Mindful Dishwashing and Rainbows

I once was forced to go to this professional development for psychologists on “teaching mindfulness,” which is basically the idea that kids (and adults) benefit from being aware and present. I have to say, I was really hoping for the latest brain-based research on the mind-body connection, because I love me some data. Instead, it was hours of us practicing out own mindfulness. During the busiest time of the year, we were taken through a series of activities such as breathing like rainbows, with arms outstretched in a slooooooow arc, and mindful walking. That’s right. Mindful walking. We all had to walk super sloooooooow and be really aware of how our foot felt touching the ground and whatnot. Let me tell you, I was mindfully texting the whole time, because I had a to-do list a mile long.

I’m afraid mindfulness is not for me. I find yoga too slow (next pose! next pose!) and I quit Tae Kwon Do after the first month because I just wanted to kick in some things and Master Kang insisted on a slow process where you have to have patience and stuff. And I certainly couldn’t relate to the presenter when she said, “I am so mindful, that when I put down the dish soap, I really feel it. It’s amazing.”

I have channeled all of my energy into my life and work, and school psychology appears to be a good match for me. Every day is different, there are tons of deadlines, crises, and things that have to be done right away. I go! go! go! All day long. There is no time for rainbows and walking super slow, thank you very much.

Well dang it if sometimes, the things we are resistant to actually end up being just what we need.* The very thing I rolled my eyes at at the "professional development" became pretty useful last night when I was in traffic on the San Francisco Bay Bridge trying to get home, with 8 hojillion people. After an hour, I had made it exactly one half mile towards my home. Every time I inched forward, a car would cut me off and I’d be in the same friggin’ spot. Then, a small snail surpassed me (in my mind) and I found myself getting increasingly annoyed. There was only crappy music on, and NPR had a lame guest. Then, I generously let this guy in my lane, in an effort to pay it forward and whatnot, and there was no “thank you” wave. RUDE. But, instead of getting even more upset, I took a breath, and started trying the mindfulness crap. I started by generating reasons for his rudeness, mindfully.

1) Perhaps his wife is in labor and he is trying to get to the hospital and is so distracted by his joy and anticipation that he is going to be a dad that he failed to notice my generosity.

2) Perhaps he lost his peripheral vision in his left eye in the Gulf War and did not see that I was so generous to let him in. A clear war hero deserves to get home .4 seconds before I do.

This went on and on in my head, and then I found myself laughing. On a roll, I started thinking of all the positive things I could think of in that moment, like the fact that I am in this car in a commute because I have a job in a recession. I was suddenly also mindful of being in my warm, toasty, comfy car. I became aware that a fabulous song had just came on the radio.** My mood lifted. I started singing and dancing to myself, and when I hit my crescendo, I suddenly became mindful that the people in the cars around me were staring at my erm…performance… and they were smiling. A guy gave me a thumbs up and laughed, and a motorcycle dude gave me a fist pump of approval. Mindfulness worked.

But I’m still not going to be mindful of the dishwashing soap as I clean up after Thanksgiving dinner. Old habits die hard, what can I say?


*Example: When my best friend tried to get me to join Facebook, I rolled my eyes and thought, “Why would I need to join that?” I stand corrected, Kendra. I love Facebook now. Especially the lively discussions that have ensued on the blog fan page recently. I will be sure to give thanks tomorrow on Thanksgiving if you stop by and become a fan!

**It wasn’t Air Supply’s classic ballad, “Making Love out of Nothing At All” if that’s what you’re getting at.

Sneakery! Again!

It is Friday the 13th. And it marks the end of School Psychology Awareness Week, which I totally forgot was this week, just like last year, and the year before. Gah! Every year! But I suppose today is technically still part of the week, so here you go with a post about what I do all day.

And just to be clear, my job description is NOT, as a janitor described to a kid inquiring who I was: “She works with ‘dem crazy kids.” That will NOT be next year’s theme for School Psychologist Awareness Week. I certainly don’t want to see a poster of that. School Psychologists: We work with ‘dem crazy kids. Bad PR.

So, in the spirit of awareness, I give to you:

Top 10 Things I Do All Day as a School Psychologist
(In decending order of how much time I spend doing it)

10) Tracking down the yoots*, aka poking my head into classrooms and trying not to be disruptive while children yell, “Take me! I need therapy!” or “I a’int no f*ing special ed! No!!!”

9) Tracking down teachers to talk about the yoots, trying to get information from them while they are desperately trying to prepare for having 20-30 little friends come in for some more learning.

8) Tracking down administration to ask about a particular yoot/situation/political issue/bureaucratic hoop.

7) Tracking down parents to get information or give them feedback about their yoot (carefully using caller ID blocking so they answer)

6) Group counseling. Trying to promote positive social skills and not accidentally forming a gang.

5) Individual counseling. Topics include: “What were you thinking about when you drew this/said that/did that/brought that,” family problems, peer problems, learning problems, check-ins about traumatic situations, and my favorite: giving positive adult attention and conducting play therapy to process situations.

4) Testing or observing the yoots for every possible reason on Earth that they are having a hard time learning—social, emotional, behavioral, processing, intelligence, situational, inter-personal, historical—everything.

3) Writing reports about yoots that no one reads, but are really informative if you can get past the technical stuff.

2) Attending meetings about yoots to share results of testing in a way everyone can understand to develop interventions.

1) Lovin’ working with ‘dem crazy kids.

Happy School Psychologist Awareness Week!

If I were fancier, I would have some sort of animation that made little confetti fall down over this entry. Maybe next year…if I don’t forget.

* Yoots (noun). Slang for “youth” derived from obscure reference to the classic film, “My Cousin Vinny.” The two yoots were seen fleeing the scene.

"Strategery"

Many of my posts are about the glamorous side of being a school psych, the fun n’ games dealing with bureaucracy monsters*, and the general tomfoolery of working in public education. I thought it was high time I offered up something actually useful for those of you in the trenches along with me, who sit in intervention meetings and everyone turns to you for the good suggestion.

For those who read for the cute stories and/or have a morbid curiosity about 10 year olds who pack heat in their backpacks (true story), we’ll see you next post!

For the hard core intervention peeps who believe in having a huge arsenal of weapons of mass instruction,** I give you:

Strategies for Students with Reading Comprehension Problems

Here’s a little side lesson about roots and suffixes before we begin.

Dys = abnormal or difficult

Lexia = word

So "Dys-lexia" is a reading disability that affects students at the word-level of reading. These are the kids who struggled with phonics in elementary, can’t decode multi-syllabic words easily in middle school, and laugh in high school when you ask, “do you ever read for fun?” because it is so laborious to try and decode every single word you come across. Their reading fluency is impaired and they lose the meaning. I tell my yoots: reading is like riding a bicycle—if you go too slow, you fall off. These students "fall off" in terms of comprehension because they are spending all their mental energy on decoding the individual words.

But there are other kinds of reading disabilities. There are the kids who can decode, but haven’t a clue what they just read. It is not unlike when you “read” a whole page in a book and then realize you didn’t really read it. The eyes were moving across the page, and the words were being "read," but there wasn’t any comprehension. These kids are typically really smart and they can articulate thoughts in class, but have a surprisingly low level of understanding what they read, given their intellect.

These kids (and all kids, really) benefit from a number of strategies for reading comprehension. Some of the strategies I pulled together from watching great teachers, some are "classics", and a few are from the New Teacher Project. Enjoy!

Rapid Reviewing
• Rapid reviewing improves both reading comprehension and memory
• After reading a section of text, students write down everything they can remember without looking back at the text.
• If they can’t remember at least 80% of the key points, they have read too much material before reviewing.
• They then reread the material and repeat the process until the key points can be recalled

Metacognitive Journals
• Students analyze their own thought processes in a journal, in which a page is divided into two columns separately titled: “What I learned,” and “How I came to learn it.” They record their thinking during and/or after reading
• The format can be modified with other prompts as well, such as “Passage/Text,” “What I think it means” and “Thoughts/Questions/Connections I had to the text”

The Insert Process/Marking the text
• Readers remain active while using symbols to represent their thoughts as they read, such as, “!” when you agree with the author, “?” for questions and “*” for new learning. Students can use sticky notes (Post-it notes) if they are unable to mark in the text.
• These markings should be revisited for further reflection/clarification after reading.
• A chart of possible symbols can be downloaded at http://www.readwritethink.org/lesson_images/lesson230/insert.pdf.

Questioning the Text/Author
• As readers notice the breakdown of meaning, they come up with questions to ask the author about the book for clarification and understanding.
• The questions are intended to help the reader better understand any confusing areas, and assists the reader in targeting appropriate strategies to repair meaning.

Graphic Organizers
• Graphic organizers are visual representations that show how key concepts are related and/or organized. They are important because they help readers visualize connections between ideas within the text and organize the new information.
• The visual representation and organization of information helps students build their text base and make sense of the text.
• Examples include problem/solution, statement/ support, sequence, cause/effect, compare/contrast, and argument.

KWL
In this strategy, students use a graphic organizer to establish:
• K- what they already know about the topic;
• W- what they want to know or learn about the topic;
• L- what they have learned after reading.

There are two popular modifications of the KWL teaching strategy:
• KWWL- what I know, what I want to know, where can I find the information, what I have learned
• KWLH- what I know, what I want to know, what I have learned, how I learned it

SQ3R
This strategy is an acronym for the five steps that comprise the strategy:
• S-Survey - students survey the reading material to develop an idea of its contents.
• Q-Question - students formulate questions about the text. These questions become their purpose for reading.
• R-Read - students read the text to answer the questions they formulated.
• R-Recite - students either jot notes about the text or discuss with a partner.
• R-Review - students review what they have learned by discussing their process with a partner and reviewing their notes. Finally, they answer their questions

Connection Chart
• This strategy calls for students to keep a running record of connections made as they read. Students are given a chart with three columns labeled for each of the different types of connection (text-to-self, text-to-world, text-to-text). As students read, they record their connections on sticky notes and place them in the appropriate column.

Using Social Networking for Character Analysis
• Students create a mock “Facebook” or “Myspace” page for a character in a book, a historical figure, or a current political figure.
• Students “characters” can interact, depending on if they would have been “friends” or not.
• This technique allows students to put themselves in the shoes of the characters and understand the underlying motivations, behaviors, etc.


*e.g. I called HR nine times yesterday to find out a simple thing. Nine times. No answer. Really? No voicemail there either? I guess they like the “While You Were Out” 1980s pink notes as much as my schools do. Which would be fine if they answered the phone to take a message. I’m gonna have to drive to the ‘hood tomorrow to ask a question, I just know it.

**Trenches and weapon metaphors in an education post? I guess it's my feeble attempt to make this post relevant to Veteran’s Day.

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