Prof.
Robak's Page
Here's what you'll find on this
page:
I Links to useful professional information.
II. Class Pictures
III.
Psychology department announcements (events, etc.).
IV. Materials from Paola Cadet for the M.S. program.
V. Course materials and EMERGENCY CLOSINGS.
VI. Occasional stories
I. Links to useful
professional information
Here are some professional web
sites:
Here is the link for application
forms for the mental health license in NY: http://www.op.nysed.gov/mhclic.htm
Here are some sites that might make
your life easier when you're researching and writing professionally:
A really good and quick guide to APA
style from Dr M. Plonsky of U. of Wisconsin
How
to write a research report
The
most comprehensive psychology database (It's on the Pace Library web page.)
A good source of person-centered
articles
Here is the statement from the New
York State Education Department web page regarding "Additional
Requirements" for the mental health counselor licensure. This
pertains to the child abuse reporting that all mental health
professionals in the state must take. For the the full text, click here.
"What other provisions apply to
individuals licensed under Article 163?
Professionals licensed in the four new
mental health professions cannot prescribe or administer drugs or use specific
and defined invasive procedures as treatments, therapies or professional
services under any circumstances. Examples of invasive procedures are surgery
and electroconvulsive therapy.
The Social Services Law was amended to add licensed creative arts therapist,
licensed marriage and family therapist, licensed mental health counselor, and
licensed psychoanalyst to the list of professionals and occupations required to
report suspected cases of child abuse or neglect. In addition, Education Law
was amended to require that professionals seeking licensure or a limited permit
in one of these professions must complete a two-hour course in the
Identification and Reporting of Child Abuse and Maltreatment as a condition of
licensure or receipt of a limited permit."
II. Summer Scholars Class of 2009
III. Psychology
department announcements
If you are interested in joining the
"Psychology Book Club"
please send me an email at rrobak@pace.edu .
Please put "Psychology Book Club" in the subject line!
IV. From the desk of the M.S.
Program Coordinator (Paola Cadet, M.S.):
Please link to Paola’s blog for information about schedules, course
waiting lists, and any other program-related information. Here is the
link to that blog:
http://pacestudentsmhc.blogspot.com/
The next undergraduate colloquium:
sometime in March, 2010.
V. My course materials
and EMERGENCY closings
PSY
630 the ACA 2005 CODE OF ETHICS
PSY 679: A good
genogram article
VI. Occasional stories.
(A) Here are two
of my favorite passages from A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
(by Marina Lewycka, 2005). This book captures the experience of
immigrants from Eastern Europe after WWII. (Thank you, Prof Peggy Minnis,
for introducing me to this beautiful little book.)
The first one is on pp. 42-43.
It is the heroine’s ruminations after the death of her mother:
"I sit on the bench under the
crab apple tree in the cemetery and sort through my memories, but the harder I
try to remember, the more I get confused about which are memories and which are
stories. When I was little, my mother used to tell me family stories—but
only the ones that had happy endings. My sister also told me stories; but
her stories were strongly formulaic, with goodies (Mother, Cossacks) and
baddies (Father, communists). Vera’s stories always had a beginning, a
middle, an end, and a moral. Sometimes my father told me stories, too,
but his stories were complicated in structure, ambiguous in meaning, and
unsatisfactory in outcome, with lengthy digressions and packed with obscure
facts. I preferred my mother’s and my sister’s tales.
I, too, have a story to tell.
Once upon a time we were a family, my mother and father, my sister and I—not a
happy family nor an unhappy one, but just a family that pootled along while
children grew up and parents grew old. I remember a time when my sister
and I loved each other, and my father and I loved each other. Maybe there
was even a time when my father and my sister loved each other—that I can
remember. We all loved Mother, and she loved all of us. I was a
little girl with plaited hair gripping a stripy cat, whose photo stands on the
mantelpiece. We spoke a different language from our neighbors and ate
different food, and worked hard and kept out of everybody’s way, and we were
always good so the secret police wouldn’t come for us in the night.
Sometimes, as a small child, I used
to sit in the dark at the top of the stairs in my pyjamas, listening, straining
to overhear my parents talking in the room below. What were they talking
about?...Were they talking about that other time, that other country?
Were they talking about what happened in between their childhood time and
mine—something so fearful that I must never know about it?..."
The second passage is a bit earlier
in the book, on page 17. It reflects the impact of twentieth-century
historical events on the personality of an individual:
"My mother had known ideology,
and she had known hunger. When she was twenty-one, Stalin had discovered
he could use famine as a political weapon against the Ukrainian kulaks.
She knew—and this knowledge never left her throughout her fifty years of life
in England, and then seeped from her into the hearts of her children—she knew
for certain that behind the piled-high shelves and abundantly stocked counters
of Tesco and the Co-op, hunger still prowls with his skeletal frame and gaping
eyes, waiting to grab you the moment you are off your guard. Waiting to
grab you and shove you on a train, or onto a cart, or into that crowd of
running fleeing people, and send you off on another journey where the
destination is always death.
The only way to outwit hunger is to
save and accumulate, so that there is always something tucked away, a little
something to buy him off with…."
*****
(B) In his
novel, Havana Bay (1999), Martin Cruz Smith continues the story
of (a now older) Arkady Renko, the Moscow police detective. Renko has
lost the love of his life and he can't seem to forgive himself. Her death
has left him in a long depression...
Smith's best writing of the book is
on page 26:
"Inattention was the greatest
crime of all. He had seen every sort of victim, from nearly pristine
bodies in their beds to the butchered, monstrously altered dead, and he had to
say that, in general, they would still be lightly snoring of laughing at a
well-told joke if someone had only paid more attention to an approaching knife
or shotgun or syringe. All the love in the world could not make up for
lack of attention.
"Say you were on the deck of a
ferry crossing a narrow strait, and although the distance was short, the wind
and waves came up and the ship foundered. Into the cold water you go, and
the one you love most is in your grasp. All you have to do to save her
life is not let go. And then you look and your hand is empty.
Inattention. Weakness. Well, the self-condemned lived longer nights
than others for good reason. Because they were always trying to reverse
time, to return to that receding, fateful moment and not let go. At
night, when there was time to think.”
