Madness, I Say. Madness.

Every year my husband thinks I’m going to get into March Madness basketball thingy and whatnot. Every year, I slightly glance at the TV while he is watching if one of my alma matters, UC Berkeley or University of Northern Colorado is in the tournament. I don’t care for sports, mostly because I feel badly for whichever team loses. I imagine the losers going home and crying because it’s their senior year, or the guy who misses the final shot at the buzzer goes down a shame spiral and replays the shot in his mind over and over. I guess it’s a work hazard to have too much empathy for people’s feelings sometimes.

Anyhoo, this year, husband printed up a bracket thingy for me to fill out in an effort to engage me in the tournament. I decided I would make my picks based on which mascot would win in a fight. As a former cheerleader in high school and college, I was subjected to hours of long boring games in between our fabulous performances. I often entertained myself by focusing on the mascots. My favorite mascot moment was in high school, when our Bear did a trampoline jump in order to dunk a basketball and his head flew off. Awesome.

So it appears as if I finally found a way to make March Madness interesting to me! Husband was trying to go to bed last night and I was all, “Honey, do you think a Longhorn or a Gator would win in a fight? Honey? Wake up. A longhorn could stab a gator with his long horns, but gators are sneaky and fast. What do you think?”* Suddenly, I have March Madness! I’m 1 for 2 right now, because I correctly picked that a Cougar would beat a whatever this guy is:


So how do we, as educators, engage kids in a similar way—finding something they are interested in and tapping into it to engage them in something they are not interested in? As school psychologists, we are typically at the front line of working with disengaged students, right? I find that when I have Sulky McGee in my office, I have to find that spark—that connection—on which we can build our rapport. I have to say (reluctantly) that it does help to have some basic sports knowledge sometimes. “How ‘bout those [insert local sports team]?” works with a lot of kiddos.

I also find that once I’ve found a connection with a kiddo, we end up using the topic as a metaphor for their school or social difficulties. With a kid who loved tennis, we discussed what is “in bounds” and what is “out of bounds” when it came to disagreeing with a teacher. With a basketball player, we talked about how you miss 100% of the shots you never take as a lesson on risk taking. And for a kid who liked aggressive video games, we talked about how you “use up your energy” fighting others, and sometimes it’s better to “go around” the guy to get to your goal.

I have seen skilled teachers engage kids in similar ways—they find their “thing” and work it into their lessons. I find that the strategy of “tapping into student’s interests” is one of those things that is easy to say and much harder to do without a lot of planning. Teachers may wonder, "How do I make quadratic equations relevant to a kid who just broke up with her boyfriend? How can a student in crisis possibly personally relate to the plight of the Pilgrams 400 years ago? Can we really make the Canterbury Tales something meaningful for the Facebook generation?" Yes! Yes! Yes! Hey, maybe each kid can make a mock Facebook page for each of the characters in Canterbury Tales and write what they would say, what groups they would join, and who they would be friends with or something. To reach a disengaged student, you often have to get creative.

Hey, if I can get into sports, then anything is possible.

What else have you seen teachers to do incorporate student interests and increase engagement? Have my fellow school psychologists been able to turn a kid's interest into an analogy about how to deal with challenges? You all know I love me some teachable moments and analogies, so share!

Also, if you must, you can also share who will win March Madness 2012. You can use my mascot decision tree strategy if you want. And good luck deciding if a Bearcat or a Wildcat would win in a fight.


*By the way, by my logic, Florida State Gators are going to win it all. I saw this special on how Alligators have basically been around since the dinosaur age, so they have some mad survival skills. I also remember them saying they can run pretty fast AND climb trees, which is unsettling because I always thought I could run to a nearby tree and climb it if I encountered a hungry gator.

This Is My Confession*

I have a confession. I have been writing for another. I didn’t mean to cheat on you, blog, it’s just that…just that…well, I met someone else. Her name is Jossey. Jossey Bass Publisher. That’s why I haven’t been around much this past year. Just know I was going down a shame spiral when I realized it had been weeks between posts and I was staying up late writing for Jossey. Of course, there was also that business of me not posting as much as normal because I was tired from making a person too...

You know you are my first writing love, blog. You will forgive me in a hot second though. I have exciting news that justifies my shameful lack of posting the last year…wait for it…wait for it…presenting…

The School Psychologist’s Survival Guide!



Oh snap! Finally! There’s a guide for school psychologists that is practical, time-saving, and useful! This isn’t the run of the mill “What is School Psychology?” textbook from graduate school, but a resource guide for surviving in the chaos of the job once you actually get in the field. Newbies will love the advice and time saving tips. School psychologists who have been around a while will get fresh ideas and strategies to continue doing their jobs without going crazy themselves! Think you're going to tear your hair out the next time you get an inappropriate referral? Do you want to poke your own eyes out if you have to write another psychoeducational report on the weekend? Fret no more! There is help in this guide. And of course, it is written with juuuuuuuust a splash of snark to keep it spicy and entertaining. Snarky? Moi?

The guide covers many different topics, including:

• Finding where you belong in the schools and successfully navigating your role
• Dealing with “Bureaucracy Monsters” that ruin your work flow
• Organizing and being strategic about your assessment caseload
• Tuning up your skills in individual, group, and crisis counseling
• How to be preventive when you have no time
• How to navigate changing policies around Response to Intervention
• How to deal with people with…uh…erm…“challenging” personalities
• Preventing burnout and increasing job satisfaction

There are time-saving reproducible worksheets, letters, spreadsheets, and organizational tools that are ready for you to Xerox and use tomorrow. Be still my nerdy heart!

I am SO excited to share this resource with you all and I hope you will find it useful as you start out in the profession or revive and improve your practice as a school psychologist. Know that this survival guide was a true labor of love for me to write**, and it was inspired by all of you readers with your great questions, comments, and posts on the Facey Face page for the blog.

You can pre-order it off of Amazon.com by clicking here. If you pre-order, I believe you get a better price. The book will arrive right in time for the spring freak-out when everyone refers kids to you and you can’t imagine how you will do all your work without going cuckoopants. Hey, maybe the book will even come on your spring break, and you can relax on the beach with it? Erm, maybe it’s not exactly a beach read, but you get the idea.

Now I can relax and not feel guilty about my lack of posting on the blog, right? I mean, you guys can now have hundreds of pages of school psychology fun at your fingertips! Wheeeeeee!

I sincerely hope you like mama's other baby!


*For those of you who read “This is my confession” to the tune of R. Kelly’s remix “Confessions” you get extra points.

**Labor indeed. This book and my baby were both due in August. I spent my final weeks of pregnancy frantically trying to finish edits while Baby B kicked (punched?) my gut. She was really helpful in the motivation department, giving me a kick start when I needed it. Get it? Kick start? Oh, nevermind.

My Titanic FAIL.

I have been noticing advertisements lately for a new 3-D version of the movie, Titanic. I don’t know about you all, but when I saw that movie in regular-D, it freaked me out and strengthened my vow to never go on a boat again. In 3D? Shudder. I know what you’re thinking. How can this woman possibly make an analogy or poignant comment on today’s yoots or school psychology by discussing the Titanic? Well, I cannot. But I can share with you my most epic fail in working with students with disabilities from early in my career.

I often get emails from young, perky students who are eager to be school psychologists someday. They ask, “what kind of experience do I need to be a good candidate for grad school?” The better question, I think, is, “what kind of experience do I need to know this job is for me?” It’s not for everyone. I remember being a bit stunned in my grad school program when a few fellow classmates in my school psych classes admitted that after the first year of practicum, they’d rather do research on education than work with kids. They transferred to the research-side of the building. Now, I love me some research, but I love me some kiddos much more. Shocking they didn't think about whether or not they liked working with kids before signing on to a school psych program, right?

I think the best experience I had to prepare me for the job of being a school psychologist was working in group homes during summers in college. I have worked in group homes for students with developmental disabilities and students with emotional disturbance, and after basically living with these kids for a few summers in college, I knew I could handle any kid (or flying object) heading my way. I found myself learning the on-the-job skills that are not taught in any course: how to get a kid with autism off the roof, how to handle a kid twice your height having a seizure in the middle of the street, how to keep a kid from trying to kill herself or run away, and how to anticipate when a large object is going to be thrown in protest. I would come home after days at the group home and lament on how I had actually used phrases like, “Jeffrey, put down the stove.”

Anyhoo, back to The Titanic. One day, while working at the group home for students with developmental disabilities, I decided to take 5 teenagers to see a movie. Movies were always a good way to kill a few hours on a hot, summer day. The kids were typically happy at the movies. So I picked the longest movie on the planet. I would surely get 3 ½ hours of happy time if we went to The Titanic. It turns out, 3 ½ hours is way too long. To make matters worse, I had an “aide” with me, who had autism. Sure, she was high functioning, but she wasn’t the best person to help when chaos ensued. She had a “thing” about countries, and she had memorized every country and their flag, capitol, and main exports and such, and every time she saw a reference to a country she would scream out the name of the country. I don’t know if you remember, but there were a lot of immigrants on the Titanic. IRELAND! AMERICA! ENGLAND!

About halfway through the movie, the kids were getting restless. I saw one kid’s glasses fly across the screen, because another kid had an obsession about throwing glasses. I fumbled for them in the dark and found 148 old pieces of popcorn and 276 old jujubes as well. Gross. Then, another kid began to masturbate. After a fruitless attempt to tell him “that is for private time” I gave up. We got to the most dramatic point in the movie—[spoiler alert for those who lived under a rock in 1997] Jack is holding on to a piece of wreckage and Rose says, “I’ll never let go, Jack! I promise,” and as I am tearing up at the moment, and I look over to the aisle to see a kid taking his pants off and then running out of the theatre. I quickly grab the other kids and get everyone back in the van to go home.

I never got to see the ending of the movie. Do Rose and Jack end up together? I guess I will have to go see the 3D version to find out. And I will go alone with my box of Kleenex, thank you very much. I learned my lesson. I suppose the bigger lesson is that when you work with the most severe needs students early in your career, you have confidence that you can handle any kid that comes into your office after that. It also gives you empathy for all those special education teachers out there working with students with disabilities all day long. If I couldn't get 5 kids to watch a movie, I shudder to think if I had to teach them to read, write and do math. Here's to special education teachers!