Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm a psych student, so don't be surprised if I start answering most problems in this area of the guild forum. I'm giving my advancing skills practice. Remember, though, what I say is not from someone with a P.h.D., but from someone who is only a student. What I say may not work for you, but I'm going to give them my best replies.

If anyone has a question they'd rather ask in private, I'll also take PMs.

If anyone's curious, by the way, I'm focusing on three areas: childhood psych, adolescent psych, and relationship counseling. Yes, I'm going to get a degree as all three of them. I absolutely love psychology. heart


Edit: And yes, I do have a lot of my own problems. I usually won't post about them here because I want to work them out on my own and already know how to deal with them. I tend to be a bit more optimistic in my views, despite the ungodly amount of crap I put up with and have been through. I'm here to help.

Have you found yourself into a certain school of psychology, for instance, behaviorism? I assume you're predisposed to clinical psychology?

Sorry for my slow reply,

I've actually worked with autistic (and mildly challenged) children before in a teaching role. It was amazingly more difficult than teaching children of the same age level, but you eventually learn there are special knacks. Without any formal training, I came to the conclusion that any particular child could be reached, you just had to try a lot of different ways before it actually worked, sort of like guessing the combination on a lock, so maybe a little more work for you, but just as rewarding and maybe safer (unless you have a particular individual that suffers from fits of violence, which does happen occasionally).

Very nice! I'm mainly talking from my experience as a Cadet Teacher. I'm now in the Indiana Reading Corps. but that doesn't really allow me to deal with children who are extremely challenged, merely the ones that arn't catching on at a young age like they ought to. I prefer it because it's much easier lol, but if presented with a child who is an unrecognized or mainstreamed autistic I could manage, which is perhaps a good thing for what I'm doing right now. I will, in the summer, mainly work with adults getting their GED so not too much there for challenged persons.

I'm an Economics and History major and the local party leader of the CPUSA/YCL (Communist Party U.S.A and Youth Communist League) Cpusa.org and yclusa.org, so nothing to do with psychology and I've not gotten either of my degrees (going for a bach's in both) and later grad -school. I do intend to teacher college students though, but obviously, as a Cadet I could only teach (by law) persons younger than me, so I chose to work, first, with the "low end" 7th grade geography class for a semester, then I worked with our schools "Special Needs" geography/history (here we tandem teach our special needs kids the material they'd cover in 7th and 8th grade over 2 years rather than keeping it separate). There were only 2 autistics in the class I was assigned to, but I often came in during lunch to work with the other class (for 1/2 the class period) who had one. I then helped with summer school for "US History" which was teaching juniors and seniors. At which point I discovered I don't want to teach high school aged kids, and my experiences elsewhere showed me that I could work with younger kids, and I liked it, but I couldn't teach the way I wanted to.

I was thinking about becoming a psychologist there for a while though lol around my sophomore year, and Marxists are very much bound up with the more philosophical side of psychology. At one point, a Russian Marxist even made the statement "Psychology needs its own Das Kapital" So that helps a bit lol.