My First Real Job

In 1966 I entered graduate school at the Institute of Child Development at the University of Minnesota as a student in the Clinical Child Psychology program. This program was primarily test oriented and this did not seem right to me.  I was less interested in how a child was performing or acting and more interested in why. One event in particular sealed my fate in this program.

I was asked to go to a school in Minneapolis to administer a Wechsler Intelligence test.  I arrived at the school and found most of the students were black and poor.  The teacher involved told me the child I was to test had scored below normal on the intelligence tests administered by the school but that she thought the girl was more intelligent than the scores indicated.  

I sat down with Felicia and began to ask her the questions on the exam.  One of the cardinal rules of this sort of testing is that you don’t ask a child why she answered as she did, you just record the answer.  Some questions have general answers that give you full marks.  If you offer a specific answer, you lose points. So when I asked “Where do you get groceries?” and she answered, “Albertsons,” she lost a point.  I couldn’t help myself.  I broke the rule.

“Why Albertson’s?”

“That’s where they take the food stamps.”

Poverty had just lost this girl IQ points.

Then when I showed her a picture of a coat, she identified it as a sweater.  More lost IQ points.  Again, I broke the rule.  We were in the beginning of a Minnesota winter and this little girl was wearing a tattered sweater.  So I asked, “Do you have a coat?”

“No,” she replied looking down.  

When I tallied up the points she indeed had an IQ below normal. When I told the teacher, she said, “I guess I was wrong.”  She put more faith in the test than her own judgement.  Discrimination and poverty had consigned this girl to a limited future and I really wanted no part of this.  

As much as I wanted to work with children, I did not want to do it this way.  I drove back to the Institute and found Harold Stevenson, the chair of the department, and told him I wanted to change programs from Child Clinical to Child Development, a research based program, a program focused on “Why?” Fortunately, there was another student who wanted to move in the other direction so we swapped fellowships and I became a student of developmental psychology and he became a student in the clinical program.  We also became good friends.  

I am particularly thankful to Harold because without his prodding, I would never have heard many of the stories I am recounting here .  At the end of four years of graduate school and after 10 years of university studies I was sick of it all.  I told him I would do my research and finish my Ph.D. after I left Minnesota.  He reached into his drawer and pulled out a sheet with the names of every one of the students who had left without finishing. Next to those who did finish later was a check.  It was a paltry number.  

“But I don’t have time,” I said.

He said, “There are two kinds of theses.  There is the Magnum Opus, a masterpiece of research and a real contribution to the field.  Then there is the kind you are going to do.”  I will ever be grateful for that. That degree opened many doors for me and allowed me the privilege of being a part of so many lives and to have had such rich and instructive experiences.

As I recount the stories I am writing here I feel such gratitude to the students, clients, teachers and children who have shared their lives with me in such a rich manner and to all the people who said to me, “You have got to write these stories down.”  The first time this happened was in 1970.  I had returned to Minneapolis to take my final Ph.D. orals. We never even talked about the thesis. They just asked to hear more stories about the wild kids at the treatment center where I was serving as treatment director.  Harold, a prolific writer himself said, “You have got to get these stories recorded."  That same year my sister-in-law, Melba Riley told me the same thing on several occasions.  If two people from such different backgrounds found my stories interesting and funny, I thought they must be worth writing down.  So here I am all these years later finally getting it together.    

As my graduate school days came to an end, I began to receive inquiries from a number of prestigious universities in the United States, Canada and Europe.  In those heady days of unfettered expansion, graduation from a first class program in child development ensured numerous offers from departments desperate for qualified people.  I had over a dozen offers of employment, but I wanted to work with children as well as teach at a university. Unfortunately, by switching from clinical to developmental psychology, I had eliminated my chances of achieving certification in most states.

Through a series of coincidences, word about my search reached a psychiatrist in Victoria, B.C., Canada who invited me to visit him at the Pacific Centre for Human Development, a residential school for "emotionally disturbed” children. He offered me a job as treatment director and put me in contact with the chair of the University of Victoria Psychology Department who was delighted to have someone from the Minnesota Institute of Child Development in his department as a part-time instructor.  I took the jobs, flew home to finish my degree, and in the fall of 1970 my wife, my two-year-old son and I emigrated to Canada with plans to stay for two years, gather some experience and then return to California.

What I found when I arrived at the Centre was shocking.  The kids were running the place and the staff was barely surviving in an environment of fear and chaos. Bribery and physical force were the two main methods of control.  I wanted to establish a very tight program of behavior modification with strong incentives for academic success and reasonable conduct.  The staff were very resistant and undermining of this program and something drastic had to happen. So one morning I came in and I told the staff, “I am going to demonstrate that this program will work.  I want you to all take the day off and come back at three.”  

They were shocked and I could tell they were expecting to find the building burned down and me dead when they did return.  But I had a devious plan that had nothing to do with Behavior Modification.  After they left I found the two most violent and powerful kids in the school and offered them a deal.  I pulled out two twenty dollar bills and said, “If there are no incidents at the school today, each of you will get one of these at three o’clock.  The kids can do anything they want but there can be no destruction or violence and you can’t tell anyone about this.” 

They agreed and we had a peaceful day.  No other child at that facility would dare to challenge these two.  When the teachers arrived they were stunned to find a school functioning quite well with no violence or destruction.  They bought in and we began a behavior modification program immediately.

It took about six months, but the place began to run smoothly.  It also became evident to me that, while we could affect major change in some children, we were sending them back into the same environment which had produced their behavior in the first place.  I initiated a parent training program and found that education and some introspection helped many of them to become adequate, if not perfect, parents.  I will never forget the gratitude of some of the parents when they were finally able to take their children home.  It was working with the staff and parents that led me to the conclusion that I liked teaching adults as much as working with children.  

After two years at the Centre I was asked to be the Canadian representative at the First International Conference on Behavior Modification in Minneapolis.  In preparation, I distilled all the data we had collected over the previous two years and wrote it up in a report which was eventually published as a chapter in a book summarizing the proceedings.  Among the many fascinating aspects of the data was the fact that children who had been considered unteachable had covered two or three years of math and English in the space of one year.  

How were we able to do this?  As Jean Piaget has said, learning is a fundamental human drive.  If you create an environment in which inquisitiveness is nurtured and rewarded, learning is inevitable. We made education a positive experience for these children by allowing them to work at the level at which they were competent and we rewarded progress, no matter how small.  We also focused considerable attention on their interests.  Every person alive, unless he or she has been completely beaten down in life, has a passion for something.  If you can discover that passion, you can unlock the motivation for learning.  For Alan it was science.  For many of my adult students it has been the desire to raise healthy, happy children, or perhaps to understand their own childhood.  

At the end of my three-year tenure at the Pacific Centre, I had the background I needed to become licensed as a Clinical Psychologist and did so.  I left the Centre, opened a private practice and eventually was offered a job at Camosun College where I taught for 23 years while continuing to carry a light load of clients in private practice.  The two-year commitment became a 28 year commitment until my wife and I moved to Santa Fe, NM in 1998.

I learned so much at the Centre and I realized that a true understanding of developmental psychology can be a powerful clinical tool.  I also had a lot of humorous experiences, some of which I would like to share.

Shortly after I arrived one of the teachers told me the five boys she had in her class were paying no attention to her, physically assaulting her and that she was going to quit if things didn’t change. I had not implemented the program yet so I tried something desperate.  I hauled the kids out about 15 minutes before lunch one day and took them to the activity room.  I said, “We have about 10 minutes before lunch and I am going to challenge you. I am going to take on all five of you and if I am still standing at the end of 10 minutes I want you to promise not to bother your teacher anymore and to be good students.”  

Their eyes widened as they relished the thought of pummeling a senior staff member to death and were a little disappointed when I told them there would be no punches, no nasty stuff below the belt and no biting.  But they agreed.  So I said, “Go!” and they did.  

We went at it for ten minutes and at the end I was still standing, barely.  They were elated and promised to behave as agreed and they did.  I made five good friends that day and we never told anyone.    

The nurse at the school was a wonderful Scottish woman who had seen it all. She had learned her nursing skills in the worst neighborhoods of Glasgow and described herself as a spinster.  She told me that if she was going to have to take care of someone she wanted to get paid for it and marriage salaries were not that great. She was a prankster of the highest order.  I remember showing up to camp and her approaching me with a “special sandwich I made just for you.”  Peanut Butter and cotton balls.  Yuk.  

She used to put pills out on the kitchen counter in the morning and one morning she was going to do a dental inspection so she laid out about 30 pink pills that were intended to highlight dental issues when chewed.  There was one incredibly difficult boy at the center at that time, Donny, and as he entered the kitchen he gathered up all the pills and downed them.  She went ballistic.  She often lectured the kids on the dangers of taking drugs so this was a major affront to her warnings. She grabbed him, hauled him up the stairs, castigating him all the way and then locked him in his room and screamed, “You could die from doing that.”

He took full advantage of this opportunity, yelling, “Helen put me in here to die, Helen put me in here to die!”  

She paid no attention and her parting shot was, “Don’t be surprised if your urine is red!”

The next morning she was doing bed checks and when she came to his bed he smiled and proclaimed, “It was pink!  And, I am not dead!”

She replied, “How do you know you are not in heaven?”

Stunned, he blurted out, “You’re here!”  

She relished talking about one experience she had with Donny who had an undescended testicle. She maintained that was why he was so ornery.  She was examining him one morning and asked him to move his penis to a position that would not hinder her from examining the offending testicle.  

He said, “It doesn’t move that way.”

“Yes it does,” she replied.

“Helen,” he proclaimed, “You know a lot about pills but you don’t know anything about penises.”

On another occasion we took the children from the treatment center to a beach campground for a summer camp experience.  One of the boys in my tent was wetting his sleeping bag every night and we were pretty sure he was doing it on purpose.  So I told him, “If you pee in your sleeping bag again, we will take you home to the Centre.”

That night I was awakened by the sensation of warm liquid spreading in my sleeping bag.  Startled I awoke to find him urinating into my bag.  “What are you doing?”

“You told me you would take me home if I peed in my bag so I decided to pee in yours.”

He had me.  

Another child taught me that using power over a child can often lead to resentment and retaliation on the part of the child.  This boy had a terrible learning disability which caused him to see written material backwards.  He wanted to go home to Yellowknife for Christmas so I told him he had to learn five letters before December if he wanted to go home.  When the time came to show me his work he said, “I actually learned six.”  He then wrote the following message for me.

U O Y K C U F.  

This was a powerful lesson for me about the misuse of power and authority.  I sent him home for Christmas, a trip he deserved just for being a child, regardless of his disability.

I got into another bad situation with ultimatums when I was showing a new boy around the school.  He was yelling and cursing me, the school and his parents and said he would never stay at this “F…ing S…hole of a school.”  Exhausted and fed up, I turned to him and said, “You can stay here or go to jail!”

“I’ll take jail,” he replied.  

Once again I had backed myself into a corner.  Just then I remembered a story a professor of mine had told me.  At the end of the war he was drafted and asked, “Europe or Asia?”  Since the war was over in Europe he answered enthusiastically, “Europe.”

“Europe’s full,” the officer replied.  And he was off to Asia.

So I said, “Jail’s full.”

Although he was one of the most difficult kids to deal with, he eventually came around and became a model for other boys to emulate.  When it was time for him to leave we gave him the choice of returning to his dysfunctional family or a foster home.  He chose the foster home.

Bobby was a developmentally disabled boy who had suffered some kind of abuse as a young child and had formed an attachment to Dinky Toy cars and would walk around for hours making car noises as he pushed the cars through the air.  At one point a new boy, Alex, arrived.  Alex claimed to be a vampire and after a few weeks I was convinced he was right.  More than one staff member had bite marks on their necks.  He took a fancy to Bobby and manipulated him into a very exploitative homosexual relationship.  We decided to use behavior modification to try and convince Bobby to avoid Alex.

My friend Barney and I brought Bobby into Barney’s office and explained a program in which Bobby could earn points by staying away from Alex.  When Barney asked him “What do you like that you could earn with these points?”

Bobby replied, “Well, I really like it when Alex sticks his tongue in my mouth and goes lubalubado.”

Barney calmly replied, “That is not on the list.”

Having worked with several autistic children I considered myself somewhat of an expert in behavior modification with this challenging group.  So when a young autistic girl showed up at the center I decided to record a teaching video for staff to watch in order to learn how to use such skills as shaping and prompting to teach behavior.  One of the things that made Jeanne special was that she had an ileostomy collection bag on her side.  It would fill with urine and have to be emptied often.  What I didn’t know was that when angry, she would pull the bag off and empty it on the floor.  

I sat down with a simple reader and her lunch.  I would point to letters and prompt her to repeat them as I was being filmed through a one-way mirror.  She began to get agitated as she did not like her lunch to be contingent on completing the tasks I set out for her and when I turned to look at the clock, she whipped off the bag and emptied it on my head.  This video became extremely popular and was hauled out every time there was a staff party.  

Several years later, after Jeanne was released, I went to visit her in Vancouver. When she came to the door, she gave me a big hug and said, “Remember Larry. You teach me to read.  I dump PeePee bag on your head.”  Then she laughed uncontrollably for a few minutes.

I had many other memorable experiences but these are some of my favorites.