Second Semester Commences

First off, so sorry for the recent lack of entries. I didn't feel much a reason to update over winter break though, since I was home for most of it and not doing much exciting. Plus I got to see most of you during that time anyway!

Now that second semester is in full swing, I thought it was time to update. This is going to be fairly brief, as I'm getting ready to head to bed soon (yes, it's 9:00... I had a long day!) But hopefully I'll update again in the next couple of days.

I'm taking four classes again this semester, plus my field seminar. Field seminar, however, is a joke because we only meet every other week for 45 minutes. We're supposed to discuss what's going on in our field placements, etc., but that amount of time gives us little opportunity to get much accomplished. When I was completing my BSW at UW-Madison, our field seminars met every single week for 2 hours, and we were really able to process and expand upon what we were learning in our field placements. I was pretty annoyed when I discovered how it works here at the U. It ends up just feeling like a waste of time.

However, my four "real" classes are all going quite well. I'm much more satisfied than I was last semester, which is great. My first class of the week is on Wednesday evenings from 5:00-7:00. That class is called "Working with Immigrant Populations." The thing that I really enjoy about this class so far is that almost every week we have a guest speaker for the first half of class. Last week it was a man that worked with refugees at a resettlement agency. He talked all about the resettlement process and what refugees have to go through prior to and after coming to the U.S. I feel like in a place such as the Twin Cities, home to so many immigrant and refugee populations, a class like this is necessary for any social worker.

Thursday I have class from 8:30-11:30 and 1:55-4:55. The first class of the day is "Interventions with Families." That class is basically about teaching us how to do family therapy, which is quite useful. We'll be learning various different models of family therapy and then practicing them intensively in role play situations. I really like the instructor, Judy Hoy. She's a community faculty member and has her own practice. She's been doing family therapy for years and years, and just has a wealth of stories to share.

The second class of the day is my policy class, which was a requirement. There were a couple of policy classes to choose from (health & mental health policy, global policy, etc.), and I chose family and child welfare policy. I chose this first of all because my focus is in the area of children and families, and also because Mira took the class last year with the same instructor and highly recommended it. The instructor, Tammy Kincaid, worked for years and years in the area of child welfare and is now the director of human services in Pierce County, Wisconsin (just across the border). She's extremely knowledgeable about policy.

My last class of the week is on Fridays from 11:45-1:40 and is entitled "Mood Disorders: New Directions in Clinical Care." It obviously focuses on mood disorders, including depression and bipolar disorder. I thought it would be a very valuable class to take since so many people suffer from mood disorders, and since bipolar disorder is "the ADHD of the new millennium", with ridiculous numbers of very young children being given the diagnosis and being put on dangerous atypical antipsychotic medications that have not been tested in children. The class will be looking at models of assessment and intervention for clients with mood disorders. We'll be learning about cognitive-behavioral therapy, family therapy and pharmacological treatments. We'll also learn about cultural, class, race, gender, age differences in treating and identifying mood disorders. Again, I really like the instructor for the course, Mark Meier. He's another community faculty. He's a licensed clinical social worker as well as the CEO of Creative Workplace Solutions, a consulting firm dedicated to raising awareness about depression.

So that's a quick summary of my course load for the semester. In the very near future (I would say tomorrow, but I don't want to make any promises) I will update with some info about what I'm doing at Wellstone for the second half of the year.

Love to all!

SEMESTER ONE: FINISHED!

Just about exactly two hours ago I e-mailed my final paper for Risk & Resilience to my professor, and I just now printed off my final paper for Children & Adolescents that I will be dropping off at the School of Social Work tomorrow. This makes me officially finished with my first semester of graduate school!

Tomorrow, after going to turn in my paper, I will be spending the day doing absolutely NOTHING ... Well, I will be packing for vacation and doing some laundry. But other than that, I will be relaxing and thinking about all of the things that I don't have to be doing!! It feels good to know that I have an entire month now where I will have no school work to think about.

Thanks everyone for your love and support in this first challenging semester!! Can't wait to see most of you over this coming holiday season.

Done with class!

Today was my last class of the semester!!! I spent all day working on my final paper for my Children & Adolescents class, and am nearly finished. Then I just have to finish my paper for Risk & Resilience and I'll be all DONE!!

Last day

It's a week of lasts. Today was the last day of my favorite class, Adv. Practice with Children & Adolescents, taught by the incredible Anne Gearity. It truly was a sad morning, and I wish that the class could continue for another semester at least. I learned so much in that class, about child development, about children's mental health, about clinical social work... I will remember her class for the rest of my career I'm sure.

Tonight is my last tutoring session with D'Angelo until after the New Year. Tomorrow is my last day at Wellstone until after the New Year. I'll be going in on Tuesday for a meeting, but tomorrow will be my last real day for a while. The next day will be my last Saturday class (hopefully forever!), and my last time watching Paxton for a couple of weeks. Monday will be my last day of classes for the semester. The semester is really wrapping up, now if only my last two exams would write themselves!

Group presentation

Last night in my diversity class my group did our presentation. This is the presentation concerning our fictitious social service agency, where we had to do two "staff meetings" or in-services. I feel confident saying that we totally rocked it! Our instructor seemed very pleased and said that we did a very good job and were able to cover a lot of subtle things that he hadn't expected us to mention.

Now all I have left for that class is our group paper, due next Monday (my last day of class for the semester). I've been sort of designated as the "group leader" just because I've taken charge of a lot of things. Rather than assign me a part of the paper, I've instead been given the task of editing it and making sure all the citations are correct, etc. I'm a little concerned because it's going to be much longer than 20 pages and I'm going to have to edit it down. However, I'm not going to worry too much about length because he gave us a list of about 24 bullet points that he wanted covered in the paper. So the way I figure it, he's asking for it!

O Christmas Tree

When I got back from my Thanksgiving vacation, Mira and Mel surprised me with a Christmas tree! They had purchased it from the YMCA while I was gone. It's an adorable little tree that we have sitting on a table right by our front windows. Today I braved the Christmas shoppers at Target and got some decorations for it. We couldn't put anything breakable on it, or anything that looks like a cat toy. So I got white and silver bows and blue and silver glittery snowflakes. We already had white and blue lights on it, so we seem to have a white/silver/blue theme going on. It looks really pretty and adds a little bit of Christmas spirit to our house! It's bigger than it looks in the photo, it's probably about four feet tall and on the table it stands taller than me.

Update

Well, it's been quite a while since I've posted anything in here. It's been a combination of things -- busy with school and internship and also trying to figure out what exactly is appropriate for me to write about. I've struggled over how much I can share with you all on here, as the issue of confidentiality is always at the forefront of my mind. If I were working somewhere such as the county or a large non-profit, I could easily share stories about cases just by changing names and some details. However, since I work at a school where there are a limited number of kids that I am working with, I feel uncomfortable sharing stories. If someone from Wellstone happened to come across this blog, they could probably identify who I was talking about, even with names changed. So I've decided that I can share some more general information about what I do, including stories about positive interactions. But it wouldn't be ethical for me to divulge any sensitive information. That somewhat limits what I can share, but there are plenty of other things going on in my life that I can talk about. So I will try to update a bit more frequently :)

The first thing that I would like to tell you about is the results of the Washburn toy drive. A little bit ago I posted a letter from Mira that was asking for donations. Each year the Washburn Center for Children, where Mira works, sponsors a toy drive for the case management kids. This year, as anyone who read her plea knows, they had come up short in funding. They were only going to be able to purchase toys for about half of the kids, which left the case managers in the tough position of having to decide which of their clients should get toys. Since most of these families are low-income and really struggling, sometimes these toys are all that the children will be getting for the holidays. So Mira and all of the other case managers went out to try to collect donations. I just spoke with Mira today and learned that over the past couple of weeks they were able to raise over $3000 through both corporate and private donations. This was enough to cover not only all of the case management kids, but also EVERY single child that Washburn serves!! In such a challenging year for social services, this is truly a happy story that I am thrilled to be able to share.

In other news, I have one week left of classes and then it is finals week. I don't have any final exams, just a number of final papers due. I am all finished with my Program Evaluation final because my wonderful professor utilized an "installment plan", where we turned in drafts of the final paper over the semester. Therefore, I've been working on it all semester and revising after each draft was returned. Another final that is nearly complete is the one for my diversity class, which has been a semester-long headache. The final is a group presentation and 20-page paper involving the creation of a fictitious multicultural social service agency. Each group had to select a specific culture that we planned to develop services for. We first had to write a 12-page community mapping paper for that culture, which identified the various resources available to that culture, along with demographic information and cultural strengths, weaknesses and barriers to service. Then we had to prepare a 30 minute presentation which involves two simulations of a staff meeting where we are presenting information about culturally responsive service delivery for that culture, along with identifying a real-life community organization that we plan to collaborate with. The 20 page paper describes our made-up organization. My group chose to do the Somali culture, which most of you know is a huge population in the Twin Cities. I have learned a lot, but it's been a ton of work. Luckily we are nearly done. Our group presents on Monday and the final paper is due on the 14th. We have been utilizing the wonderful tool of Google Documents, which is basically like Microsoft Word except it is online and a group of people can have access to it. We can all go in on our own and add to the paper. It's worked out quite well.

My last two final papers are extremely similar. They both involve doing a client assessment and creating a case plan. One of them is a bit more involved, as it requires me to do a literature review on one of the client's issues, along with creating a genogram (sort of like a family tree) of the client and a whole bunch of other things. The other one is more like an actual assessment, where I go through the case history, presenting issues, overall functioning, etc. Then I have to do a DSM-IV diagnosis of the client and create a case plan. I've already gotten a good start on the more involved one. I still have to do the literature review, which means reading over a whole bunch of journal articles that I've collected. I plan to review the literature on how relational trauma affects a child's attachment. Relational trauma pretty much refers to some type of trauma in the child's important relationships. In the case of my client, the relational trauma involves parental neglect, substance abuse and mental illness. Typically relational trauma results in an insecure parent-child attachment, where the child is unable to learn important skills from the parent, such as self-regulation. They child also develops a poor inner-working model (IWM). We all develop an IWM throughout our life, that says what we think about ourselves and our relationships with other people. A child with a poor IWM might think of himself as being unlovable or not having value and probably doesn't trust other people or think that relationships will be positive.

This reminds me that I never wrote anything about attachment, which I said way back that I was going to do. Attachment theory is huge in children's mental health, and is something that I will probably refer to a lot. I'll make sure to get something written about it sometime soon.

In the meantime, I hope everyone is doing well and I'm looking forward to getting home again in just a couple of weeks!!