Wednesday Testing

So I pick up my gear from the office and head over to the school.  Some student in the common area outside the school tries to look in the file box I'm carrying (yes, I'm very high tech; I constantly look like I'm moving into a new office or have just been fired) and asks if he can help me carry the box into school.  At first I wonder if I look that old that I would be assumed to be enfeebled but then he reveals that he just wants to help me because he thinks it will earn him a ride on the school elevator.  Again, this leads me to wonder if I look so incapacitated that I would need to use the elevator to carry one box.

Once I'm in my office, I endure the torturous school announcements and then call a student to my office for testing.  I torture the poor child for about an hour and a half and then send them back to class.  I'm about half-way through the evaluation and plan to finish it up by next week at the latest.

Following this I contact a few parents to get those darn survey forms back and I actually have success in speaking to them.  I look at the time and determine that I have caused enough damage in this school for one day and head off to another school to finish up the testing with the student that I had to call DYFS about.

My fears that the student would turn and run away from me as soon as they see me turn out to be unfounded.  In fact it is just the opposite.  As soon as the kid sees me, they say, "For me" with an eagerness that I'm not used to.  While I'm walking to the room for the assessment, the student says, "I wish we could do this every day for like the next ten days."  And this is even after the kid attended an assembly that morning.  Boy, I feel special.

As an aside, if you ever want to get a boost to your self-esteem in this field, do a classroom visit to a kindergarten.  You'll feel like a rock star.

So I don't know what happened between the last time I saw the student and today.  When I try to find out if there were any visitors (aka state officials) at their home, the student seems completely oblivious.  The kid is also more hyperactive than an appropriate simile for someone being hyperactive (thanks again for the joke, David Thorne; for someone, this just makes me laugh).  I finish the evaluation and return the kid to class.

I then return to the office and start another psych report that I can't finish because I don't have surveys back.  So that means I now have approximately four psych reports in the hopper, none of which I can finish due to missing information.  I also get assigned two more psych evals.  Such is life.

Oops, I just remembered that I forgot to log in a risk assessment from a colleague.  Note to self.

The afternoon involves getting some stuff organized and calculating dates for re-eval planning meetings.  This also means playing around with MS Excel.  While I'm doing that a fellow school psychologist asks me if I can cover an initial referral conference for them tomorrow.  The manner in which they ask me makes me wonder how my coworkers are seeing me these days due to my personal difficulties, which also makes me wonder if I have an inaccurate view of myself during this time.

I'm thinking about asking my coworker about this tomorrow.