parents saying they monitor because they care. Both parties are correct in their feelings. I help the kids understand the motivation behind monitoring and help the parents understand that their role should change in high school from monitor to facilitator. I wrote an article about homework across the ages, that gives specific tips for parents, if you haven’t seen it yet.

As for the tale of two parents, I hope each achieves a balance that serves the children best. As it usually is in this profession, I stay tuned to find out. One encouraging email did come to me this week from a parent of a teen I worked with a year ago that read: “Thank you for helping us figure out our role as “facilitators” with Jamie. We are doing our best to support him when needed, but let him stumble sometimes so he learns his own homework routine.” Yes, sometimes victories come years later. Plant the seeds and wait. That’s how school psychologists roll.

*Oh the shame. I still haven’t read the Great Gatsby to this day. Maybe my mom should have pushed me? I hear it’s a great book. Perhaps over break, I shall finally finish it.
**Courtesy of my dissertation, read by two people: my dad and my advisor. Thanks, dad.

Sleep. So Hot Right Now.

I presented this evening on the power of sleep for children and learning at one of my schools. Inadvertently, I became my own case study this week on the effects of lack of sleep. I got little sleep this weekend because of a holiday party on one night, and then getting up at 5am on Sunday morning to get to the Antique Faire. I know, I'm psycho. But all the good mid-century modern stuff goes in the first hour. Early bird gets the Hans Wagner wingback chair that looks like Dr. Evil would sit it in. Mwa ha ha.

This week at school, I have gotten terrible sleep as well. One night, my 80 lb dog was all up on my side of the bed and I was cramped all night. Another night, I slept like junk because of an ill-fated decision to have a Mocha Milan Latte at 5pm the night before. And so, I am functioning poorly this week. My symptoms are masquarding as ADHD--Inattentive Type: trouble initiating tasks, poor task persistence, faulty executive functioning (yes, came to school today without my lunch and the test protocol I needed), and irritability/restlessness. This is after only 3 nights of poor sleep. Can you imagine the impairment if it's habitual?*

Apparently, kids get about one hour less of sleep than they did 40 years ago. And apparently, 90% of parents think their kids are getting enough sleep and they are not. Here's the recommended amount for preschool children through adolescence, per the National Sleep Foundation:

Toddlers (age 1-3): 12-14 hours in a 24 hour period (naps count)
Preschoolers (ages 3-5): 11-13 hours
School Aged Children (ages 5-12): 10-11 hours
Teenagers (13+): 9-10 hours.

I know for sure that the teenagers I work are not rockin' 10 hours of sleep a night, that's for sure. The reason I know this is before I test them, I always ask when they went to bed the night before and when they got up. The reason I do this is because the research is so clear that even a little sleep debt or depravation affects you in the following ways:**

1) Learning is consolidated and enhanced during sleep. Kids with more sleep have higher grades, and higher IQs. Even 15 minutes more sleep makes a difference. Kids are terrible at estimating their sleepiness too. Their cognitive scores are lower even if they claim they got enough sleep.

I see sleepy kids trying to learn all the time. One the other day wrote a sentence from the prompt "Write a sentence with the word 'as' " that read: "I am as sleepy as a sloth." For the word "of" he wrote, "All I can think of is sleep." Some kids straight up put their heads down. I have had kids stay up all night doing work, or taking care of newborn siblings.*** The cumulative effect is that they don't learn as much. Kids need their sleep to learn. Just ask my little poppit in the Spanish immersion program who wanted to call the fire marshall to shut down school so he could go home and get a nap.

2) Lack of sleep may cause depression. Think how you are after having poor sleep. I'm guessing if you're like me, you're not Miss Mary Sunshine. There can be reasons for this--emotionally laden memories are stored when we sleep. Positive memories are processed in the hippocampus and negative in the amygdala. Lack of sleep causes impairment in storing memories in the hippocampus. So guess what? We file away bad memories more often than good when we are sleep deprived. I have teenagers I work with who I swear would not be as depressed if they got more sleep.

3) Lack of sleep makes you have symptoms of ADHD. Um yeah, my case study above (n=1) proves this. Plus, studies show that sleep loss debilitates the body's ability to extract glucose from the bloodstream. Without this stream of basic energy, one part of the brain suffers more than the rest--you guessed it--the prefrontal cortex. The one that helps you with executive functions--planning, organizing, attending, and sustaining effort.

4)Sleep loss makes kids fat. Obesity increases 80% for each hour of lost sleep. Kids with less than 8 hours sleep have a 300% higher rate of obesity than those who get 10. Yikes! Sleep loss triggers hunger and stress hormones. No wonder after my 3-day sleep debt I kept going for the wheat thins all day.

I think I'm going to start adding the recommended sleep hours to my list of recommendations at the end of my reports. It seems that would help learning and mood right away.

I also think I'm still in sleep debt from earlier in the week. So now if someone could call the fire marshall and shut down my computer, that would be great. I need a nap...

*"YES!!!" exclaims anyone with an infant child. Three exclamation points.
**From Nurture Shock, Chapter Two: The Lost Hour
***Yeah, I called the parents on that one. Please don't give your 12 year old the 12-2am feeding slot for your newborn.