Chapter 17

            I really enjoyed Dr. Hill’s presentation on the brain Wednesday evening. Since I will be becoming a school counselor in the future I think it is important to know how a student’s concussion can affect their emotional state along with the mental state. The idea of young children getting concussions is scarier because we really don’t know what the long term effects are of concussions. I also found the point where he spoke about how the pleasure part of the brain will still activate when they are watching drugs being used even though they aren’t using. I think this just helps to show how powerful the brain is and how hard it is to truly end addiction. It isn’t as simple as quitting there is a lot going on behind the curtains that a lot of people don’t think about. I think this is important to remember with any addiction that a client might have their brain will be really hard to rewire, and even though they think they are over their addiction it will still activate even if they are around the addiction.

            I also really enjoyed the middle school presentation last week. I thought it was a good idea to get each of the different subjects to teach a little bit about careers within their curriculum. This I feel would be easy for teachers to do as long as they are allowed to add this into their curriculum. Since, the mandatory state testing is taking precedence over everything in the educational field, I think it may be a struggle to incorporate this into the already packed curriculum. It is going to be crucial to show the powers that be how important this curriculum is to the students and see how it goes from there. Overall, I really found the presentation to be very engaging and useful.

            In this week’s chapter I really got to thinking about children of illegal immigrants. If we have a child in our school who we are trying to guide through their post high school plan we may run into a lot of trouble. They are going to be afraid of exposing their parents and they also may have no way of paying for college. I think this is going to be really hard because I don’t know how as a counselor you can work with this. It is going to be a personal debate that I have to decide what is more beneficial, letting the student go by undetected or do you run the risk of exposing their whole family. I think this is going to be really hard and I hope that I may never have to face this situation.

Brown, D. (2012). Trends in the labor market and the factors that shape them. In Career Information, Career Counseling, and Career Development (10th ed.). New York: Pearson Education, Inc.