Show Me The Way
Unlike many of you I am fortunate in having had the rare opportunity to see a guidance counselor's job from both a student's and a teacher's perspective. This is why, in my extremely limited, yet telling experiences, I can conclude this: guidance counselors do not do a hell of a lot of guiding.
For the first part of my argument, let's take a walk down memory lane. As a child, I don't really remember my guidance counselor all that well. I suppose this is a good thing because when you're in elementary school and already need guidance that can be a very good foreshadowing of psychotherapy bills for years to come.
But when I went to high school, I distinctly remember my guidance counselor. It was like the CIA of guidance counseling, which, incidentally I believe is the next spinoff in the popular CSI series. This is because at this level your connection to the guidance counselor is supposed to become more interactive. They allegedly take an active role in guiding and shaping your future while you should feel comfortable in the knowledge of them doing so.
Since I went to a fairly large high school there were a team of crack counselors. The way you were assigned to a counselor was simple and orderly: it all went by the first letter of your last name. God knows how many people each guidance counselor actually saw. Basically the system was not all the different from waiting in line for your cold cuts at the deli. You simply waited for your number to be called and asked kindly that your college recommendations be thinly sliced.
In a way I suppose this indirectly prepared you for the college experience considering in a college of thousands if not hundred thousands you are bound to just be a number to admissions. There's no two ways around it. Eventually everyone becomes a statistic.
Which brings me to my limited experience with said counselor. To give this experience richness I have to tell the backstory of the day I first took the PSAT's. I distinctly remember sitting in that classroom, that Saturday morning. I remember hearing the sounds of laughter from the kids were done and released early. I also remember having some hysterical laughter of my own as I attempted to answer questions on math I had no business being near.
So when my results came back and the guidance counselor called me in, she was concerned. Not for me, per se, but for the numbers the number known as me had generated. Apparently I had an extremely skewed test with results somewhere in the 700's, nearly all of it in verbal portion.
Now these results were not surprising to me. They told me what I already knew; I sucked at high school math. But since my guidance counselor didn't know me, she just figured I was sleepwalking through half of the test. Turns out she was only half right. I mean it wasn't without giving it the old college try, no pun intended.
The breakdown in communication was simple. The tests told her what she needed to know. But the thing was, I already knew. So cutting out the middle man would have worked great in this scenario. But taking the PSAT's and eventually the SAT's were a high school rite of passage, regardless of it's inaccurate measure of success that I won't elaborate upon here.
Long story short, eventually I did make it in to college, a four year college thank you very much, despite my guidance counselor's guiding me to do otherwise. She even conveniently "lost" a few of my applications because she saw me as a two year transfer, nothing more, nothing less. It didn't matter that my grades were solid and that my recommendations were consistent. One piece of paper said otherwise and that my friends, is the downfall of the guidance system.
Fast forward ten years later and now I have the "privilege" of working alongside actual guidance counselors. I can call them colleagues. They can call me Al. In my school there are two guidance counselors and one social worker. Just like Meatloaf once said, 2 out of 3 of them ain't bad. Guess which one I'm stuck working with?
Yes, the guidance counselor assigned to the third and fourth grades is, how do I put this delicately...a complete imbecile. And unfortunately, unlike when I was a child, in this particular elementary school, good guidance is desperately needed. Many of these children come from broken homes or homes where the parents themselves could benefit from a bit of guidance. Calls to Deyfuss for rumored abuse or neglect are par for the course and as a result, the guidance department in my school is almost desensitizied to doing anything about it.
But elementary school kids, God bless 'em, still are naive enough to believe that the system is working with them, not against them. So whenever they are having a problem at home or a problem with a bully in school they ask to go to guidance because after all, that is what a child in crisis should be able to do.
As if that wasn't enough, guidance also comes to us once a month. Think of it as the hot dog cart of helping. This past month the guidance counselor did a lesson on emotions and tolerance. She talked a bit and then put on an old school eighties video on the same topic. Only the message was decidedly lost on these children. I know this because ironically there was fighting going on while the guidance counselor was in the room. Guidance counselors, by the way, have to had some amount of teaching experience before "crossing over". You'd like to believe the most effective teachers go into guidance, but the evidence says otherwise. This woman had no idea how to manage the conflicts that were going on and instead the classroom turned into Jerry Springer for the elementary set.
Seeing is believing so unfortunately, I remain skeptical, yet open minded about the effectiveness of the educational guidiance department.
So, if there's anyone out there who can lead me in the right direction, you know where to find me.
For the first part of my argument, let's take a walk down memory lane. As a child, I don't really remember my guidance counselor all that well. I suppose this is a good thing because when you're in elementary school and already need guidance that can be a very good foreshadowing of psychotherapy bills for years to come.
But when I went to high school, I distinctly remember my guidance counselor. It was like the CIA of guidance counseling, which, incidentally I believe is the next spinoff in the popular CSI series. This is because at this level your connection to the guidance counselor is supposed to become more interactive. They allegedly take an active role in guiding and shaping your future while you should feel comfortable in the knowledge of them doing so.
Since I went to a fairly large high school there were a team of crack counselors. The way you were assigned to a counselor was simple and orderly: it all went by the first letter of your last name. God knows how many people each guidance counselor actually saw. Basically the system was not all the different from waiting in line for your cold cuts at the deli. You simply waited for your number to be called and asked kindly that your college recommendations be thinly sliced.
In a way I suppose this indirectly prepared you for the college experience considering in a college of thousands if not hundred thousands you are bound to just be a number to admissions. There's no two ways around it. Eventually everyone becomes a statistic.
Which brings me to my limited experience with said counselor. To give this experience richness I have to tell the backstory of the day I first took the PSAT's. I distinctly remember sitting in that classroom, that Saturday morning. I remember hearing the sounds of laughter from the kids were done and released early. I also remember having some hysterical laughter of my own as I attempted to answer questions on math I had no business being near.
So when my results came back and the guidance counselor called me in, she was concerned. Not for me, per se, but for the numbers the number known as me had generated. Apparently I had an extremely skewed test with results somewhere in the 700's, nearly all of it in verbal portion.
Now these results were not surprising to me. They told me what I already knew; I sucked at high school math. But since my guidance counselor didn't know me, she just figured I was sleepwalking through half of the test. Turns out she was only half right. I mean it wasn't without giving it the old college try, no pun intended.
The breakdown in communication was simple. The tests told her what she needed to know. But the thing was, I already knew. So cutting out the middle man would have worked great in this scenario. But taking the PSAT's and eventually the SAT's were a high school rite of passage, regardless of it's inaccurate measure of success that I won't elaborate upon here.
Long story short, eventually I did make it in to college, a four year college thank you very much, despite my guidance counselor's guiding me to do otherwise. She even conveniently "lost" a few of my applications because she saw me as a two year transfer, nothing more, nothing less. It didn't matter that my grades were solid and that my recommendations were consistent. One piece of paper said otherwise and that my friends, is the downfall of the guidance system.
Fast forward ten years later and now I have the "privilege" of working alongside actual guidance counselors. I can call them colleagues. They can call me Al. In my school there are two guidance counselors and one social worker. Just like Meatloaf once said, 2 out of 3 of them ain't bad. Guess which one I'm stuck working with?
Yes, the guidance counselor assigned to the third and fourth grades is, how do I put this delicately...a complete imbecile. And unfortunately, unlike when I was a child, in this particular elementary school, good guidance is desperately needed. Many of these children come from broken homes or homes where the parents themselves could benefit from a bit of guidance. Calls to Deyfuss for rumored abuse or neglect are par for the course and as a result, the guidance department in my school is almost desensitizied to doing anything about it.
But elementary school kids, God bless 'em, still are naive enough to believe that the system is working with them, not against them. So whenever they are having a problem at home or a problem with a bully in school they ask to go to guidance because after all, that is what a child in crisis should be able to do.
As if that wasn't enough, guidance also comes to us once a month. Think of it as the hot dog cart of helping. This past month the guidance counselor did a lesson on emotions and tolerance. She talked a bit and then put on an old school eighties video on the same topic. Only the message was decidedly lost on these children. I know this because ironically there was fighting going on while the guidance counselor was in the room. Guidance counselors, by the way, have to had some amount of teaching experience before "crossing over". You'd like to believe the most effective teachers go into guidance, but the evidence says otherwise. This woman had no idea how to manage the conflicts that were going on and instead the classroom turned into Jerry Springer for the elementary set.
Seeing is believing so unfortunately, I remain skeptical, yet open minded about the effectiveness of the educational guidiance department.
So, if there's anyone out there who can lead me in the right direction, you know where to find me.
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