Before starting a school psychology program, I thought I was pretty good at multi-tasking.  In Chile, I learned to flag down a speeding bus, while talking on the phone, and helping an elderly woman get into her car. As a tutoring program coordinator in Minneapolis, I discovered that I could prepare for the games that day, heat up snack in the oven, and calm down an anxious parent all at the same time.  While these skills have helped me with juggling the demands of a graduate school program, practicum, work, and maintaining some semblance of a personal life, I may have hit my multi-tasking ceiling, so to speak.

This week our psycho-educational assessment class required us to undergo a one and a half hour live simulation “proficiency check” of a cognitive assessment we are learning to administer. Although I practiced administering this battery several times, today I still found myself scrambling to keep track of time, write down answers, read the script verbatim, observe and manage the T.A. acting like a difficult 10 year old, and organize my kit materials (do I hand over the red pencil now or the regular one?) while properly administering the correct assessment questions which differ depending on the previous answer provided by the student. Whew! My neural pathways need a break.