Six degrees of separation
Okay, this blog is not about the game "Six Degrees of Separation", it's about the separation between degrees and how it can really matter. I have my master's degree in social work (MSW). I don't currently work in a job where I routinely put my degree to work and some days I don't know if my degree even matters. But, not having an MSW definitely does matter. We are currently going through the foster parent training in Missouri, known as S.T.A.R.S. training. We are three weeks into the nine week training and so far I haven't learned much. The training is helter skelter. The case workers doing the training appear to dance in and out of the curriculum, picking up the pieces they feel like teaching and leaving lots of other pieces behind. They allude to information and indicate we'll come back to a topic, but then the issue gets dropped altogether by the time the class ends each week.
Tonight's topic was normal social/emotional/physical development and attachment. The trainer kept talking about "Reactive Attachment Disorder" and the reasons why most kids who come into foster care have "Reactive Attachment Disorder" and that foster parents have to learn to overcome "Reactive Attachment Disorder". I, with my MSW, know what Reactive Attachment Disorder is, but for the benefit of all the "regular" folks in the room I asked the trainer to describe what Reactive Attachment Disorder is. He promised that the answer fit in the later part of his presentation toward the end of class. In the final two or three minutes before we were dismissed he revisited Reactive Attachment Disorder so that he could answer my question. He answered it by reading the definition of Reactive Attachment Disorder that he printed off of Wikipedia while we were on a break. And he only read the summary of what causes the disorder (which we had already discussed in depth). He didn't read any of the symptoms (because they weren't listed on Wikipedia). As a class, we still have no idea what Reactive Attachment Disorder will actually look like.
I've never gone through the S.T.A.R.S. training but I'm 99.99% sure I could begin teaching it next week and do a better job of covering the material than our trainers are doing. They're nice people, but they just don't have the right degree. They probably graduated with bachelor's degrees in Sociology or Psychology or English Literature...and those degrees just aren't the same as what they would have learned in social work. They do the work of social workers, only they don't have the foundational knowledge to build upon. Our trainers have lots of stories and years of on-the-job training....but they don't have the training that the right degree would have offered them. Sometimes degrees do matter.
Tonight's topic was normal social/emotional/physical development and attachment. The trainer kept talking about "Reactive Attachment Disorder" and the reasons why most kids who come into foster care have "Reactive Attachment Disorder" and that foster parents have to learn to overcome "Reactive Attachment Disorder". I, with my MSW, know what Reactive Attachment Disorder is, but for the benefit of all the "regular" folks in the room I asked the trainer to describe what Reactive Attachment Disorder is. He promised that the answer fit in the later part of his presentation toward the end of class. In the final two or three minutes before we were dismissed he revisited Reactive Attachment Disorder so that he could answer my question. He answered it by reading the definition of Reactive Attachment Disorder that he printed off of Wikipedia while we were on a break. And he only read the summary of what causes the disorder (which we had already discussed in depth). He didn't read any of the symptoms (because they weren't listed on Wikipedia). As a class, we still have no idea what Reactive Attachment Disorder will actually look like.
I've never gone through the S.T.A.R.S. training but I'm 99.99% sure I could begin teaching it next week and do a better job of covering the material than our trainers are doing. They're nice people, but they just don't have the right degree. They probably graduated with bachelor's degrees in Sociology or Psychology or English Literature...and those degrees just aren't the same as what they would have learned in social work. They do the work of social workers, only they don't have the foundational knowledge to build upon. Our trainers have lots of stories and years of on-the-job training....but they don't have the training that the right degree would have offered them. Sometimes degrees do matter.
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