Emily and Dr. Haskins:
Classroom Expectations, Pragmatics, and Clinical Acumen

by
Susan Behrens and Linda Carozza
Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders
Marymount Manhattan College

Part I—Disappointment

Emily is an undergraduate at a small liberal arts college. She is very verbal and loves books. As a freshman, she signed up as a Comparative Literature major. However, for Emily, college has not come easy, having spent many years of her middle and high school education in special education programs. Wanting to “give back,” she has started taking courses in the Clinical Psychology concentration. With a double major, she can pursue the study of language and literature, her true love, and work towards a clinical career where she can help others.

Emily has never labeled her condition, but some of her professors guess that Emily is on the autistic spectrum, probably living with Asperger’s Syndrome, a syndrome on the high-functioning end of the spectrum that includes a deficit in pragmatic skills. Emily demonstrates severe difficulty reading the little cues that so many of us use to navigate social relationships. In addition, she is hyper-verbal, verbose both in her writing and speaking, another aspect of the syndrome.

Hard-working, intelligent, and highly motivated, Emily aces all her classes. On tests, she is repetitive and wordy, but gets the answers right. In class, she is a bit too enthusiastic and dominating in conversations for some teachers, but they learn to either put her off, let her talk, or discuss the issues with her in office hours. Her professors never as a group discuss Emily or share their experiences about her. Each professor handles her in his or her own way. Some display more patience than others, but none ever directly tells Emily that she is disruptive in class. Nor does anyone suggest writing help for her verbose style and overly long papers.

Emily has been assigned an advisor, with whom she has a good relationship. Her advisor is a professor whose specialty is experimental design and who is not directly involved in the senior year clinical requirement for students. All in all, to the advisor, Emily is an unusual but excellent student.

Now Emily is in her final year of the Clinical Psych program and she must complete the senior practicum. Her book, test, paper, and classroom skills do not prepare her for face-to-face encounters with clients at the school’s clinic. She completes all of her coursework and paperwork, but her people-skills and ability to adapt her plans on the spot to suit the client are very weak. Her clinical supervisor, Dr. Haskins, assigns Emily her lowest grade in a college course (she earns a D). Her hopes are shattered as her dreams of graduate school and a clinical career disappear. Emily can repeat the course, but then she would have to wait another year and explain to her family why she is not graduating as expected.

Her other option is to pursue graduate study in Comp Lit, but she feels she has failed by not training towards a position that would allow her to “give back” to the community. She is distraught. Graduation day, the day she longed for, is a let-down.

Questions

1. Discuss the strategies Emily’s teachers used to deal with her in the classroom. Did they help or hinder Emily?
2. What are Emily’s options at the moment?

Date Posted: 02/06/07 nas

Image Credit: Licensed illustration ©iStockphoto.com/Kristian Stensoenes.

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