What is love?
I'm specifically referring to romantic love. I thought I knew and then I met my wife and I realized I knew jack shit.
What I've discovered is that it is irrational, spontaneous, beautiful, baffling, funny, sexy, but also it is making tea, doing the dishes, a kind word, knowing she's home before I even hear her come through the door, or bringing me coffee while I stare at my screen in pursuit of my academic and professional goals.
She makes me think about flowers, leather, dark shadows, the scent of vanilla, taking long walks, music, art.
I thought I would never marry again, I thought I was done and was looking forward to returning to my formerly monkish lifestyle as an academic. I was wrong, very wrong.
I just started my new life as a married woman. Stay tuned...
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There are many aspects of graduate school that vex me. One is overly complicated assignments such as the one I am doing later today for a class entitled “Clinical Social Work: Practice With Adults”. It is mostly about learning the skill of Motivational Interviewing. It's aim is to encourage the individuals we work with in clinical settings to become an active participant in the change process by evoking their intrinsic motivations for change. Even in the face of ambivalence on their part.
Myself and another student will “interview” each other about a change we want to make for ourselves and to coax out the goal, their motivations, and to encourage their better angels if you will. My social work friends are probably cringing at that description. However, it is as accurate as any other I have found. This interview is to be 15 minutes long. Then we take 5 minutes of it, edit it, add voiceover, and turn that in. We also write assessments both of our performance and our partners. Sounds pretty straight forward.
Except that we have had scheduling (how that is possible during a pandemic I'm not sure, nonetheless) and technology issues. It is 40% of our grade. We are getting a bit stressed. No I am not going into the university to use the departments media lab to record this, there is a pandemic taking place outside in the real world.
Too many students have technology issues, or a lack of privacy because they are home, or in the case of several of my students last Spring Quarter, across the Pacific Ocean in Taiwan, Malaysia, and China, in very different time zones. Too many have inferior or outdated technology that make streaming media and video downloads and uploads a real problem. This also requires video editing and adding an audio track and subtitles. I am privileged to have a nice desktop computer and a tablet along with both wireless and an ethernet connection. During my previous Master's degree I got hands on learning experience from an instructor how to create video content for the classroom by creating a five minute film for my MA hooding ceremony. I've got it easy, and I am having issues...
For all the trouble I fail to see much usable knowledge gained here, or practical experience for that matter. In one hour of a therapy session with an individual I am working with, or shadowing my clinical supervisor I learn 10-20X more because there is context, randomness, real world actions and reactions. Not to mention my own therapist gives me a twice monthly master class in effective therapy techniques. This material screams in class practice, a fair amount, which is difficult at best via Zoom.
I get the point of the assignment as an instructor. I have built syllabuses and followed others while assisting with the class as a co-instructor. Get the students to “practice” and reflect on what did and did not work in a given situation using a bit of knowledge and/or a new technique. Classic pedagogy. I just do not feel for the time and hassle involved the payoff is sufficient to account for 40% of my grade.
Second guessing instructor choices is a hallowed practice among graduate students and we engage with it lustily. It is a normal part of being a grad school. I once heard the experience of being a graduate student described as being not quite an instructor, not quite a student. That's apt. We occupy both roles frequently. I'm sure there is a student or two among the 100+ I taught last Spring who second guessed my decisions (and I have the evaluations and some emails to prove it). I feel no ill will towards them. Criticism is part of the ecosystem at a competitive research university.
When I think about this issue of Motivational Interviewing and it's place within my overall clinical social work education I am reminded of something my field instructor told me, “modalities are brands”. Indeed they are. They are really big business. And while this obviously useful skill is something else to learn and add to the tool bag to bring to bear working for the people who come to me to for therapy or case management, I'm just not sure it justifies taking up ¾ of the oxygen of this one core class because of the lack of praxis as a learning tool, let alone an objective.
This and two other are the last core classes I have left for this degree. After this, nothing but electives I choose and advanced practicum work before graduation in eight months. Not that I am counting or anything.
Back to work...