The Highest Compliment (An Aside)

I guess with two posts in one day I'm just making up for lost time. If I count all the days that I missed since February, it looks like I owe about 70 to 80 posts. But I know that isn't going to happen.

So this is just a random thing. Two short stories from the lost time.

While others in my profession may think differently, I don't think that what we do as far as creating a psychological picture of a person is particularly amazing or surprising. While we may spit out numbers from cognitive assessments that mostly don't mean much to the parents or students, what we tell them about how their child functions really isn't something that surprises most parents. If you live with a person their entire life, you get a pretty good idea of how they function.

I think the amazing part comes from being able to generate that picture from only seeing the student for two or two and a half hours.

The highest compliment that I have received from a parent after they have received my report or had me go over it with them has been "that sounds exactly like my child."

Now another story. I had a particularly difficult and delicate case for the past year and a half. It was the end of the school year and I had a second IEP meeting with the parents to hammer down the student's schedule for the next school year. During the meeting, one parent begins to talk about one subject area where they felt the services that were provided were subpar and a disappointment. The parent went on for a few minutes and then stopped and looked expectantly at me, awaiting my response.

Now I'll skip to the next day in order to get to the punchline. I'm in my office and one of my coworkers who was also at that meeting comes in to talk to me about a different subject. Before my coworker leaves, she says that she just had to tell me about the stroke of genius that I had during the meeting. That when I said the thing that I did, she had wanted to hug me right there in the meeting because it had just completely shut the parent down and ended the argument that the parent was looking for.

So what did I say? I said, to the parent, "I don't have a response for that." This wasn't a stroke of genius. I really didn't have a response. From my point of view, I remember a long pause and my thoughts were along the lines of "what am I going to say, what am I going to say, oh crap, everyone here is going to think I'm a complete loser and incompetent. This is where they found out how incompetent I am..."

So it was not a stroke of genius. I just couldn't think of anything to say.