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So, counselling school.
The good, first. I learnt so, so much this year. All the teachers are also practicing counsellors who've been in practice for at least a decade and have also taught for years and it really shows in their depth of knowledge and the way they do demonstrations in class. I feel incredibly lucky to have been taught by them, and I'm mostly looking forward to my classes for next year. The other students are also great, and we've all been very supportive of each other.
The ambivalent: The classes have also been difficult in ways that I didn't expect. I took a complex trauma class and expected to be triggered to hell and back, but it turns out that when your teacher is an experienced trauma therapist, they're really good at being able to talk about triggery topics in non-triggery ways. Instead, it was the regular counselling practice classes where we were doing short practice sessions with peers that really fucked me up, because material kept coming up that I wasn't expecting and hadn't prepared for. I'm also slightly dreading taking the compulsory group therapy class next year, because it has a reputation for being rather harrowing, while also looking forward to it because I expect it to be harrowing in a growth-oriented direction.
The bad: Oh boy. One of the lecturers is kind of awful. Lots of anecdotes that don't really connect to the material, wastes class time showing us Youtube videos and having us read random barely-related pop articles off the Internet, has weird grading criteria that literally no one else cares about. And unfortunately he's one of the core staff and teaches several of the core classes, and I'm not done with him yet. That's not the really bad part though. The really awful, horrible part? Is that the program might be about to get shut down. If it is, they're not actually allowed to bail on us completely - they're required by the government to have a plan to get us all graduated, assuming we decide to stick around. But it means that the program quality is going to go downhill. It already has in multiple ways, with lecturers deciding to cut their loads on the spur of the moment, the student support guy for our program abruptly quitting without notice, and a general narrowing of the range of electives available to us. If the program is going to be discontinued, there's no reason for any of those things to improve - why hire new staff if your student numbers are already unsustainable for keeping said staff on the payroll and will only be going down since no new students will be enrolling? And several of my peers I've spoken to are strongly considering leaving, which will be sad since part of what's been great about the program has been mixing with people from all different cultural and counselling backgrounds and being able to learn from each other.
The good, first. I learnt so, so much this year. All the teachers are also practicing counsellors who've been in practice for at least a decade and have also taught for years and it really shows in their depth of knowledge and the way they do demonstrations in class. I feel incredibly lucky to have been taught by them, and I'm mostly looking forward to my classes for next year. The other students are also great, and we've all been very supportive of each other.
The ambivalent: The classes have also been difficult in ways that I didn't expect. I took a complex trauma class and expected to be triggered to hell and back, but it turns out that when your teacher is an experienced trauma therapist, they're really good at being able to talk about triggery topics in non-triggery ways. Instead, it was the regular counselling practice classes where we were doing short practice sessions with peers that really fucked me up, because material kept coming up that I wasn't expecting and hadn't prepared for. I'm also slightly dreading taking the compulsory group therapy class next year, because it has a reputation for being rather harrowing, while also looking forward to it because I expect it to be harrowing in a growth-oriented direction.
The bad: Oh boy. One of the lecturers is kind of awful. Lots of anecdotes that don't really connect to the material, wastes class time showing us Youtube videos and having us read random barely-related pop articles off the Internet, has weird grading criteria that literally no one else cares about. And unfortunately he's one of the core staff and teaches several of the core classes, and I'm not done with him yet. That's not the really bad part though. The really awful, horrible part? Is that the program might be about to get shut down. If it is, they're not actually allowed to bail on us completely - they're required by the government to have a plan to get us all graduated, assuming we decide to stick around. But it means that the program quality is going to go downhill. It already has in multiple ways, with lecturers deciding to cut their loads on the spur of the moment, the student support guy for our program abruptly quitting without notice, and a general narrowing of the range of electives available to us. If the program is going to be discontinued, there's no reason for any of those things to improve - why hire new staff if your student numbers are already unsustainable for keeping said staff on the payroll and will only be going down since no new students will be enrolling? And several of my peers I've spoken to are strongly considering leaving, which will be sad since part of what's been great about the program has been mixing with people from all different cultural and counselling backgrounds and being able to learn from each other.
