weak

My female owner had the worst period of the semester last week. I might have mentioned it before. She had two heavy duty assignments due on Monday, a case presentation on Tuesday night (which her dubious supervisor didn’t get back to her on her slides, so she was literally on her own during the presentation) and an early morning competency assessment (i.e. practical role-play) on Wednesday. Throw in tutorials on Monday evening and a client on Monday night and full day lessons (from 0900 to 1600hr), she was hardpressed for time to prepare for the competency assessment which was worth 50% of her grade.

For the competency assessment, students would be given 1 of 8 possible scenarios to demonstrate their clinical skills. It was a children and adolescent module and my female owner had zero experience working with this population. She has never explained a CBT model to an adult (surprise surprise, for all the hours she had clocked, she hasn’t done the very basic!) much less a child (and having to modify her language to suit a child’s level of understanding).

In addition, my female owner had a bad experience last semester with competency assessments. Both times, she was allocated the most challenging scenarios and for one, given a very low grade by her tutor (who would be the child role-player in the current assessment) and that rocked her confidence. Plus, her anxious clients who terminated on her made her question her ability to relate to the Western population.

And my female owner was very frustrated with the situation she was in, because she was the only person in the cohort who had to do a case presentation at night (slot was randomly allocated early into the semester) followed by that early morning assessment (slot allocated by surname – now you know why). She felt so disadvantaged. She wished that she could either skip the case presentation (she could, if she was not presenting… and many of her coursemates did that) or have a later time-slot for her assessment (change of surname? She could have requested for an afternoon slot).

And since she was already frustrated, she went jogging at 1am and got home at 2am on Tuesday morning, adding to her miry situation.

To cope with this helpless situation, she did something which she seldom do. She started to pray really hard and asking for God’s grace and favour to be upon her (for an easy scenario etc). She also prayed specifically to get a “7” (high distinction) for this module as it is the easiest module among the rest. And she started quoting the verse in 2 Cor 12:10 “When I am weak, then I am strong.” Meaning that when she is weak, she is then strong in Jesus, because rather than relying on herself, she is saying that He will be her strength. This time round, she was really weak, because she had no time to prepare herself decently (compare this to her other coursemates who wrote out scripts and even spent some time role-playing with one another).

Happily, my female owner was given a simple scenario to demonstrate her skills. The tutor in question tried to make things difficult and my female owner was caught off-guard. But she managed to remedy the situation somewhat. It was a short and sharp pain for my female owner, preparing for that assessment, as compared to writing up a case study for the other 50% of the grade.

So, the lecturer sent out the marks yesterday, and my female owner fell through the cracks.. “6” is a 76 to 84. “7” is a 85 to 100. She got 84.5. So she was in a no-man’s land… and could be given either a “6” or a “7”. She wrote to her lecturer and also prayed about it.. and was delighted when her lecturer (without being persuaded by my female owner) said that she would bump her up to a 7.

Praise God. A battle won.