How the WAIS (IV) helped me find my ways
Here is the background info I want you to know before jumping right into my story: I am an international student from China, even though this is my seventh year in Canada, sometimes my accent can still be noticeably strong. I used to care about my accent excessively, I would make simple grammatical mistakes during a casual conversation because all I could think was “oh, that word just sounded so off again!! ARGH!” and then I just lost what I was planning to say. It was like a rolling snowball, at one point I strongly believed that my English is poor, my vocabulary is so limited that I can’t make a normal conversation. I never talked to professors nor TAs because I tried once, strong accent and broken sentences made me feel so embarrassed that I wanted to dig a hole and bury my head in it like an ostrich.
You might ask, why is this related with psychological testing? Okay, now I think it’s time to tell you my short encounter with a cognitive assessment last semester and by the end of the blog, you will know the reason.
Last semester when I was in motivation class, Dr. Koestner introduced us to a psycho-educational assessment project which we could get a free cognitive/academic abilities or personality/career-related assessment from a counseling psychology PhD/Master student. Three meetings consisted of an interview regarding the examinee’s educational history, the administration of intelligence test (WAIS-IV) and academic ability test (reading, writing, listening, comprehension, etc.) and debriefing session. Apparently there were 600 volunteer applicants and 20 were randomly selected. I was one of the lucky ones.
In the first session, the graduate student Ana and I briefly talked about ourselves, the goals and the purpose of the assessment. All the doubts of whether I would be able to complete all the tasks just kept appearing in my head, I almost wanted to quit.
Another week flew by, I was sitting in front of her again, “How do you feel, Yusi?”, “I’m excited but also very nervous”, “why are you nervous?”, “mmmmm….”
These are the tests I did with Ana. We started off with the perceptual reasoning section. First test was block design which focuses on visualization ability and motor skill. I was supposed to rearrange the red/white blocks to match with the pattern shown in the booklet.
Things were going well until we got to the verbal comprehension section. The core subtests consisted of similarities, vocabulary and information. I started stuttering and felt the panic had started to grow in me. I remember there was one part I had to choose a picture (out of four) that is corresponded to the verbal instruction. “mmm, I don’t know”, “mmm, whatever I’m just going to choose this one”, “I have no clue, I’ve never heard that word in my entire life”. Ana saw something was going on but she just smiled and said, “Don’t worry, just try your best”.
During a short break, it was my first time to tell her that I thought my English maybe not as good as I hoped. Ana winked at me, “Don’t worry about it, as long as you try your best, then it’s fine.” For the rest of the assessment, I brought it up again and again but Ana didn’t comment on it.
Two weeks ago, we met up for the debriefing. “Yusi, I was almost fooled by you, you made me believe that your English is bad. Your tests don’t say that at all. You performed in the average range for all of the tasks. This means that you are performing just as good as individuals in your age group. You know what I think, the one who blocks you from academic achievements is you. You know how many times the answers you were mumbling were right but you second doubted yourself or you just gave up? You have the focus, all you need is you to believe in yourself and continue to push yourself even when you feel as though you don’t have the motivation.”
I couldn’t talk for the longest time and then tears just fell down on my face. Why do I despise myself?
“People called me fob before and… it all started from there”
“What’s fob?” Ana asked. I sighed a little, probably this only exists in the Asian community.
“Fresh off the boat. It’s a phrase to describe the old Asian immigrants who once shipped here all the way from Asia. They have an image of being poor, uneducated, and of course, with heave accent or can’t speak English at all. Gradually ‘fob’ becomes a more and more negative term. Some of the Asians who were born here tried really hard to detach from that identity. They want to be whitewashed. They refuse to learn the Asian language. ‘So Asian’, a derivative word from “fob”, becomes something for people to use to distinguish them from those people who act more Asian. They will say ‘no I wouldn’t do that, that’s such an Asian thing to do’. So when they said that to me, I felt inferior.”
As I was speaking, I realized how absurd everything sounded like. Why do I let other people define who I am? Why do I easily get affected? why does one culture need to be more superior than the other? Why to say some non Asian has yellow fever when they date an Asian, like some disease? Why accent can make you inferior? This is not only about accent, what about body image? Who says slim and six packs are the best? Who defines fat and skinny?
I never expected some cognitive assessment would lead me to this actualization, it was a real life lesson I got. To a degree, it helped me to accept who I am and embrace the fact that I have accent. It’s part of my Chinese identity, it is part of who I am. Not only this, I also learnt that I’m good at perceptual reasoning and when I use numbers I automatically switched to Chinese language system because it’s faster for me.
For those of you who read till the end, thanks for reading and I want to tell you that something more important I learnt from this experience is we are better than we think. If you are struggling about something right now, hope you can find your own “cognitive assessment” anytime soon.
Finally, I would like to share a video with all of you — “You are more beautiful than you think”
Goodnight :)
p.s It’s not my intention to offend anyone, so apology in advance if you do feel so :’)
