lieben und arbeiten

Ah, I just went to my interview for my field placement internship. Twice a week I will be working at a Head Start program, doing clinical therapy and case management with itty-bitty kiddies. Having little experience with younglings, I definitely will learn a lot. And quickly, I imagine. (How do you swing a kid on to your hips anyway?)

Maybe this a good time to relate my disaffection with the social welfare program. (Sparringly, though. Who's going to read this?) I've been torn and frustrated these past few weeks with a program that appears to throw theory at us first-year students, with little guidance on how to use it. I feel that I have had invaluable--but perhaps even too few--panel discussions and seminars of topics of import, like elderly abuse reporting and talks with mothers in drug rehab. But the information I'm getting in classes is all so vague and seemingly obvious. Should we consider clients' environment as a factor in possible psychosocial epidemiology? Duh! And yet the authors of our reading somehow found ways of repeating that same concept for pages and pages. All the redundant and dry writing that social workers seem to produce is also highly discouraging.

I've been telling myself "It'll get better" as a kind of mantra. And actually, all these negative thoughts are what I was feeling before field work offered new experiences. I really am liking the program. I think the first few weeks were rough, maybe even purposely so, but concrete discussions about interviewing techniques and the ethical responsibilities are so pertinent and necessary that I find myself truly thinking about how to incorporate what I am learning into practice. And I think the secret to the enourmous amout of reading we are assigned is...don't do all of it. Gasp! It's true. I think we are expected to get out of school what we put in. Uh, which I hope in my case will be more than I have put in so far. I'm so behind on reading!

As to "lieben und arbeiten," when Freud was asked what should normal people be able to do well, he replied with these two words, which in German mean "love and work." Now ain't that the truth? And being a social worker in training is making those two things more real for me. So live long, my friends, with much Lieb und Arbeit!