Tribulations of a school psychologist

Abstract

For those of us school psychologists who work— who actually work—haphazardly in a convent school, a daycare center, and a public school in a housing estate, for example, the label educational psychologist feels a bit too grand. 

It feels just as inflated for those colleagues who spend their days driving back and forth to form the municipal team shared by three or four towns, each forty or fifty kilometers apart. We are another breed entirely; call us the B team, the ordinary ones, the ones nobody writes about. That is why the “educational” title is reserved for the PhDs, the ones who do something called educational psychology, which, if we are honest, usually has very little to do with the day-to-day work of a school psychologist.

Our story, like that of most of our peers, is hard. We left university two, three, maybe four years ago, and never looked back, not even to see how it was doing. For all we know, it may have died a quiet, natural death, and we would be none the wiser. We don’t browse "Psychological Abstracts", and a doctorate is not in our future. But when a small Spanish journal on the subject lands in our hands, we tear through it, eager to find out how other colleagues handle their daily practice and what kinds of experiences they have had.