Gradu

Re-entry Survived

2009-08-08T22:29:00.000-07:00

Re-entry is a word I've been thinking a lot about lately. It conjures up images of the space shuttle and heat shields. Atmospheric dust and pressure changes conspiring to create searing temperatures and a bumpy ride back to earth.

Re-entry to Juneau hasn't been nearly as dramatic, but maybe similarly challenging. On the positive side, it's been simply wonderful to see old friends and neighbors on the street and to be genuinely welcomed home. One of Celia's friends even made a welcome home poster to hang on our door. And my co-workers had a delightful banner on my office door, complete with balloons and personal photos.

We've also seemed to catch the tail end of Juneau's Best Summer Ever. Warm days and sultry nights only to be marred by an occasional batch of wildfire smoke blown in from the Yukon. It's raining lightly now while I write, but you get the feeling that the sun will be back soon. Last week, I even got to go on the annual voyage to Sweetheart Creek with the boys. 40 boat miles south of Juneau, one can catch up to 25 sockeye salmon a day with a net. The fish were few that day (we only caught four), but just up the creek from us, we watched a sow brown bear fish for salmon for her three young cubs. At one point, all the cubs were napping with their heads on the rocks while momma bear tore fish flesh in her mouth.

On the downside has been a flummoxing employment situation. My leaving Juneau for my fellowship coincided with a vast reorganization of my employer. At the time, it seemed removing myself from the organizational structure was the right thing to do. But now, returning to the agency, I don't have a clearly identified role. For the past few months, I've been in the application process for the CEO position for the agency. Just two days ago, I received word that I didn't get the job.

So now what?

In my confusion, I decided to take a few weeks off and paint the house, like I've been meaning to do for a few years now. Scraping paint for the past four days has given me a certain amount of solace. It's incremental, but you can see the impact of your work. And it's somewhat satisfying when you pry off a big chunk of paint chips all at once. We'll see if the weather holds enough for me to get a coat or two down. But at least my role is clear and the path forward is not uncertain.

Professionally, I'm pursuing a new research project through my fellowship. There may be a possibility of working half-time from my house on a research project for 15 months or so. It would be some great experience to conduct a research project from start to finish, with the help of some expert advisors. And I could take a turn at primary caregiver, something I've been wanting to do. Celia just starts kindergarten this year. And Ferguson is more and more interactive every day. I'm hoping it works out. I'd like to be back on some steady tracks for a while. This little caboose doesn't do so well sitting in the rail yard, waiting for an engine to hook up to.

Coming Home

2009-07-12T23:16:00.000-07:00

Dixon Entrance

We're on the M/V Taku, coming into the open waters of Dixon Entrance. Here, before Ketchikan, the Inside Passage breaches itself and lets the Gulf of Alaska push its way in. You can feel the ocean swells start to lift the bow ever so slightly.

We must be about to cross the international border, leaving British Columbia for Alaska. The land offers a familiar sight. Low clouds obscuring the horizon, to where sea and sky end and then begin. A few rocky islands with scraggles of trees somehow survive the open waters. The pale light of a setting sun breaks through the clouds somewhere and then reflects off the water.

We're coming home.

This morning in Prince Rupert a wolf bounded in front of me down a path through the woods. Was he beckoning me homeward? Or is that some silly romantic notion from my youth? The day I first left Alaska, my first summer out of college, I heard the wolves howl near my home on the Toklat River. To me, their howl was saying goodbye. But I am older now, and less given to such notions. But part of me still wants to think this rare sight of a wolf is somehow meant to reconnect me to this land.

It feels like we've been gone a while. And the journey back reminds me of just how far we've gone. We stretched out the road home a little, with a trip to Buffalo, NY en route. I had to speak at the Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada annual convention in Toronto, and we took the opportunity to visit Jessica's family in upstate New York and across the border. When we got back to our car in Seattle, we drove up to Vancouver, BC, and spent a few days there. Then we took a short ferry over to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island and drove up the island to Port Hardy. Another BC Ferry took us to Prince Rupert yesterday and we left Rupert this evening. After another 42 hours or so aboard the Alaska Marine Highway, we'll land in Auke Bay and drive on home.

Now you can really feel the lift and fall of the bow.

The ferry offers a good time to reflect, when one isn't chasing toddlers around. I'm hoping it will also be as conducive to sleep as the last boat we were on. For the first time in I don't know how long I took not one, but two, two-hour naps yesterday on the BC Ferry. I guess that shows how much this trip home has involved sleep deprivation. Going to the east coast and back, sharing rooms with small children, and early morning flight and ferry queues have had a cumulative impact on us all.

As I look back on the last six months, it's still hard to fully process the experience. It feels like I won't really know what this experience has meant until I am able to sleep in my own bed again, get back into my old routines, and sit back in my desk at the office. I guess maybe it feels a bit foreign still, and won't become part of me until I can relate it to my everyday world a bit better.

Preparing for my talk in Canada gave me a good chance to think about what I've learned these past six months, though. My talk was about how to use external research articles in the context of youth mentoring. So as I thought about what I would say to a group of my peers on how to use research, I figured I could only tell them what I had learned. In the end, I think one of the main things I learned was how to critically read a research article. So I tried to give them a few pointers on how they could become critical readers of research themselves.

I also found myself coming back to the limitations of research. In the end, I've come to believe that as good as the research is, it doesn't give us any final answers. External research adds important information into the dialogue, but it's not the only information. I think it should be considered along with intuitive knowledge gained from practical experience, data used in daily program management, and other information. There simply isn't enough research to answer many of youth mentoring's important questions well. What findings are there give us good information to use in guiding our programs, but they also provoke a lot of other questions.

In my mind, as a youth mentoring practitioner, one of the best uses of external research is to help us think critically about how we manage youth mentoring programs. By helping us think like a researcher, reading research can inspire us to consider our programmatic questions with the critical rigor of a scientist. Reading research can also open up additional questions to us, which we then must seek to find an answer. And maybe most importantaly, research can cause us to challenge our assumptions. We may have assumed that a program was working, or that there was a reason why we did things a certain way. But when we actually see some data that confound our assumptions, it can cause us to think more critically, more rigorously, about our work.

And this, I believe, is essential. The work we do, bringing strangers into the lives of fragile youth, and trying to create nurturing relationships between them, is frought with challenges. And frankly, while we like to talk about the life-changing power of our program, our matches don't always work out. If we want more children to experience this promise of life-changing relationships, we have to think more critically of our business. Surely we need to tell ourselves and others our wonderful stories. But just as much, we need to tell ourselves the not-so-nice stories, and look under the hood of these matches to see if we can fix them. Only by asking the tough questions will be able to improve our programs so more children can benefit from a one-to-one mentoring relationship with an adult. And asking tough questions is just what research can, and should, inspire us to do.

Now even the reflection of the sun is gone. In front of our bow, the waves disappear into fog. It makes one wonder where one is heading. But that is the subject for another posting...

Bad Blogger

2009-06-08T15:26:00.000-07:00

I've been a really bad blogger lately. Probably six weeks has gone by without a post. I've discovered that it's really easy to fall off of the blogging wagon. And once you're off, you start to wonder if you really need to jump back on it again!

Well, I've started this thing and I aim to finish it. So now with my finals winding down for the spring quarter, it seems like a good time to update this here website.

Today, I just turned in my final exam for my statistics class and am about to drop off my final research paper for my class on relationship-based interventions for children.

Here are some highlights from the last six weeks:

I brought Celia and Ferguson to an Arceneaux family reunion in Lafayette, Louisiana in early May. Flying alone with two young kids was one thing, and then Ferguson caught the croup an hour before our return flight to Portland. I was hoping to introduce the kids to the joys of boiled crawfish, but they both eschewed their 1/4 Cajun heritage on that point.

<--Two-headed Louisiana Turtle

We concluded the online survey of the youth mentoring field and the use of evidence-based decision making. I've been analyzing the data with SPSS and have found some pretty interesting stuff. I managed to craft a paper for my statistics class out of some multiple regressions I created with the data.

I went to Washington, DC, in late May to attend the Society for Prevention Research Conference. On the way there, we visited my brother-in-law near Harrisburg, PA. We had fun watching Celia and Ferguson play with their three cousins. It was a new experience to be at a conference and hardly know a soul. I was able to meet some friendly researchers who work on suicide prevention, though, and attended some interesting research presentations. Probably the highlight was having the opportunity to serve as a discussant on a panel discussing relationship quality in youth mentoring. As discussant, I was supposed to deliver some incisive commentary after the researchers presented their works and help kick off a discussion with the audience. I was pretty nervous about playing the role (usually taken my a senior researcher in the field), but I think I avoided making a total fool out of myself. It actually helped me confirm that I've learned quite a lot these past five months. I wouldn't have imagined doing that kind of thing with any degree of confidence six months ago.

Farmer's markets are in full swing around here and my current quest is to find the perfect strawberry.

I think that about catches the blog up for now. My time is winding up here in Portland. Over the next few weeks, I hope to reflect more on my experience and what I've learned and get it down in the blog.

Lucky Man

2009-04-23T12:29:00.000-07:00

It's been a while since I posted here. I guess I am slipping a little. Maybe that's a good thing.

The last few weeks have had a lot of travel, with the trip to Anchorage and a trip to New York last week. I was in the City to meet with the other Fellows supported by the WT Grant Foundation. We met at the Foundation's offices in mid-Manhattan for two days and shared about our experiences. It was interesting to learn what the other Fellows are up to and connect with them on a personal level. There are some amazing people doing some innovative work.

I think the meeting helped me get my head on a little straighter. Since being back, I've been thinking a lot about how to make the most of my remaining days here in Portland. I've since met with my mentor, Tom, and we've got a refined plan for how my remaining time will be spent. I think it's realistic and doable and that's given me a bit of a lift. I'm hoping for a strong finish to my time here.

One of the projects I'm excited about is one that involves starting to look at our internal data from BBBS of Alaska. For one of my classes, we have to complete a research project. I'm hoping I can look at some of the Strength of Relationship reports we've been collecting from our Bigs and Littles and see how these scores relate to match success and the way we provide support to our matches. It'll be good to work with the home office more over the next few months in advance of my return home. Plus I'm excited to bring some of my new statistical knowledge to bear on the work I've been doing at the agency.

Being in New York City also made me realize how unique my Fellowship experience has been. All of the other Fellows are still working part-time at their existing jobs and part-time on a Fellowship project. None of them transplanted their entire families to have this experience. Again, I realize how incredibly lucky I am to have such a supportive partner, my wife Jessica. She's let me follow my dreams, and kept our family together to make this move possible.

Jessica turned forty today. Happy Birthday, Sweetie! You are the love of my life.

Coming Back

2009-04-09T22:52:00.000-07:00

I'm on the plane again, heading from Anchorage back to Seattle and then on to Portland. I think we might have passed over Kuiu Island a few minutes ago. I was reminiscing just yesterday about visiting Kuiu Island with another member of the Alaska Suicide Prevention Council. I was lucky to go there with Kake leader Mike Jackson more than 10 years ago. He took me to Point Cornwallis to pick seaweed (nori) and showed me all the places on Kuiu Island that used to be inhabited by the Tlingit people. He told me there Tlingit names and how heavily settled it once was. Now Kuiu Island is uninhabited, but it is cherished land by residents of Kake. It was a weighty experience and I felt incredibly honored to be brought to this sacred place and learn a little of the subsistence lifestyle. We picked a lot, and Mike showed me how they dried the seaweed in the open air.

It's been an interesting few days meeting with the Council. Since it was my first meeting in-person, I really tried to listen and learn about the council before shooting my mouth off too much. I think that's one thing I've learned over the last few months. I need to get better at assessing a situation and the dynamics of a group before sharing my opinions. Yesterday we spent most of the day getting to know each other and learning about some of the history of the council. Today we had a facilitated session to help develop a new strategic plan for the council.

I think everyone was pleased by the end of the day with the progress that we made. There are a lot of new members on the council, so it felt like an important step to clarify what we are about and what we want to accomplish. During the day today, we came up with some reasonable goals to shoot for over the next three years and I think they will really help to motivate the council. Personally, I really enjoyed getting to know the individuals who make up the council. Many of the members have been personally touched by suicide and it was incredibly moving to hear their stories.

I also picked up a new favorite quote, from fellow member Pat Donelson, a pastor from Wasilla who's done some really neat outreach to kids in rural Alaska around suicide prevention:

"You can't teach what you don't know. You can't lead where you won't go."

Since we were in meetings all day, I didn't have a chance to go by the Big Brothers Big Sisters office. I feel bad about that. But I did get to see a few friends from the agency after hours and get caught up on how the agency is doing.

I related to my friends how I felt changed by this experience. These last few days has made me think that more and more. All through the meetings of the council, I wanted to ask questions about the research. I wanted to know what data we have about suicide's causes in Alaska and what we know about how to prevent it. I'm not sure how the rest of the council feels about using a data-driven approach though. I may be the only one who wants to move the group in that direction. I'm wondering how much I will find myself in similar situations in the future. Maybe I am becoming an evangelist for using evidence in decision making. I wonder if this will lead to future frustration for me or if I will find success in helping others consider bringing research into different decision making processes. It felt like a taste of what's to come for me, anyways.

On my last blog, I described this image of being lost in the water, treading amongst the separate islands of research, practice, and policy. Here's a crude drawing to that effect:

Identity

2009-04-08T00:47:00.000-07:00

It's Tuesday and I'm on a plane to Seattle, on my way to Anchorage tonight. I'll be attending a meeting of the Alaska Suicide Prevention Council over the next two days, barring any further explosions from Mt Redoubt.

Next week, I'll be attending a meeting of all the fellows under the WT Grant Distinguished Fellows program in New York City. I have to give a 20 minute presentation to the rest of my colleagues about my fellowship experience. I've been puzzled by what to present to this group. Surely they won't be interested in the details of my fellowship experience. I'm tempted to talk about some of my recent soul-searching, but this might be a bore as well. I could always show some pictures. Shots of Alaska and the kids are always crowd-pleasers. But that would probably be a cop-out.

Thinking about this presentation has got me thinking more about my recent malaise. I'm snapping out of it, but what's remaining with me is a blurred sense of identity. I wish I could draw better, or I would like to draw a picture of my face all scrambled up. It would be one way to show how I'm feeling. Today in class it really struck me how I don't fit into this world of academics. Sure it's interesting and I am learning a lot of useful things. But all my other classmates are on tracks to get a degree. I don't feel like their peer, nor do I have a large urge to enroll in graduate school at this point. At the same time, now that I've been away from the job for three months or so, I'm not quite sure how I fit in there, either. It seems like I've changed somehow through this experience, and I'm not sure how my re-entry to the work-world will be.

The other image that comes to mind is a scene of three islands representing the worlds of Practice, Policy, and Research. I'm in the middle, treading water, wondering which island is inhabited by a friendly tribe and where I should try to come ashore. Meanwhile I'm getting caught up in a water polo match and constantly getting shoved underwater (I tried signing up for water polo this quarter. Two classes later and I couldn't shake my fear of drowning so I dropped the class).

I'm not trying to sound dramatic. I'm not losing a ton of sleep or anything like that. It's more like a general state of unease. It's probably confounded by the fact that I'm not quite sure what my job will be when I get back to Alaska. Right when I left, our organization was undergoing a restructuring and I wasn't really assigned a seat at that time. I thought it would be more fair for the agency to organize without me and see where I fit in when I got back. Now, my boss has announced her resignation, and I'm planning to apply for her spot as Executive Director. But who knows how that will turn out.

I've also started to wonder how it will feel to return to Juneau. I miss it more and more, but I've also gotten pretty accustomed to Portland's temperate weather. It's particularly nice to see the kids playing outside all the time. And I've gotten pretty used to the amenities of a more urban lifestyle. Surely Juneau is home, but will it feel like our permanent place once again? Who knows what the future holds.

Anyways, I'm starting to get into the groove of the new quarter. My two classes, statistics and relationship-based interventions for children seem really interesting. I'm excited to get more background in child development and to hone my statistics skills more.

Progress on my research projects has been slow. I was thrilled to launch an online survey I've been working on for weeks recently, though. We finally got IRB approval and were able to launch the survey last week. The survey is designed to provide some information from the field of youth mentoring to help inform my guidebook project. I'm working with David DuBois and Tom Keller to write this guidebook on evidence-based decision making in a youth mentoring context. Our hope is that the book will provide some useful tools to mentoring professionals to help make better decisions to guide program management. So far, we've gotten a good response from the field and I think we'll get some very useful information.

Some of my other projects have kind of gone to the back burner, but I am pretty excited about my newest one. I'm writing an article with the help of some researchers to try to compare the results of the recent random assignment studies on school-based mentoring. It's really helping me read the literature more closely. I'm particularly excited that we'll also be doing some meta-analysis of the results. I think it will be an eye-opening experience. We're going to try to publish the article when it's all finished.

I'm off the plane and here in my hotel now. Talking to the cab driver on the way into town made it feel like coming home. We'll see what it feels like when I go back to my temporary home in a few days.

Spring Break

2009-03-31T11:11:00.000-07:00

It looks like I haven't posted here in a while. I guess I've been a slacker in lots of ways lately. Last week was Spring Break and the week before was finals week. I'm feeling guilty for taking the chance to goof off quite a bit, after finishing up my classes from last quarter. Here are some photos of highlights:

While Jessica and Celia enjoyed an alpine lesson at Timberline Lodge, Ferguson, Monique and I went nordic skiiing at Trillium Lake. Monique and Celia had lots of fun during Monique's visit. The fun of taking Monique to the airport on the MAX for her trip home made the parting a little less sad.

After Monique went back to Chicago and her work as an acupuncturist and Chinese herbologist, the Wheeler-Parises took a trip through the Willamette Valley and across the Cascades. The children really liked all the animals. One our our first stops was for a family of goats. The highlight of Peterson's Rock Garden near Redmond were all of the peacocks that strutted around like they owned the place.

Next, we stopped at Silver Falls State Park. This is an amazing little park in the foothills of the Cascades. It has something like ten different waterfalls that flow over basalt cliffs, some of which you can actually walk behind. Here I am with Ferguson behind South Falls inside the park.

We spent the next two nights in a rustic cabin on Suttle Lake, just over Santiam Pass on the other side of the Cascades. I really liked the ponderosa pine forests and we all enjoyed the dry sunny weather afforded by the Cascades' rain shadow. The middle photo above is Ferguson and Jessica walking to the headwaters of the Metolius River, near Sisters. This river suddenly erupts from the hillside in a cold water spring. On our second morning at Suttle Lake, we awoke to several inches of new snow. We took the hint and went tubing at Hoodoo Butte on our trip home. Celia really liked it but Ferguson preferred the warming hut to blasting down the mountain in an inner tube through the blowing snow.

Last but not least was the Enchanted Forest, Celia's favorite part of our trip. This little amusement park near Salem has lots of fairy tale scenes for the whole family to enjoy. Here is Celia with Miss Moffett.

***

So now it's back to school. The quarter started yesterday. I'll be taking two classes again, a second statistics course and an MSW class on relationship-based interventions with youth. It's good to get back to school. My time is now halfway over here. I feel like I really need to buckle down this quarter and make some good progress on the research projects I've started.

I'm also hoping that my recent existential funk will soon pass. I'm not sure where it came from, but I've spent a lot of time brooding on my future recently. Maybe I'm empthasizing with all of these college students too much. Maybe I'm reliving my own college days when I spent so much time wondering what I would do with the rest of my life. Or maybe this full immersion in an academic setting has got me confused about my role in society. I don't know, but I'm hoping that throwing myself back into school will allay some of this self-questioning. It's frankly just a bore to worry about the future. I much prefer distracting myself with the present.

Portland is beautiful this time of year. The cherry trees have all announced that spring is indeed here with their explosions of pink and white blossoms. And every time I see a forsythia I can't help but wonder if it was the burning bush that Moses saw.

Finals Week

2009-03-17T11:46:00.000-07:00

It's St Patrick's Day here in Portland. I made sure to wear some green today, but then I felt guilty when I realized I hadn't done the same for Celia. I had this horrible thought about the kids pinching her mercilessly at school today. Then I looked down at her pantleg as we rode the bus this morning and spotted a sole green stem of a flower on her pants. Whew. Kids can be so cruel.

It's finals week. I had two take home finals assigned. I just turned one in today and the other is due tomorrow. I'm feeling pretty good about them, but the one due tomorrow is slightly confusing. I've tried to contact the professor to ask some questions, but I haven't had any luck. So I guess I'll just do the best I can and hope for the best.

It's been less stressful than I thought it would be. About the only stress I've had recently is a run-in with a graduate student. I seem to have offended this person and they've taken it quite personally. I didn't mean to cause such a row. But as silly as the matter may be, it's always hard to encounter such interpersonal strife. I guess all you can do is seek a peaceful resolution, treat the person with respect, and move on. That's what I'm trying to do, anyway.

Finals week has been nice by freeing up time from classes and homework. It's given me more of a chance to write and work on some other projects. Right now, my main project is an article on school-based mentoring. The goal is to submit something for publication to an academic journal. It seems a bit daunting, but I'm looking forward to learning about how the whole article submission process works. I'm also learning a lot in the process of writing.

I've also started a little writing on the guidebook for youth mentoring professionals. I'm trying not the let the magnitude of the project get me down, but it's a bit paralyzing to think about it. I guess the best strategy is just to start writing, one small chunk at a time.

I really enjoy writing, but I'm not sure I'm cut out to do it on a daily basis. It's pretty scary to think about. Last week I read the piece in the New Yorker about David Foster Wallace and his last days. I keep reflecting on how sad it was to lose such a brilliant mind and gifted writer. I never knew how mentally ill he was. It seems all too common to find genius and mental illness wrapped up in the same person. Maybe its selfish to wish that he was still around to share his gifts the world. But I still do. I can't help think about the works he could have produced during a long life. Here's to you, DFW. I hope you've found peace.

Reality

2009-03-10T16:30:00.001-07:00

It looks like I haven't written a post here in a while. I guess I've sort of hit the doldruns. It's probably natural and something that will soon pass. It feels like I'm hitting the stage where the newness of my situation has fallen away. Now my life feels more like reality and less like a departure from it. And those demons that I thought I could dodge have reminded me that they're still there. I wasn't fooling them one bit.

OK. Big deal. The demons are back. Probably Lent is as good a time as any to wrestle with them. And so it goes.

Probably the highlight of my days lately has been my morning commute. Now that Celia's in school, I take her on the bus every day. Then I ride my bike from her school to mine. It's lovely commuting with Celia. We get to spend about a half an hour together on the bus. Lots of time to talk. Today I brought a few books to read to her. Pretty soon she'll be reading to me, I think. She's gotten good at sounding out words. She just needs more practice and confidence in putting them all together. We've also learned our bus driver's name and usually get to sit in Celia's favorite seat (rear window). If the seat's occupied, she will usually ask the person if she can sit there. Invariably they give it up to her.

I'm still learning lots in school. A recent class project has taught me more about the pluses and minuses of collaboration. It's given me much food for thought on collaborative research. I'm still trying to understand how this joint writing of research papers works. I'm sure as I get into it more it will become clearer. I'm just now learning how much hangs in the balance when it comes to research publications. I never knew how important it is for people's careers. All these issues about where something gets published, the order in which the authors are listed, how much something gets cited by other publications are things I'm just learning about.

When you step back and look at it, the way research is produced and published doesn't seem very well adapted to having an impact in the world outside academia. To even get access to these research publications, you generally need to be part of a University or research center that subscribes to the publication. And then if you want to try to read the research in a discerning manner, there's a lot you need to know. I'm still learning how to read these papers critically and I've been at this for a few months now. And then, to top it off, if you want to get ahead in academia, you have to spend your limited time outside of teaching writing for these research journals. The time you might spend working with community organizations doesn't seem to count for much in terms of academic advancement.

It's a crazy world like all the other ones. I never said the non-profit world worked any better. Shame on me if I did.

I've made some more progress on some of my other research projects. I've spent a lot of time in SPSS lately, trying to understand the data in Tom's school-based study. A few other projects are still waiting for review from PSU's IRB. This is a committee that reviews research proposals involving human subjects. I've also been thinking about trying to write something to make sense of all the research on school-based mentoring lately.

Next week is finals week. I got one take home final today and I will get another one tonight. I can see my weekend disappearing. Late next week, my sister Monique is coming to town. I'm looking forward to seeing her and introducing her again to Ferguson. Every day brings a new word from his mouth. Maybe he'll have a sentence to string together for her.

Research and Policy

2009-02-28T21:30:00.000-08:00

Last week laid out a fascinating story on how research and policy influence one another.

In my earlier posts, I referenced the Policy Brief on Youth Mentoring and the Department of Education Evaluation Report on their School Mentoring grant program. These are two great examples of how research can influence policy, and they both hit the scene in the same week. In the case of the Policy brief, we had a group of scholars wishing to provide the new federal administration a summary of the current research on youth mentoring. With the Evaluation Report, we had a federal agency releasing its assessment of the efficacy of its own grant program.

It will be interesting to trace these two pieces of work and how they unfold in the world of policy-making. Unfortunately, the Evaluation Report got a lot more play last week since President Obama made a point of saying he was cutting the DOE mentoring program in his budget announcement. At least he chose his words carefully and only referred to "this ineffective mentoring program" instead of making a broader claim that mentoring is ineffective. His word choice also seemed to indicate that the program was duplicating efforts elsewhere. I just hope that people don't read his remarks and conclude that mentoring doesn't work, which seems quite possible in our culture of the sound-bite.

I guess I can't fault Obama for making the cut, in the end. He was been fairly clear throughout the campaign that he was going to cut programs that didn't work. And here a report comes out that says a federal program isn't having an impact. So he basically has no choice other than to cut the program. What's maybe not fair is the fact that very few federal programs are subjected to such scrutiny, particularly at such a young stage of development.

Indeed, if I were to criticize anyone, it would be the Department of Education for rolling out such a large scale program without performing some better evaluation up front. They laid out so much money with so little guidance and so little knowledge of how their program was going to have the intended impact. And if they wanted to evaluate the program right now, it seems like the fairer thing to do would be to evaluate which programs are working the best, and then outlining best practices for their grantees. Once these best practices have been laid out and grantees are abiding by them, maybe then it would be appropriate to have such a large-scale evaluation on outcomes. As one colleague put it, this is probably one of the best cases of going to scale before working out all of the bugs.

I've perused the report, but I'm looking forward to giving it a closer read this week. It'll be the topic of discussion for our first NLC Mentoring Programs Research Committee meeting this Thursday. I'm excited we're getting the committee started and it seems like good timing with such a hot topic to discuss.

It's hard to imagine that finals are coming up next week. I've never been on a quarter system before and I've learned how quickly the time can pass. It must be a stressful environment for teachers to have to plow through the information at such a pace. At least it's efficient, I guess.

I'm happy to report that we've finalized Celia's preschool arrangements, finally. We had been looking for a few more days to round out her schedule in addition to the two days we had at a co-op preschool. But we never found anything that fit well. This weekend, we landed a spot at Shining Star Waldorf School. It's four days a week, so we had to part ways with the co-op. We felt a little guilty, since the school was just getting started. But there was really no one Celia's age there, and most of the class was two years younger. She really needs some peer interaction right now. So she started at Shining Star on Monday and loved it. She'll be there four mornings a week.

It's interesting learning about the Waldorf philosophy. I like the emphasis on nature and imaginative play. I'm looking forward to reading more about it. I also like the concept of teaching students how to be inquisitive self-directed learners. There are several other girls her age, so that's nice (even though the one child she said she liked was the outgoing boy child). We've figured out that I will commute with her on the bus each morning and ride my bike from her school to mine. Jessica will drive over at 1 pm to pick here up. I've really enjoyed the bus commute. It's nice to have half an hour each day alone with Celia with plenty of opportunity for conversation. The first day, we left her bag at one of the bus stops. We had to get off our second bus and go back to the stop. Luckily her bag was still there and we made it to school on time.

So we're feeling more and more settled in here. This weekend, we took our first excursion and explored the Columbia Gorge. Celia hiked all the way to the top of Multnomah Falls (albeit a little whining was involved...and a few bribes with breath mints). We also went to a tap dance recital a block from our house on Saturday. Performers from all over the region came together and danced to recorded music and also a live jazz band. I never knew you could improvise tap with a band. My favorite part was watching the lead dance "trade fours" with each member of the band. The show was a great reminder of all of the cultural opportunities around us here. I made a new commitment to immersing myself and the family in as much culture as we can while we're here. You can't see a tap dancing jam session in Alaska!

The Hammer Falls

2009-02-26T22:10:00.000-08:00

Just a few hours after writing my last post, I learned of this announcement on President Obama's budget.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-the-President-on-the-Fiscal-Year-2010-Budget/

"Education Secretary Duncan is set to save tens of millions dollars more by cutting an ineffective mentoring program for students, a program whose mission is being carried out by 100 other programs in 13 other agencies."

It appears that my fears were well-founded.

Data Explorations

2009-02-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

It's Thursday afternoon and I'm in my office looking at partly cloudy sky over the Willamette River. It seems that Spring has sprung here in the rose city. I saw a tree in bloom two days ago and there are crocuses popping up out of the ground. Winter is trying to hang on; last night there was a little snow. But the world is definitely tilting towards spring.

Today, Tom and I had our weekly meeting and he showed me how to run some useful statistical tests in SPSS. So this afternoon, I started exploring the data set from his school-based study to see what I might find. I started out by making a grid of all the possible predictor variables that we have in the data and possible outcome variables. I'm looking at the child and mentor characteristics to see what might predict different relationship quality outcomes. So I'm running some correlations and t-tests on the different variables. I probably ran twenty different predictor variables today and looked at a set of five outcome variables. So far I've only found a few statistically significant results.

I'm very new at all this but the best simile I can come up with right now is panning for gold. It feels like I'm sifting through all the finds of data to find the few nuggets of statistically significant relationships. It's kind of fun because you just don't know what you might find. But it also seems a bit tedious. I can see how you would want to be methodical, to keep track of where you are in the wilderness of data at any point in time.

I'm also working on preparing for some phone interviews for the follow-up research to the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring. We want to get some more in-depth data from participants, so I am creating a phone interview guide and figuring out the logistics to doing the interviews. I've randomly selected five participants from both years. Now I need to work with Tom to make sure we have compliance with the IRB to do the additional interviews. If you aren't familiar with IRBs, they are basically bodies affiliated with research institutions that make sure we are treating human subjects properly. I also need to figure out how I will be able to record the interviews digitally for later transcription.

One of the things I've learned so far is how long things take in a research setting. There are a lot of hidden steps (like getting IRB approval) that you wouldn't know about unless you were forced to do them. It's taken a bit of getting used to, since I am naturally a little manic and impatient. But it's probably good for me to slow down and learn a little patience. It's also probably good for me to learn to think more methodically. Since you're forced to slow down, it makes sense to think through all the future steps up front. Otherwise, you might get far into your study and realize you should have done something differently. But once you are down the path, it's hard to turn back without wasting a lot of time and resources.

This week, I was interested to learn about two separate research papers. One that I would highly recommend reading is a new Policy Brief on youth mentoring. It was written by Tim Cavell, David DuBois, Michael Karcher, Tom Keller, and Jean Rhodes. It outlines a lot of what we know from a research perspective about youth mentoring, it's promise for America's youth, and its limitations. I hope this paper can influence the new administration to invest more in youth mentoring. President Obama seems to be highly interested in research to back up the expenditure of federal resources. It would also be wonderful to see President Obama to personally appeal to men of color to become involved as mentors. He seems uniquely poised to encourage more African American men to mentor youth.

Unfortunately, relying on research to guide our federal expenditures can be a risky proposition. The recent evaluation of school-based mentoring by the US Department of Education is a good example. I'm looking forward to reading it, but I understand that the report has fairly week findings on the impacts from school-based mentoring. This contrasts with the recent study of Big Brothers Big Sisters school-based mentoring, which found a wide range of impacts in the first year of the study. I hope that the new administration doesn't jump to the simple conclusion that school-based mentoring doesn't work based on this one evaluation.

Reading research with a keen and critical eye is something I'm still learning how to do. It sure seems to take a while to gain the necessary knowledge to do so. It makes you wonder how well research is digested in this complicated world of ours. My thought right now is that most research probably gets misinterpreted and misread most of the time. But I'm still learning!

The Last of the Mohicans

2009-02-22T22:47:00.000-08:00

Today marks the end of the Portland Jazz Festival. I was lucky to catch three separate shows. I feel especially lucky to have seen some of jazz's elder statesmen: McCoy Tyner, Lou Donaldson, and Bobby Hutcherson. All three of these men played during the height of jazz in the post-bebop era. And all three of them are still playing, whether they want to be or not.

I was impressed by how much chops each of these men still had. Tyner still had his feather-like touch on the keys. Lou Donaldson still had a sweet, sweet sound on the alto-sax, probably sweeter than it was in the 1950s and 60s. I am always amazed when I see someone use their mallets on the vibes to pound out lines of eighteenth notes. Watching Hutcherson do this at his age of 67 was impressive.

As impressive as they were, it struck me in the end that maybe they don't want to be playing still. Lou Donaldson is 82 years old (the same age as my father). He made several jokes about buying his albums because he needs the money. But I think he was serious. I think he probably does really need the money. He probably wished he could stay home in the Bronx and enjoy his retirement. He probably doesn't want to be flying across the country and sleeping in strange hotel rooms any more. But he can't afford not to.

I think I realized this when Hutcherson was playing. He was obviously out of breath the whole time he played. He would sit down behind the vibes between his bouts of playing and even from where I sat I could see that he labored to get his breath. And after his set, he didn't come out for an encore, even though we were all at our feet. He was probably all worn out and needed to rest. Before he finished playing, Donaldson told the audience that after him and Bobby Hutcherson are gone, there won't be anyone left, that they were the "last of the Mohicans" in his words.

Donaldson also mentioned that he was a protege' of Charlie Parker. Indeed, jazz has a strong tradition of mentoring. That's how the music was taught, passed down from one generation to the next. A leader would pass down his knowledge to the members of his band. You learned by hearing, by imitating your elders, by taking what you heard and making it your own.

Jazz is alive today through mentoring. And it seems to be working across all cultural bounds. The highlight for me of the Bobby Hutcherson / Lou Donaldson concert was hearing Donaldson's organist, a woman named Akiko Tsuruga. She's from Japan and hardly speaks English. But she understands the blues like someone from the Mississippi Delta. And she can swing on the Hammond organ with such confidence that if you would think she grew up in a gospel church. During intermission, she was signing albums and I asked her how she learned to swing like that. She pointed to Donaldson and said she had a "good teacher."

"The question isn't whether or not mentoring works. Mentoring has to work," said my mentor Tom Keller last Friday. My mind is still working on these profound words. There have been people who doubt whether or not mentoring works. But as Tom points out, young people have always learned from their elders, just likee Akiko is learning from Lou Donaldson. As complex mammals, we need a lot of instruction from a lot of different adults during our lifetime. If mentoring doesn't work, then our whole world breaks down. Without transfer of knowledge and social support from our elders to our youth, nothing works. Not even jazz.

But yes, we can make it better. And when you formalize something like mentoring, which has occurred naturally in the world for millenia, you have to be careful. You have to realize that you can mess it up. Like a pharmacologist who finds a cure to a rare disease out in the wilderness, you have to be careful with how you bottle the remedy. Your dose might not work they way you intend if it's administered the wrong way, or in the wrong intensity, or to the wrong person. When you package "natural mentoring" up and build a product around it and call it "Big Brothers Big Sisters," you can't just set that product up on the shelf and call it good. You have to keep testing it, keep trying to make it better, keep making sure it's having it's intended impact.

And from what I am gathering, we still have a lot to learn, and a lot to test. In our reading group Friday, we read some of the literature from the other mentoring fields - workplace and academic mentoring. Even in those areas, who have a lot more studies to describe them, we don't know how mentor and mentee personality types affect mentoring relationships. The few studies that we could find on personality effects had very little to say about the matter.

I think there must be something that happens at the personality level between a mentor and a mentee. There is something that happens when two people meet. Some kind of spark set off by how their personalities interact. I think that those matches that have more of the spark when they get started might just have enough strength to weather the hard parts of a relationship better. When the first six or eight months is up and the exciting "get to know you" phase is over, maybe the matches who have sparked more will have enough strength to make it through the tough times. But it seems that no one has studied personality types in youth mentoring relationships. Most of the literature points to mentor characteristics as the most important to predict success. But I still want to know if there's something there.

I'll be getting my chance soon to look at some data. Tom and I made a plan this week for how we're going to start looking at his school mentoring study data. And we've made a new plan to collect some additional data on the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring. Instead of sending out questionnaires to the participants on last years institute, I'm going to pick five random participants from each of the two years and try to interview them over the phone. This week, I'll be working on an interview protocol and running the change in question format by the IRB. Tomorrow begins a new week in academia and I'm looking forward to getting deeper into these research projects.

Changes

2009-02-18T22:29:00.001-08:00

It's Wednesday evening and this week has brought some changes to our little home-for-the-time-being in Southeast Portland.

On Tuesday, Celia had her first day of preschool. After a long search we've found a spot in a co-op preschool pretty close to our house. Celia will be there on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the morning. It's nice to have some more peer interactions available to her. It's a new school with a good teacher, but most of the kids are younger than she is. So I think we'll still be on the lookout for more opportunities for Celia to develop some peer relationships. For now, it's nice to add some more structure to her life and give her some more opportunity for exploration.

On the downside for Celia, this week has also brought the exit of Miner the cat. It turns out that the people who are looking after Miner's dog buddy Cole, now have room for a cat. And since Miner and Cole are tight, their owners want them to be together. Tonight someone came to take Miner away. Celia handled it pretty well, but she included a wish for a cat (actually two) of her own in her bedtime prayer tonight. It's been fun to see her and Ferguson bond with the cat these past two weeks. We'll miss Miner and even his habit of nibbling our chins at five am.

These few months have brought a lot of transition for our little family. I wonder a lot how Celia in particular is processing it all. She generally seems pretty happy, so I don't think it's causing her huge problems. But I'm not sure it's still the grand adventure for her that I thought it would be. Living in Portland has become her reality, very quickly. She doesn't really talk much about Juneau and Alaska. So I'm wondering if moving back will be another transition for her, and maybe something that will come as sort of a surprise. It's hard to say exactly what's going on in that world of hers. One thing seems clear, though; she and Ferguson are a lot closer these days. By sheer necessity, they've played more in the past two months together than they probably played together in the previous six months.

I've had a couple interesting new learning opportunities this week. On Monday, I was invited by a pyschology professor I've gotten to know to help critique a research paper with his graduate students. He studies sex offenders and helps review submissions for a few academic journals. So I got to read a submitted article and discuss it with his graduate students on Monday. As I've read more and more research papers, it's struck me how much the range of quality varies. And as I've learned more about statistical methods and their limitations, I've been struck that some writers are making claims that are probably not that well supported by the data. I'm learning to be a careful reader of research papers. But then it also seems that you can become hypercritical. Maybe sometimes you have to realize that a paper isn't perfect, but it does shed some light (however dimly) on a topic that needs a little more attention.

I also got to attend a presentation by attendees of the 2008 Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring on Tuesday. Three of them prepared talks on research topics that they learned about at last year's Institute and shared them at the monthly meeting of Oregon Mentors. It was fun to see other mentoring practitioners excited about research and see how the Institute affected their careers. They seemed more motivated about their work, more confident in their ability to read and understand research, and excited to share new ideas with their colleagues. It gave me another impetus to start looking at the data from questionnaires we've received from past participants. As soon as I get the right software installed on my computer, I'm eager to start looking at these questionnaires and try my hand at coding data.

On the fun side, this week also brought the start of the Portland Jazz Festival. I was lucky to get a cheap ticket for Sunday's performance of McCoy Tyner and Joe Lovano. Don Byron and his Ivey-Divey trio opened up. I have always been a huge fan of John Coltrane. So to see McCoy Tyner, his longest serving piano-man, was a real treat. Tyner is in his seventies, but still has plenty of chops. I was particularly impressed by how much touch he still had, from whispering out a soulful ballad to pounding away at escalating chords. I think it may have been intimidating for Lovano to play in the shadow of Coltrane, though. On the one Coltrane tune they played, he ended his solo pretty quickly, like he was trying on Coltrane's shoes and suddenly realized that they were much too big for him. Don Byron and his trio were tight, creative, and playful. And I even got his autograph at intermission. He is probably the greatest jazz clarinetist alive and brings a fresh spirit to the music.

I've got a ticket to Bobby Hutcherson and Lou Donaldson on Sunday, too. Yes, I am learning lots, but having fun, too!

Laying Low

2009-02-14T10:33:00.000-08:00

It's Saturday, and I'm laying low, recovering from an illness - a good time to catch up with the blog.

It hasn't been the most productive week, as I took the chance to visit with some friends who were in Seattle for the week. We met halfway between Portland and Seattle. Celia had a great time playing with her old friend Solomon and I got to spend some good daddy-time with Ferguson and Celia.

On Thursday, I had a great conversation with Tom Keller and David DuBois. We are cooking up a collaboration and it's really exciting. Hopefully our work together will provide some useful tools for the mentoring field.

I also arranged the first meeting of the NLC Mentoring Programs Research Committee this week. This is the committee that I helped organize made up of Big Brothers Big Sisters agency leaders from around the country. We have eight other top-notch members from around the country and we'll have our first meeting on March 5. I'm excited with the promise of this group to bring more research knowledge into our Big Brothers Big Sisters network. The committee has been authorized by the Mentoring Programs Committee of our Nationwide Leadership Council (NLC). The NLC is the agency-led body that helps set the direction for our nationwide federation.

I've also had some interesting reponses via email to my last blog post about meaning and truth. One of my friends, Kitt, pointed me to the work of William James. I find his pragmatist notions of truth attractive. Here's a quote from James on truth from "The Meaning of Truth,"

"Any idea that helps us to deal, whether practically or intellectually, with either the reality or its belongings, that doesn’t entangle our progress in frustrations, that FITS, in fact, and adapts our life to the reality’s whole setting, will agree sufficiently to meet the requirement. It will be true of that reality."

I also enjoyed the quote from my friend Charles, who does some cool work with experimental economics:

"Science, it seems to me, has nothing to do with truth. The concept isn't needed. Science is about statistical regularities, across individuals and through time, that characterize how we perceive empirical phenomena. That's it. Truth, whatever that is, doesn't appear. There's always noise. We never get regularities on the boundary (i.e. the error probability is 0), if for no reason other than we can only take finite samples. In fact, if it is even possible in principle to eliminate noise, the required model would probably be way too complicated for anybody to understand. But we can specify how close to the boundary we are. To me that seems like one of the big advances of science over, say, philosophy. Whatever your objective (truth, statistical regularity, etc.), only science insofar as I know has developed methods for specifying how close to the boundary you are. And I guess that's the point. The question is not, is it true or not? The question is simply, is it good enough?"

I welcome any and all comments on my blog. I've figured out the settings to where you don't have to register with blogspot to leave a comment. I would just ask that folks please identify themselves when they leave a comment. I find the practice of anonymous comments on blog sites kind of obnoxious. It seems to me that the promotion of anonymous comments in the blogosphere has lowered the level of discourse. As I've tried to keep up on current events through the Juneau Empire, I've been amazed with the thoughtlessness of so many of the anonymous comments, particularly when the articles commented on deal with politics.

This weekend, I'm hoping to finish Diffusion of Innovation, by Everett Rogers. What a cool book. I've been particularly intrigued by his theories on how innovations get adopted across social networks. Rogers talks about homophily and heterophily and how they affect transfer of knowledge across a network. Rogers defines homophily as "the degree to which a pair of individuals who communicate are similar" and heterophily as "the degree to which pairs of individuals who interact are different in certain attributes." Rogers posits that "when two individuals share common meanings, beliefs, and mutual understanding, communication between them is more likely to be effective." But interestingly, Rogers claims that heterophilous network links are especially important in conveying information, because they often bridge between isolated cliques. So while homophilous communication may accelerate the diffusion process because it's easier to do, diffusion can only occur through communication links that are at least somewhat heterophilous.

Thinking of these notions of homophily and heterophily got me thinking a lot about mentoring relationships. It seems that in many ways, we are creating heterophilous links when we match an adult mentor with a child. Not just in the sense of matching adults and youth from different socioeconomic or culture groups. We are also creating heterphilous links because of the age status of each individual. Maybe a question is how can we take advantage of the heterophilous communication in a match, to transfer knowledge from a Big to a Little, while helping our matches become homophilous over time. Maybe this is one of the ways that mentoring works, by turning heterophilous network links into homophilous links, that are effective in transmitting information, but also in creating social cohesion over time.

In our reading group last Friday we had an interesting discusison that touched on the network effects of mentoring. There has been a lot of theory in Big Brothers Big Sisters that if we can match enough children in a school or a community, we can have a larger "network effect" on that body. It would be interesting to find a way to test that notion at some point. It seems intuitively true, but finding a way to build an experiment around the idea seems daunting. Would you have two find two similar towns, and introduce mentoring at different levels of saturation to test these network effects? Or is there some kind of statistical model that could be built to demonstrate the effects?

I'm getting excited about the Portland Jazz Festival. It just kicked off yesterday and happens through next weekend. I'm hoping to be able to catch McCoy Tyner, Cassandra Wilson, and Bobby Hutcherson. Indeed, I wish I could go to a show every day, but I will be lucky if I can even pull off these three shows. I'm also excited that the festival features in-person interviews with all the performers. I'm also hoping to catch some of these free events to get some more insight on performers. Yesterday, I happened to run into the sax player Joe Lovano. I also met his wife, Judi, who is also a jazz singer. I got to tell Mr. Lovano how much I enjoyed seeing him at the Village Vanguard last September with Paul Motian and Bill Frisell. He and Judy even let me take their picture with him.

Judi Silvano, me, Joe Lovano, and an employee of KHMD radio

Meaning

2009-02-10T21:24:00.000-08:00

It's Tuesday night and I just got home from my class on research methods. I've been thinking a lot lately about meaning and truth. The more I learn about statistics and quantitative research methods, the more I wonder about how we really know what is true in this world. As my professor tonight has said a few times, they are just "dumb numbers." He likes to say it's more important to "use your noodle" than to just trust the numbers.

So here's what I've learned about quantitative social research: We can measure human behavior through lots of instruments commonly called scales. Some of these scales are better than others, but all of them have some error. If we take these scales and use them to measure the behavior of a large random sample of people, we can assume that the sample represents the greater population. But the way we select the sample also introduces error into the research. And then, once we have a research hypothesis, we can test whether the opposite to the hypothesis is true or not. With this test, we can either reject or fail to reject this opposite hypothesis, called the "null hypothesis." But even then, our test can have error, and we may or may not reject the null hypothesis appropriately.

So we have error in our measurement tools, error in how we choose our sample, and error in how we test our hypothesis. And in the end of the day, the best we can do is to let our hypothesis live for another day until someone else comes up with a test that rejects it. It doesn't seem like much to hang your hat on. But then again, like my professor stated tonight, many think it's the best system we've got.

Truth in this world is elusive, indeed. As I've aged, the world has seemed less and less black and white, more of a tapestry of grays. I guess the danger is in reading a research study and ascribing it to be complete and total truth because it has statistical significance. This may make qualitative research seem more appealing, but the more I learn about that body of work, the more complicated it seems, and the more impossible it seems to do well.

Like numbers, words can be poor representatives of meaning. Take this blog for instance. I never knew how complicated blogging would make my life. Never did I imagine how easy it would be to create misunderstanding through the simple act of creating an online journal. It's been really hard at times to deal with this misunderstanding and I have thought not a few times about discontinuing this practice. It's hard to know if the benefit outweighs the cost - particularly since I'm not really sure what all the potential benefits and costs are out there.

For now, I think I'll keep plodding along. I've gotten enough positive comments that I think it's probably worth the effort for now. But if I come to the point of thinking it's causing others harm or if I can't be genuine with my voice here, I will hang it up.

Last week, I met with Tom and we discussed his school-based research project some more. Since then, I've taken a dive into the data set and have set myself to systematically understanding each of the measures that were given to the study participants. So I've been filling in the labels for each question asked, to get a good sense of the scope of the work. Once I get a better handle on SPSS and some of the statistical tests, I want to try analyzing the data. I'm planning to take it slowly, though, at least at first, so I don't mess anything up!

For fun, I've continued to explore Portland's food scene. Yesterday I got to take an old friend from Alaska out to lunch at Clyde Common. I had the Fried Chicken sandwich. It was excellent as usual. And before my evening class today, I visited Carafe, a French restaurant right next to my office building. It got the pick for best Happy Hour in the Willamette Week last year. They have great deals on french bistro fare from 3-6. My croque monsieur tonight was delicious.

Last Friday in fencing class, we got to practice swordfighting for the first time. I had no idea how much impact those little swords could deliver. It also struck me how much of a workout fencing can be. I think we only engaged for two minutes or so, but I was huffing and puffing in the end. I've gotten a little ribbing (pun intended) for taking fencing while on fellowship, but I don't mind. I think we separate the body and the mind too much in Western culture. Too much thinking and not enough sweating makes me nuts, too. And hopefully what I learn in fencing will help me focus when I hit the books. That's my theory anyway, and I'm sticking to it.

En garde!

I also decided last Friday as I rode my bicycle home over the Hawthorne bridge that I love Portland. There's something special about this place that grew up along both sides of the Willamette River. I'm not saying I want to stay in this city for ever, but it certainly has captivated my imagination. Maybe it's the quality of the urban planning, maybe it's the concentration of espresso shops, maybe it's the saturation of fine foods, I don't know. But it really is a nice place to hang your hat for six months, that's for sure.

I also realized last week how little stress my life has now. Sure all the moving has been stressful. But as I compare my mental state to what it was just a few months ago, I find a world of difference. I think it hit me the other night at dinner. I was there with the family and I was so much more present. I wasn't worrying about all the drama at work, I was just sitting there enjoying the food and the conversation with my family. And its been like that every night here. I just hope I can preserve that state of mind once my time here is done, and I re-enter the world of social work practice. Maybe the secret is the cat, who knows?

Celia and Ferguson with "Miner"

Stuff

2009-02-05T23:06:00.000-08:00

Yesterday the rest of our belongings arrived with the movers. So while Jessica directed them on where to put each of the boxes, I strapped Ferguson to my back and walked around the neighborhood to get him out of the way. Celia was happy that one of the first boxes off the truck contained her Lincoln Logs and she set to playing with them intently on the front porch. Her quote of the day was ,"this is just like Christmas."

Indeed it was comforting to be around more of our personal possessions. I took great joy in unpacking my kitchen gear. I didn't realize how much I missed my salt shaker. And my whisk. And my rotary cheese grater. There they were again, in my hands, ready to bring pleasure once again. I remember opining about how I didn't really miss much of my stuff. But maybe that was just my short-term memory in action. It definitely is nice to have more than four pairs of socks. And once again having a radio in every room of the house will bring me joy.

But here's the sad news, folks. I know you all have been wondering about my espresso maker. Unfortunately, it seems that the Gaggia Carezza didn't do so well traveling all the way from Alaska. I had excitedly bought some Illy coffee beans the day before, expecting to brew my own once again. But when I was all ready to pull a shot, my machine couldn't make the water go down the right holes. There it was, hot water leaking all over the place, none of it dripping through my well-ground and expertly tamped coffee grounds.

Alas, I must keep visting my local barista and paying too much for my caffeine fix (gotta keep that dementia at bay...). At least I found a good one only three blocks away - A Fine Grind . Turns out there are at least two businesses here in Portland that specialize in espresso machine repair (figures, don't it?), so I'm hoping to get it fixed soon.

Yesterday I also participated in an all-day meeting of the Alaska Suicide Prevention Council. I've applied for a seat on the Council (one reserved for an adult affiliated with a youth-serving organization), and it seems that my appointment by Governor Palin could be in the works. It hasn't officially happened yet, but I was invited to attend the meeting in anticipation of the announcement. The body meets four times a year and was in Juneau for a daylong meeting followed by a day of visiting with Legislators. The council is set to sunset this year and legislation is pending to extend the life of the council for another four years.

For those that don't know, suicide is happening at staggering rates in Alaska, particularly in rural Alaska. The statistics are horrifying. In parts of Northwest Alaska, the rate of suicide rate is more than seven times the national average. During my years in Alaska, I've know far too many people affected by suicide, particularly that by young people. If you'd like to learn more about this epidemic problem, you can visit the council's webpage here. I feel very strongly about doing what I can to combat the problem. I'm particularly interested in using research to get to the root cause of what's happening here.

Today, I was on campus and had a meeting with my mentor Tom Keller. We spent some time going over one of his research projects which I'm hoping to help analyze. He studied 27 school-based matches in an in-depth study a few years ago. We want to go back into the data and see if there's anything we can find regading the youth and mentor's individual characteristics and how these affected relationship quality. He gave me a copy of the data set and I will be excited to start poking around there. We're going to meet again tomorrow with one of his graduate students and talk more about our other project, looking into data collected in the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring.

Today I also proudly joined the many cyclists in this city who commute to work. I'm amazed by the number of people riding bikes in this town. My commute is perfect - about 15-20 minutes. Just enough to get the heart pumping, but not too long to make you completely sweaty by the end of the day. I also became a member of the PSU bike co-op today, a totally cool thing. You get access to all their repair tools, and they even have a mechanic on duty that can coach you and sell you cheap gear.

Before I retire for the evening, I'm going to say some more prayers for little Hailey. She's five-year old girl in Celia's daycare back in Juneau. Normally, she's full of joy and life and her eyes sparkle with a special brightness. Right now, she's in Harborview Medical Center in Seattle, medivaced there after being in a head-on collision with her mom and little sister. I'm not sure I believe in Justice any more, but can't there be a little piece of it somewhere around, to help this little girl and her family pull through this ordeal?

A New Home

2009-02-03T10:13:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting here on the front porch at our new home, taking in some sun. I don't understand how people can complain about the Oregon winter. I'm in my t-shirt in the sun and it feels good. Maybe they complain about the rain here just to keep the crowds away. But they haven't fooled me.

We spent all day Saturday cleaning up our old place and brought our carload of stuff over here. Then on Sunday we visited with an old friend from Juneau and went across the river to see the Super Bowl with Jessica's sister's family. So we really haven't had time to settle in yet. Some of our stuff is still in bags, as we've gradually unpacked over the last few evenings. We're still waiting for the rest of our belongings to come from the movers. Hopefully it will all arrive tomorrow.

Our new house reminds me of New Orleans. It's an older home with wood floors, a front porch the width of the house, and a layout that stretches towards the back of the house. It's in the Hawthorne neighborhood, which has lots of coffee shops, a Powell's Books, and a movie theater that sells pizza and beer, called the Baghdad Theater. I don't think I've ever lived in any place so hip before. What's especially nice is how easy it is to walk around here. Another cool thing about this place is that it comes with a cat. We're catsitting the folks we're subletting from for the next three months. Miner is an affectionate cat and seems to put up with little kids quite well. It's been a joy to see Celia and Ferguson light up every time they see him.

Yesterday, I even walked the three miles to work. It was good to get a sense of the neighborhood topography on foot. I'm looking forward to having my bike here and commuting to campus that way. On my walk yesterday I was amazed at all the bikes I saw. It felt like being in China. At the Hawthorne Bridge, there was a steady stream of bikes proceeding across the river in a continuous line. It should only take me 15 minutes to get to the office once my bike gets here.

The second move has set me back a bit in my work, but I'm continuing to absorb as much as I can through my reading. Later today I'll have statistics class and my class on research methods. I have to turn in my second homework for statistics today. For research methods, we have to perform eight observations using a rapid assessment tool. I've chosen to assess my daughter Celia using the Behavior Rating Index for Children, by Stiffman, et al. I'll measure her every Friday and Monday evening. It'll be interesting to see if there's much variation from week to week.

Using this assessment tool really shows me how subjective these tools can be. It's an admirable effort to try to capture human behavior using questionnaires and assessment forms and five point scales. But as I use this assessment tool from day to day, I find myself interpreting the questions a little differently every time. If I can change in how I approach the questions from day to day, then how must they change when used by others. It also strikes me how complex human behavior is. We are strange and mysterious creatures, aren't we?

The End of Week Four

2009-01-30T13:14:00.000-08:00

It's Friday afternoon and I'm getting ready to leave the office a little early to start helping with the moving process. We need to be out of our current place by tomorrow evening, so tonight we'll start packing our belongings and cleaning up.

It's hard to believe that my first month has almost passed. It's been a busy time, but I feel much like I am still getting into the groove of a new lifestyle down here. It'll probably seem like that for a while longer, with a new house bringing a new commute, new routines, more packing and unpacking. Luckily we'll get the rest of our stuff next week, too, which has been held in Tacoma with the moving company for the past three weeks. It's funny what you miss when you don't have it. The top three items that I miss are: 1) my espresso maker 2) my chef's knife and 3) my saucier. I think once I get these things back, I'll feel more at ease. It reminds me how central a kitchen is to my concept of a home.

It also makes me realize that we probably brought way too much stuff with us via the movers. Other than items like the ones above, we've been fine without many of our everyday belongings. It's so hard to know when you're leaving for six months, though. You probably can't really know what you're going to need until you are there. And we probably simply live with way too much stuff. Hopefully, we'll weed through what we brought down and donate a lot to charity before we take off for Alaska again. There's no sense shipping something again if we don't really need it, is there?

It's been another good week in academia. I got some good news on Wednesday when I learned I'd be getting a full refund of my tuition and textbook cost for the qualitative research class that I had to drop. With this refunded, I'll be able to take more classes next quarter. I'm already starting to think about what classes I'd like to take, and what will be most useful to me in the future.

Yesterday, I had a great conversation with David DuBois, a mentoring researcher who's also on a fellowship through the WT Grant Foundation. David was a big support to be during my application process and I've learned a lot from the conversations I've been lucky enough to have with him. His fellowship has embedded him at Big Brothers Big Sisters, both at our national office, and in the Metro Chicago agency. We are coming into this fellowship from opposite sides of the research/practice divide and it's interesting to compare notes about our experience. We talked about some possible collaboration yesterday and I'm excited to see where that might lead.

And today, I met with one of the PhD students here at PSU to start looking at some of the data gathered from participants in the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring. He showed me how to code the questionnaires using an analytical software called AtlasTi. I'm excited to dive into the data soon and try my hand at coding the questionnaires from the second year of the Institute. Hopefully we'll be able to learn something of what happened as a result of the Institute back at the participants' home organizations. I've been trying to read about qualitative research methods on my own to prepare for this. I imagine there will be a lot of trial and error as I get into this and hopefully I won't mess anything up while I am learning!

To start thinking more about how research actually gets used in a practice setting, I've also picked up this great book recently, Diffusion of Innovations, by Everett Rogers. He's an academic, but the book is written in a very clear fashion, with lots of real-world examples. So it feels rigorous but accessible at the same time. Besides helping look into how the Summer Institute has functioned to diffuse innovation, I'm hoping it gives me more ideas about how a research guidebook would best be used to diffuse concepts in the mentoring field.

Today was also my second fencing class. Class got canceled week when the teacher threw his back out. This week, we learned how to hold the saber, how to advance and retreat, and how we should stand in en garde. He made us keep poses for a very long time to start to train our muscles. I have a good feeling I will feel some muscles I never even knew about before long. It's a good class though, and I''ll be excited to test our new moves out when we get suited up next week.

Besides moving this weekend, I've got some homework for classes on Monday and Tuesday. I'll also be evaluating the applications for our new Mentoring Research Advisory Committee (or whatever it's title finally becomes) at Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. We're creating a committee of peers from around the Big Brothers Big Sisters network to read research articles, discuss them, and make recommendations to our network. It was great to see the amount of interest in research out there. We received 23 applications for eight open seats. I'll be meeting with Keoki Hansen, BBBSA's Director of Research and Evaluation, on Monday to compare our scores and pick who will be on the committee. This committee is one of the ideas I proposed in my fellowship plan and it's great to see it starting to take shape. I'm excited to see what changes this committee might bring to our national network.

Beauty

2009-01-28T10:22:00.000-08:00

It's Wednesday morning, and usually I would be spending the day with Jessica and the kids. Today, I'm on campus to attend a discussion group in the psychology department. I met a professor there and he's invited me to participate in their monthly discussion groups. This month I'm interested in attending since the paper to be discussed is on prevention research and how it gets used in the field. I'm hoping to get some ideas from the discussion on how I can think about the Summer Institute as well as my proposed research guidebook for mentoring professionals. I''ll stay home tomorrow, to be able to go see Celia at her soccer lesson in the morning and then take some phone calls from home.

I've really been enjoying my statistics class lately, and have even started to look forward to doing homework problems. I'm also trying to use the homework as a way to teach myself R, an open-source statistics program. All this statistics has brought back many of the fond feelings I had for math growing up. I was a bit of a math-head in my primary school years. At first, I loved the sense of accomplishment from solving a math problem. Having a final answer to a problem brought happiness and relief. Maybe it was an illusion, but I liked the promise certainty that working math problems held. Later, as I continued in math in high school, I began to love the beauty of math. I found logical proofs stunning in their completeness and geometry beautiful in its clarity. Surely the world is a complicated place, but math has a way of boiling it down to a more perfect whole.

I started to regain this sense of beauty as I learned about the central limit theorem. When we first starting discussing the normal distribution in statistics, it was a pretty picture, but I really didn't believe that anything in the world fell into the classical "bell curve" type picture. But then we learned that when you take a random sample of a population, and your sample is big enough, you always have a normal distribution of the sample mean. Wow. Suddenly this beautiful curve had real meaning. Suddenly the randomness of the world could be tamed with this elegant mound. Now that's something to be excited about. Maybe it's the very complexity of the world that makes such elegance appealing. Maybe that's what we are all looking for in this world - something we can hold onto that's fixed, immutable, predicable, real.

It feels good to get back to my mathematical roots. It kind of feels like finding an old self. I was well on my way to majoring in Math in college when suddenly I stopped enjoying it during my freshman year. My Differential Equations II class seemed to be all about weeding out the weak. I wanted to find beauty and instead I found competition and the desire to succeed in math to advance in the world. So I dropped Math and went to find beauty in English and History. And I really haven't used my math skills ever since. Who knows what finding this old lost self will bring to my life.

I've also continued to read whatever I can, and have lately picked up an introductory manual to qualitative research, by Corbin and Strauss, The Basics of Qualitative Research. I'm hoping this will give me enough of a background to start looking at the qualitative data gathered under the Summer Institute.

Last night I also finished Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. I highly recommend it, especially to my friends in teaching and academics. I'm not sure I believe all of Gladwell's arguments, but he provides some interesting food for thought to think about how success happens in this world. I especially liked the way he ended the book with a call to action. The world doesn't have to be this way, and maybe with a few changes, we can open up a lot of opportunity to more children around the world.

Lastly, on the food scene, I've discovered that many of Portland's good restaurants do a happy hour with reasonable priced small plates. So I stumbled into Ten-01 last night before my evening class and had some delectable cauliflower gratin and a chorizo burger with pickled shallots, provolone, and spicy red sauce. I've also found a decent coffee place near my office, called Katie's Cafe. The use Illy coffee, which always seems to make for a quality cup. And now that there's some evidence that coffee prevents dementia, I have even more justification for my caffeinated quest for excellence.

Week Four

2009-01-26T21:14:00.001-08:00

It's hard to believe that my fourth week is already here. The next thing you know, these whole six months will be over. I wonder what I can do to make this whole thing slow down...drink less espresso? Nah! That's not even worth thinking about!

Speaking of which, I've decided to go on a quest for the best espresso in Portland. This town has plenty to options to consider in that regard. I thought Seattle had a lot of coffee shops until I came here. But I've also found that the quality is pretty varied, and that I don't really like the popular local roast, Stumptown. Their espresso tastes sour to me. So I've decided I need to try all I can to find something that suits my palate, within a reasonable distance of home and campus.

So far my tops have been Spella Caffe, a food cart on SW Alder and 9th, and the coffee counter at Pastaworks on Hawthorne. Spella roasts their own beans and pours a rich and chocolately espresso. The use a ristretto shot, and I favor a little more liquid. And they are only open from 9-4. So it's not perfect, but it sure is good. Pastaworks uses Illy coffee and pulled a smooth shot. The man Illy was dedicated to perfection in coffee. He died last year, unfortunately, but his passion for the perfect cup of espresso lives on in his company.

But you don't need perfect coffee when the company is good. I was lucky on Friday to have some bad coffee with two colleagues from the local Big Brothers Big SIsters agency here in Portland (BBBS of Columbia Northwest). Seeing them was like seeing family. It reminded me of how much I miss the Big Brothers Big Sisters world and all my comrades back in Alaska. I hope to be able to connect with the local agency more in the future. I can't believe that I'm actually looking forward to being part of their Bowl For Kids' Sake in a few months. It'll be a fun way to get to know their agency a little better and raise money for their high-quality organization.

Friday also brought a fantastic lunch with an old friend. We went to Clyde Common, a stylish European gastro-pub near Powell's Books. They restaurant is quite open, with long benchlike tables set for community seating. The kitchen is open to view and you can even talk to the cooks. They use local seasonal ingredients and assemble them into pub food with significant panache. I had one of the best oyster po-boys I've ever eaten there (and as a Louisiana boy, I've eaten my share). They called it a po-rich girl, and they added bacon and red pepper aioli. My only wish is that it had more oysters. The chef said that people here didn't like it so rich, so she had to cut back on the oysters. The food is great here, but I guess it's not Louisiana.

Okay, so you are starting to wonder if I'm writing a food blog and not a blog about my fellowship. Well, it couldn't hurt to write a little about food now, could it? It's kind of hard to separate out food from the experience I'm having here. I think it's been one of my biggest lifestyle changes, moving to a place that actually had decent dining options. Juneau is a wonderful place, but don't put it on your list for dining travel. For some reason, a dining out culture just hasn't taken hold in Juneau.

I'm actually a little overwhelmed by all of the food options here. It's starting to make me kind of twitchy. How will I try it all in our limited time here? How will I avoid spending all our money on viands and tasty beverages? I really started to worry when I discovered that we will be soon living near Pastaworks, a high-end Italian deli on Hawthorne. It brings me right back to my junior year in Bologna. I can see spending way too much money there in trying to quench my nostalgia.

Besides eating, thinking about food, and planning my next meal, I've also been doing quite a bit of reading. I've been reading more youth mentoring research papers, as well as some papers on how information travels through social networks. In preparation for looking at data from the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring, I am reading what I can on how research gets used in practical settings. It seems like a very large field of inquiry. I'm trying to get my hands on Diffusion of Innovations, by Everett Rogers, one of the seminal works in the field.

On Friday, our reading group had a great discussion of "Building Relationships with Youth in Program Settings," by Morrow and Syles and "An Exploratory Study of Youth Mentoring in an Urban Context: Adolescents’ Perceptions of Relationship Styles" by Langhout, Rhodes, and Osborne. I'm still not quite convinced by Langhout, et al's findings. I feel that they made a lot of assumptions as they worked with the data gathered in the 1995 P/PV Outcome Study. And I guess I'm concerned by some of their recommendations for the field, such as "it appears that adult mentors should be trained to be less like peers and more like good parents." I can understand how they found that some structure in mentoring relationships related to positive outcomes. But I worry about comparing the role of a mentor to that of a parent. To me, that language evokes too much of a prescriptive, authoritarian role model.

As I'm learning more in my classes, I'm also starting to understand the statistical parts of these research papers more. When I first read these research papers, I had no idea what all these little greek letters stood for. Now each time I read a new paper, it seems like I am understanding just a bit more about how the paper was produced. I probably know just enough to be dangerous at this point. I'm starting to understand just enough to start to question the assumptions made by the authors, like why did Langhout drop a scale from their analysis that described how youth-centered the activities were? We know that have a youth-centered focus is a good practice for creating strong mentoring relationships. So why was this area exclueded from their analysis?

I've also been reading more of Tom's work, to be better prepared to look at the data in his recent School-Based Mentoring study. He also recommended I read
"The Test of Time: Predictors and Effects of Duration in Youth Mentoring Relationships," by Jean Grossman and Jean Rhodes. This paper, released in 2002, looks at the 1995 P/PV Outcome Study data set. The authors took the data and broke the matches into cohorts of different match length. Then they compared the outcomes of the youth across different lengths of match. As you might expect, they found that the longer matches (especially 12 months or longer) correllated with increased positive outcomes for the youth. But they also found significant negative effects from matches that closed early, including increased alcohol use among matches closing in less than six months.

This is a striking finding. This study should be required reading for every mentoring professional. As a field, we like to talk about the positive impact we can have on the lives of youth. But I don't think that we consider often enough the potential negative impact of youth mentoring. It is a fragile thing to place a stranger into the life of a child, especially a child that has faced adversity already in life. We need to know that short-term matches can have a negative effect on youth and do whatever we can to avoid disappointing youth with one more failed adult relationship in their life.

I better wind up and stop preaching. There's some statistics homework I should get a head start on. Until later.

Getting to Work

2009-01-23T06:22:00.000-08:00

It's Friday morning and I couldn't sleep past six. So I'm trying to write a bit before Ferguson wakes up. We'll see how far I get.

This marks the end of my third week at PSU. It finally feels like I'm settled in and starting to focus on the work to be done. I've had to spend a lot of the last three weeks just figuring out the logistics of life, transportation, class registration, etc. It felt like a watershed moment to have my first in-depth meeting with Tom yesterday, where we lined out some of the research projects that I will be working on under his guidance.

My drama over dropping the class seems to be coming to a close as well. I submitted the paperwork yesterday to drop the class and petition for a full refund of my tuition. I must say I was a bit upset on Tuesday when I found out that dropping a class this week means I would only be subject to a refund of forty percent of my tuition. But luckily there is a process to petition for a full refund for extenuating circumstances. And thankfully the professor helped me fill out the required forms. I am hopeful for a full refund. I also missed the deadline to return my textbook. Hopefully, the bookstore will accept my request, as well, and refund me the $140 I paid for the text that was required for the class.

I've also been processing what happened with the class more and am starting to come to a resolution. In the end, I think the professor's reaction says more about the professor than it does about me. I may have blundered a bit, but I attempted to rectify my actions. Instead of giving me some guidance and allowing me a chance to succeed in the class, the professor chose instead to eject me. This may have been done out of concern for the rest of the class. And maybe that's the fair thing. But in the end, I think I should have been given more of a shot. I think I could have learned a lot and added to the classroom discussion.

It's also been interesting to think about my reaction to the whole thing. It finally dawned on me that just because someone's a teacher in an academic setting doesn't mean that I should place so much of my self-worth in their hands. I keep thinking about the refrain of one of Don Juan, the Indian, one Johnny Vidacovich's songs:

...
Careful who you idolize
Caution when you pick a guru
Attention, look inside for the true you
...

To that point, the longer I am here the luckier I feel to have Tom Keller as my mentor. He has been incredibly supportive, helpful, and patient with me as I've undertaken this adventure. He's done so much to make this experience possible for me. And now that I'm here, he's done whatever he can to guide me and help me on my way. To top it off, he's a master in his field. January is National Mentoring Month and is a good time to take stock of all the mentors in our lives. I was glad to have a chance to thank Tom yesterday on "Thank Your Mentor Day." Making this transition without Tom's assistance is pretty much unthinkable. Just thinking about where I would be without his support and guidance here at PSU reminds me how important mentors are in my life and in all of our lives.

For our reading group today, we read two pieces about the qualities of mentors and mentoring relationships. The first is one that I've wanted to read for a while, by Morrow and Styles. It is one of four studies undertaken by Public/Private Ventures in the mid-1990's to understand the field of youth mentoring. In their piece, titled "Building Relationships with Youth in Program Settings," Morrow and Styles described their qualitative study of 82 mentoring relationships across eight Big Brothers Big Sisters agencies.

They found that the approach of the volunteers made a big impact on the longevity of the matches and the frequency of match meetings. Through their interviews, they were able to classify volunteers as either developmental or prescriptive. The developmental volunteers focused more on building the relationship with the youth while the prescriptive volunteers focused on "fixing" the youth. Understandably, the developmental volunteers were the ones better able to keep a mentoring relationship alive for an extended period of time.

It was great to finally read the piece. I had heard about these two typologies of mentoring relationships for years, so it was nice to finally go to the source and understand them more fully. One of the great things about the report is the inclusion of so many quotes from volunteers and children. As I read the different voices, I could think of so many similar statements from matches that I have gotten to know in Alaska.

The study also opens a lot of questions about what it takes to put together a successful mentoring relationship. Certainly it's important to take a developmental approach and center the match on the needs of the youth. But how much structure should the mentor provide? How does the mentor grapple with their increased level of power in the relationshi? Unlike a peer, the mentor knows more and has more control over the relationship than the mentee. So how does the mentor focus the relationship on having fun and building the relationship around the needs of the youth while also providing some of the knowledge and wisdom that comes with greater life experience?

We read another study for this week which I continue to grapple with: "An Exploratory Study of Youth Mentoring in an Urban Context: Adolescents’ Perceptions of Relationship Styles" by Langhout, Rhodes, and Osborne. I read this paper in December for a discussion of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada's Research in Trends Committee, of which I am also a member. I am still having a hard time coming to terms with the findings from this study (especially the finding that relationships characterized by unconditional support had a negative effect on youth) and I'm hoping today's discussion will provide greater insight for me.

I'm really enjoying having the time to read so many youth mentoring research papers right now. After meeting with Tom yesterday, I'm understanding how important it is for me to get immersed in the literature. Hopefully, I'll be working on two projects with him - one to look at data from a school-based mentoring program study he completed and another to look at data gathered from participants in the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring. In the school-based study, we want to look at the characteristics of the Bigs and Littles and see what effect these had on the mentoring relationship. In looking at the Institute data, we want to see how participants went back to their organizations and were or were not able to bring research to bear in their practice setting.

To prepare for helping on these projects, I need to get grounded in the literature. So I will be reading all I can about these topics. I also am eager to get immersed in the data from the different projects. It feels great to start diving in!

I'm also excited today to be reconnecting with some peers from the mentoring field, having my second fencing class, and meeting a relocated Juneau friend for lunch today at Clyde Common. It seems to be popular with the local foodie crowd here. Maybe I will post my review at a later date.

Until later.

Inauguration Day

2009-01-21T16:53:00.001-08:00

Yesterday Barack Hussein Obama became the 44th President of the United States. I watched the ceremonies at home with Jessica, Celia and Ferguson. The rest of the day was all a blur.

These were my favorite moments from the inauguration:

Seeing the amazing throng of people on the Mall.

Hearing the inaugural poem by Elizabeth Alexander. "...What if the mightiest word is love?.."

Watching Reverend Joseph Lowery close the ceremony with his benediction - " ...That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen."

Rejection

2009-01-19T21:43:00.000-08:00

Today is Martin Luther King, Jr. day and the end of a long weekend. I'm looking forward to going back to class tomorrow and getting back in the swing of my studies. We had a wonderful weekend, though, blessed by the visit of one of my old college friends and her family. And on Saturday, I got to cook for a dinner party, one of my favorite things to do. We had our weekend guests, plus some other friends in town from Seattle, and one of my other college friends who lives here in Portland. Eight adults and eight children. It was a lot less chaotic than I thought it would be, but maybe my view was warped since my head was mostly in the stew pot. I made beef in barolo, one of my favorite dishes.

sign of a full house

Unfortunately, I am ending the weekend grappling with personal rejection. It seems that I will no longer be enrolled in the qualitative research class any more, at the request of the professor. So tomorrow, I have to figure out how to drop this class and retain my full-time status, even though the add class deadline has passed.

It's been a hard experience to be asked to leave a class, particularly one that I was enjoying so much. It was really exciting to me to learn about all of the different qualitative research methods and to think about the different paradigms that inform them. I was enjoying all of the readings for the class and I found the class discussions incredibly stimulating. Probably the hardest thing of all though is to feel personally rejected by a teacher.

All my life, teachers have been important mentors to me. Starting with Mrs. Willa in the third grade, I've had a special bond with many of my teachers through the years. It seems like at every stage of my childhood, there was a teacher that provided an important source of support to me. In many ways, I think I also learned to ingratiate myself with the teacher, aiming to be the "teacher's pet." To be rejected by a teacher is something I'm completely unfamiliar with. And frankly, I'm really not sure how to deal with it.

What's also difficult is trying to understand why I'm being asked to leave. After speaking with the professor, I am just not able to add it all up. The reasons given just don't seem to compute. I'd really like to understand the situation better, so I can hopefully avoid the same mistake in the future. So I've contacted the professor again, trying to get more of an explanation.

I've also been doing a lot of kicking myself. Why couldn't I have taken more time to learn the environment, assess the situation before shooting off my mouth? Why did I get so involved in the classroom discussion, when maybe I should have taken a back seat to the regular PhD candidates? Through the years, I seem to have developed a classroom style where I ask a lot of questions and don't hesitate to interject myself in the conversation. Most teachers seem to like a lot of interaction from the students. But in this case, I seem to have misread the situation and talked too much too soon.

It's funny to look back and remember that I was afraid I wouldn't be able to keep up with the other students. But I didn't really expect that I wouldn't fit in. I've always thought of myself as someone that fits into an academic world. Maybe my 15 years in Alaska has warped my sense of reality, or changed my style into one ill-suited for academia. The term "passing" keeps coming to mind. Maybe I need to learn better how to "pass" as an academic for these next six months. But then that seems disingenuous. If I can't be myself in this environment, then I am losing the opportunity to have others learn from my experience as well. Isn't there something that I bring with my real-world experience that would be beneficial to my fellow students?

Like other rejections in my life, I'm sure I'll get over this one. But it's not really much fun. I just hope I can learn something from the experience. Maybe the days to come will give me greater insight on why this happened. Maybe as the months go by, the words of the professor will ring more and more true. And I'm sure, like all other doors that shut, this one too will open another. Now I will have more time to devote to other pursuits. I remain committed to getting the most out of my time here, to learning as much as I can over the next six months or so.

On a more positive note, it looks like we will be moving out of our current living situation at the end of the month. We found a nice little house in the Hawthorne area that scored a 95 on the walkability scale. We'll be a few blocks from a Powell's Books, Ben&Jerry's, a Fred Meyer, and lots of coffee shops. And it's only two to three miles from campus. We'll be relocating at the end of the month.

Tomorrow is also a huge day for our country. I will be thrilled to watch the inauguration of our 44th President in the morning. As I watch his speech tomorrow, my thoughts will drift north to my compatriots in Juneau. We've been through a lot together to get to this moment. How sweet it will be.

The End of Week Two

2009-01-16T18:45:00.000-08:00

It's Friday and I'm taking the bus home. Mt Hood is standing tall among the Cascades, collecting the last of the day's light in it's icy faces.

It's been a tumultuous week. I'm looking forward to visits from friends this weekend, and a little bit of a break from the intensity of my school experience. I am definitely learning a lot about making the transition from the world into the academy. I haven't been totally successful in the transition so far, but I am learning from my mistakes.

Speaking of mistakes, I was stunned to hear excerpts of President Bush's last press conference in office this week. I don't want to get political in this blog, but I simply can't comprehend his unwillingness to admit to any mistakes during the last eight years. To err is human, right? We all make mistakes. I make them daily. I only hope I can learn from them and avoid the same mistakes in the future.

Yesterday, I treated myself to some acupuncture. I had found a practitioner when I was here for the Summer Institute for Youth Mentoring. She worked on me soon after my emergency appendectomy, when I was feeling quite out of sorts. Seeing her then made me feel a lot more put back together. So I wanted to go back and see her as soon as I could. My sleep has been a wreck for the past year or so and I still suffer from TMJ. But sure enough, I slept like a baby last night, and could barely stay up past 10 pm. If you are every looking for a practitioner in Portland, I highly recommend Armstrong Acupuncture.

Today was my first day in fencing class. There are about 30 other students in this PE class. After hearing some background about the fundamentals of fencing, we practiced collapsing in case we feel faint. We also practiced our hand movements by tossing tennis balls to a partner and did a little work with a dowel in place of a saber. I think I will like this class. It should help with my concentration skills and hopefully connect my mind and body a little bit better. Maybe it will also finally give me some of the grace I've been looking for all my life.

After grabbing lunch at a wonderful Saudi food cart on campus, I needed a little pick-me-up. So I went to my new favorite place in Portland, Cacao, for a shot of european drinking chocolate. It's delicious, like drinking a melted dark chocolate bar. It brings me back to the hot chocolate I had in Italy, but it's even better. And it provides enough lift to get you through the rest of the day when you're starting to drag around the lunch hour. But my little jaunt for chocolate made me just late enough to force me to break my little rule. So instead of taking the stairs, I took the elevator to the ninth floor of my office building to meet Tom and the other graduate students in the independent study group I'm in. I promised myself I would take the stairs every day I go to the office in appreciation of the spectacular view from my desk (see photo below). But I'll probably have to break the rule every now and then in respect for others.

Our study group is planning on reading a host of research papers on youth mentoring over the next eight weeks. For this week, we read two papers which discussed some of the basic ways in which youth mentoring programs work. In reality, we know very little of how mentoring programs work to achieve impacts in children's lives. There is some theory from child development and psychology that postulates some of the processes through which mentoring operates. But a lot more study is needed to determine how mentoring programs actually function in the lives of youth. While this may be an exciting opportunity for researchers, it's a little frustrating from a practitioner's point of view. It would be wonderful to know exactly how mentoring works so that we can adjust it to have the maximum impact for each child we serve.

We started a very interesting discussion about the qualities of successful mentors. So next week, we're going to read one of the fundamental studies on youth mentors, by Morrow and Styles, as well as a more recent study looking at the amount of structure provided by different mentors and how successful they are.

Wednesday

2009-01-14T21:57:00.000-08:00

First off, I'd like to thank everyone who's been reading my blog and letting me know about it. It's especially nice to see people post comments here. Please feel free to respond to what I am writing about, especially if you think I'm full of it, or if I am missing something obvious. I'd like this blog to not only help me reflect on my experience and let others follow along, but also to allow others affect and help direct my experience by giving me suggestions and responding to what I am writing about.

Since Monday and my experience divulging about my blog in class, I've had a lot of different thoughts about blogging. It was interesting to ask my other two classroom professors about how they felt about my blogging about class. Neither of the other two had any qualms about it. One professor said it wasn't a problem as long as I wrote about positively about them (with a smile). The other responded with shrugged shoulders and said,"I don't care. It's about freedom of speech."

I've also researched online, and it seems that the idea of a blogger's code of ethics has been swirling about without a clear resolution. I guess that would be a hard thing to resolve right? It's probably hard to imagine a more independent class of citizens than bloggers. Maybe Alaskan handtrollers, I don't know. In any event, a few people seemed to have attempted to put together a code of ethics, and debate has ensued. One that I liked from an organization called Cyberjournalist.net can be found here. Interestingly, some undergraduate students in Singapore even studied the question of ethics in blogging in 2005. A post describing their research can be found here.

Since many of bloggers think of themselves as quasi-journalists, a lot of these ethics codes pertain to journalistic practices. The authors of the above-mentioned study, Andy Koh, Alvin Lim, and Ng Ee Soon divided bloggers into personal and non-personal bloggers. Personal bloggers (like me) were more likely to believe that minimizing harm was important compared to non-personal bloggers. Interestingly, both personal and non-personal bloggers felt that accountability was one of the least important of the four ethical priniciples listed. And both groups were ambivalent about the need for a code of ethics.

So I guess I'll have to figure this out on my own, without a clear standard of ethics to go by. I will do my best to minimize harm to others and respect the privacy of the people I come into contact with. But I am sure I will mess up along the way. And for that I am sorry.

When my maternal grandmother would come visit, she would always say the same thing when she left, "please forgive me if I have offended you in any way." She was a dear, sweet woman, and wouldn't have ever harmed anyone intentionally. But she cared enough about the effect of her actions that she always apologized, whether she caused harm or not.

I would hope that anyone I offended would let me know and let me make amends. But it doesn't always work like that. And I could harm someone in this blog and they might never know about it. But they would still be harmed. It's a tricky business. Like with the rest of life, I guess you just do your best to act justly, thinking critically about your actions, and pray for forgiveness for your shortcomings.

As for my classes, things are going smoothly. I feel myself getting more into the groove. Today was my day at home, and I tackled my first piece of homework for statistics. I actually enjoyed doing the problems. It feels good to use the math side of my brain again, which has probably withered much since I gave up my mathematical passions as a freshman in college. I've also been trying to keep up on my reading. As I get into the workload, I'm impressed at how much work these PhD students can put in. Time will tell if I can keep up.

On Tuesday, I signed up for fencing class for PE. I added an hour of PE to round out my schedule to a full-time load of 12 credits. I thought it would be fun to try something that I might not ever have the chance to do again. I really wanted to sign up for water polo, but the times conflicted with my class schedule. So on Friday, I will get my first introduction to the world of epees. Those who know how much of a klutz I am may be concerned. Here again, I will do my best to do no harm. En garde!

A Stopping Point

2009-01-12T20:31:00.000-08:00

Today was a tumultuous day. For starters, I needed to get downtown in time to mail my film off to the JUMP film festival in Juneau. Entries are due tomorrow, so I figured that I could overnight mail it today if I got to Fedex in the morning. I spent the wee hours Friday and Saturday nights editing so it would be ready for submission. I am still figuring out which open source programs are good and which ones are buggy. The first video editor that I was using (Kino) would crash on me literally every time I used it. So I switched to KDenlive which seems to be marginally more stable. It was so frustrating to lose my work time and time again on Saturday night. I finally learned to save my work after every change I made to the project, but it was still annoying to have to restart the program every 10 minutes.

Thanks to edits from Jessica and a few friends, I finally got it into decent shape and it was ready to send this morning. I got to FedexKinko's (when did that happen? last time I used them in college, they were two separate companies...) in plenty of time to print off the submission form and mail it off. But then I re-read the submission guidelines and figured out I needed to send it in a different format. So I bought another CD and began to burn another copy. Waiting for that, I decided to multi-task and check my email. Wrong. My computer froze up and I had to spend precious time re-booting and getting things back in order. So when I finally got ready to mail it off, my class was about to start. Then the Fedex people told me it would cost $36 and they couldn't even guarantee overnight to Alaska (even though there are daily flights between Seattle and Juneau...). Outraged, I ran over USPS and sent it Expressmail for a cool 16 clams. All this to say I had to run to class and I was still ten minutes late. I hate being late. Punctuality is a value I hold dear.

I apologized to the teacher and tried to catch my breath. Again the class presented a terrifically engaging subject matter. Before long I was caught up in the discussion and remembered that I wanted to ask my classmates how they felt about my blog. It seemed to be very appropo to the subject matter, which dealt with how to think about research through all of the possible paradigms. Central to new theories of research is how research subjects can participate in knowledge creation. I should have thought how to approach this better, but at the time it seemed the right thing to do. So right during the discussion, I broached the subject of my blog and asked the professor and classmates how they felt about me writing about the class.

Boom. I had just dropped a bomb. We spent the next half hour discussing the topic, as I felt more and more remorseful. Looking back, I should have brought the subject to my professor before class and ask how to handle the topic. It would have given the teacher an opportunity to direct me in the best way to broach the subject. Instead, I took up valuable class time with this topic and created a spirited debate.

So I need to re-think this blog. I need to figure out how I can write about my experience while respecting the privacy of others and honoring the precious space of the classroom.

When I first conceived of the blog, it was to help me reflect on this fellowship experience and help others connect with what I am doing here and possibly learn through my experience. I had envisioned recording my interior monologue during this fellowship to help me make sense of what I am encountering here. But as I blog more, I find myself wanting to write about my interactions with others. Clearly, I am not alone in this endeavor. But what are the ethics of writing about others in this public space? Before mentioning someone in my blog, I need to get their consent. But what about the other issues? Can I write about the ideas that I discuss with others without infringing on their intellectual property rights? By keeping a blog and letting others know about it, how does that change their interactions with me? Will they have their guard up more? Will they feel as free to be forthright with me?

It also makes me reflect on my role here in an academic setting. I have a hard time being quiet, as many people know. So I have enjoyed geting involved in the classroom discussion and responding to the teacher's questions. But today, it was like I rolled a hand grenade into the class. So I am rethinking how I need to approach this experience. Here I am, inserting myself into a small cohort of PhD students. They are building a shared experience and an intimate intellectual discovery. And there I go disrupting everything and pulling their inquiry off-course.

So then I thought I should be quieter, and try to attend class and not ask any questions. I vowed to be more of a wallflower for the next class. But that didn't last long. Before I knew it, there I was again asking questions of the professor.

So I'm still wondering how to approach my classes. How can I get the most out of this experience and not negatively affect the experience of others? I will need to think some more about this.

So I'll end this entry still a bit flummoxed. On the positive side, I did figure out the school pool today, which was remarkably empty over the noon hour (followed up with some excellent falafel from a street vendor). It's comforting to start to get my exercise regimen in order. I think it's been one of the stresses of the move to lose my routine. I'm gradually figuring out when I'll have time to run and swim, and that feels good. I even found a trail that traverses some nearby parks on Saturday (complete with a few resident coyotes, it seems).

Celia is eager to see the coyotes. Maybe we will look for them tomorrow before I go back to campus.

Possibilities

2009-01-10T00:47:00.000-08:00

Today was another day of opening new possibilities. It was Friday, and I started out the day with a meeting with Michael Garringer and his colleagues from the National Mentoring Center. I had spoken with Michael during my project development about the idea of a research handbook for mentoring professionals. He was very supportive of the idea and helped me write the project into the fellowship budget.

Today, I visited with Michael and his colleagues and we talked about the possibilities of such a guidebook. After talking with them in detail, it actually seems that such a manual would fill an unmet need. There are many mentoring programs around the country being started without any idea of the existing research on mentoring programs. There also seem to be a lot of professionals in the field who could use a guide to help them understand how to read research papers and also gain a better grasp of research principles that can be adapted into their everyday work. There have been a few attempts to synthesize the research into salient bits for practitioners, but the field seems to lack more of a practical, how-to guide to bringing research more fully into program practice.

It was exciting to talk to the friendly folks at the NMC and think about the possibilities of the guidebook. They loaned me some materials from their library and invited me back to use their facilities if I needed them. I hope to get a good sense of what resources are available in general to the mentoring field, so that I can do the best I can not to duplicate something that's already been published.

I also had the first meeting of my colleagues in the independent study group that Tom has put together. I will be meeting with Tom and two graduate students once a week to discuss research articles that we're reading and other projects. We're going to start out grounding ourself in some of the mentoring research, and then work to incorporate readings on each of our areas of interest. This group will help further our individual projects, but also I think create some great synergy between the four of us. I can already sense that this will be a dynamic group and create more possibilities of inquiry for me during my fellowship.

I closed the day at a potluck party held at the home of my office, the Regional Research Institute. It was nice to meet some of the people I will be seeing on a daily basis and break bread with them. Unfortunately, I couldn't make anything, but I did happen upon a breathtaking chocolate store a few blocks from the office. And even better, the chocolate bar that I brought was barely touched, so I have leftovers for weekend munching!

I'm not sure if it has to do with the fellowship, but I feel like I'm entering a more creative phase in my life. Just last week, I entered a poetry contest in Juneau. I've never submitted a poem for anything before. This contest is one that results in poetry being placed in Juneau's buses. I always love reading poetry on the bus. And this weekend, I am working on a video to submit to a local film festival in Juneau. Maybe it's just coincidence that all this productivity is happening as I start my fellowship, but I don't think so. I hope that I can find more creative outlets throughout this fellowship and beyond.

Digging In

2009-01-08T15:46:00.000-08:00

It's Thursday of my first week of school and I can't really believe I'm here. I feel like a kid in a candy shop, like a convict released from prison, like a refugee arriving on friendly soil. I mean no disrespect to the job I've left. I just feel so lucky to be here that the air is just that much sweeter, even though I'm in the city. And I can't get this silly smile off my face.

On my second day of class, I got a little deeper into numbers with my second statistics class. We learned a few basic concepts and then went to the computer lab to enter some data into SPSS, a common statistical software. With the fellowship, I purchased a new computer for my use here and beyond. I took the bold move to go Microsoft-free and loaded Ubuntu 8.10, a version of Linux on my new machine. It is wonderful to be in the open source community and this machine works like a racehorse. But now I'm wondering if I should purchase SPSS for this computer, or if I should learn R like my buddy Charles is recommending. R is an open source statistics program that seems a bit hard to learn, but also seems much more powerful. I guess I need to figure out if it's worth my time to learn R or if I should just stick to using SPSS on the computers in the lab here and keep my new machine totally open source.

But I digress. After statistics, I took the streetcar down to one of Portland's holy sites, Powell's Books. I remember it from an earlier visit. I think the only way to approach the place is to go there with one book in mind. If you try to explore the whole store or just wander around, it's enough to make your head explode. Since I couldn't find a used copy of the textbook I needed, I got out of there as quickly as I could to mitigate any undue damage to my pocketbook, and indeed my brain.

On the way back to campus, I needed to grab some food before my three hour class that started at 5:30. I stumbled upon Kenny and Zukes, a seemingly upscale Jewish deli in downtown Portland. They served me probably the best reuben I've ever had outside of Katz's deli. It had a pile of some amazing pastrami on it. Like my cousin Joe used to say, "it's the meat that makes the sandwich."

Fully sated, I sat in on my first class on research methods for social work. I'm taking this class to get a broad sense of how research methods can apply to social work. I've also chosen the professor for this class with an eye to getting some ideas about the research guidebook that I'd like to write. This professor does a good job of boiling down research methods into its essential elements. As I start thinking about a guidebook that will help other mentoring professionals incorporate research practices into their daily work, learning how someone else simplifies research methods for a broad introduction seems like a good opportunity.

This class is taught for MSW students and it's interesting to see the difference from the PhD classes I'm taking. The professor is a fun guy and it very much trying to draw the class into the subject matter. The smaller classes for PhD students seem already to have the engagement of the students and are maybe a bit more suited to having engaged debate within the class. It's good to see the difference and understand how research methods are presented to different levels of graduate students. I think it will help me conceive better of the different audiences for research and how this new world of academics operates as a whole.

On Tuesday, my mentor Tom Keller also showed me my new office.
Tom has two offices on campus and is letting me use the one he hardly uses. It's at the Regional Research Institute, an organization affiliated with PSU that does a lot of social work research. As I sit here and type, I can't believe that I actually have a view out of my office window, let alone a view from the 9th floor of the Willamette riverfront and Mt Hood on a clear day.

I've had lots of crappy offices in my time working at Big Brothers Big Sisters. When I first started, I had a window office. But then we started growing so quickly and space was at a premium, that I always took the smaller offices for privacy and gave my employees the bigger ones with windows to share. I once worked in a room with no windows slightly bigger than a closet. My last office was roomy, but it only had a tiny window that looked out onto another building. If it was a rare sunny day, there were about 10 minutes each day where I could feel the sunshine bounce off of the windows of the building next door and onto my face. So I will enjoy this spot immensely while I am here.

Today, Tom and I met again to talk about our work together. We are conceiving of two research projects to work on together. One that I will help on is analyzing some of the data gathered from participants in the 2007 Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring, which I attended. We want to see how participants went back to their practice setting and were or were not able to apply some of the research concepts that they learned at the Institute. I think that Tom is hoping my perspective as an attendee will provide some insight into the data gathered from the other participants. He also wants to get my ideas on helping design the 2009 Institute, which is thrilling to me since that's where this adventure of mine first took off.

We also want to look more closely at some of the data he's collected in a previous study of a Big Brothers Big Sisters school-based mentoring program. We want to look at the characteristics of the Bigs and the Littles and see how these impacted the strength and quality of the mentoring relationships. I am very excited by this topic since it seems to me we know very little about what makes for a good match. We match our Bigs and Littles primarily based on shared interests, geography, and parental concerns. But we know very little about what personality types make the best match or what questions we should ask during our participant interviews to get the right information to make the best match. It's exciting to think that I might be able to help build some useful knowledge for the mentoring field while I learn the ropes of writing a research paper.

Tomorrow, I'm going to meet with Michael Garringer at the National Mentoring Center to discuss my fellowship at the guidebook project in particular. I am hoping to use the resources of the center to publish the guidebook and disseminate it in the field. Then I will have the first meeting with Tom and my colleagues in our reading seminar. Two graduate students and myself will be immersing ourselves in the literature of youth mentoring research. Finally I will have a justification to read all those articles I've been wanting to read and the time to do it! This seminar will also provide a good foundation for the literature review I'll need to do in preparation for the research paper.

First Day of School

2009-01-05T20:54:00.001-08:00

Today was my first day of classes. I feel like my brain has been stretched like a balloon, with a hand inside of it pushing and poking. It was a great day and I feel like my mind's appetite has been whetted and is now hungry for more.

My day started with navigating Portland's transit system to get to campus. I figured out which bus line to take and ambled out of the house with plenty of time to spare. When I got to the right corner, it took me a while to figure out where I was supposed to stand. Then I remembered I was supposed to have gotten bus fare before I left the house. I looked in my wallet and all I found were twenties. At this point, the bus was going to come in ten minutes. I could have raced home and tried to make it back in time for the bus, but I surely would have missed it. My other options were to beg the bus driver or pay make an $18 donation to the Tri-Met system.

So instead, I started waving a twenty dollar bill at the motorists who stopped at the stop sign. Probably five of the twenty cars who stopped rolled down there window enough for me to ask if they could break a twenty. The driver of the fifth car didn't have change but asked me how much I needed and handed me the two dollars. I asked "you're just going to give me this?" He replied, "yeah, Merry Christmas." I decided then there that these Oregonians are a friendly bunch. Granted, it probably would have been different if I didn't look like one of the area's mostly white middle class residents. But still I found the gesture quite welcoming and another good omen for our time here.

When I got to campus, I had enough time before my meeting with Tom to attend to some of my student life details. I went to the registration desk and made sure I was signed up for all the right classes. I got a student id, figuring this was probably good for all sorts of discounts. And I paid for a three month student pass on Portland's transit system.

Next I made my way over to Tom's office in the Graduate School of Social Work. It was great to see him again and start our work together. I could see the excitement in his face when he greeted me. We got started right away discussing what we wanted to accomplish together these six months. We looked at my class list and what research topics we wanted to pursue together. While we were talking about some of his previous studies, it suddenly struck me that I needed to learn not just about statistics and quantitative research, but also qualitative research. Some of his previous work that we had talked about digging into together involved qualitative research. I had also been quite impressed with some of the qualitative research presented at the 2007 Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring, particularly that of Renee Spencer.

So Tom and I looked at the offerings for qualitative research and figured out that the class would start in about twenty minutes. So we tried to track down the professor to see if she would let me into the class. We raced across campus, and found that the room assignment had changed. When we found the right classroom, the professor was very accommodating and welcomed me into her class.

It was thrilling. The class was small, with only four other students. All the other students were first year PhD students in the School of Social Work. When the professor introduced the course and said we would be exploring where philosophy and theory intersect with the mechanics of research, I knew I wanted to be there. Soon we got into questions of: what defines research? how do we find the truth? is there such a thing as truth? My mind lurched and keeled around, trying to get its bearings as it spun around in circles. This was exactly the kind of environment that I was looking for, one it which it's okay to ask the big questions, where it feels good to make my brain work in new and different ways, where my assumptions about the world are challenged and I have to look at life anew.

The two hours flew by and soon it was time to go to lunch. I remembered the Vietnamese restaurant nearby and dropped by for some yummy take out pho. I brought it over to the computer lab to get hooked up with my computer account and most importantly wireless access. Unfortunately, the system was down, so I went and ate my soup on the quad and watched people.

My next class was a statistics class for social work researchers. Very different than the earlier class. But again, my mind started to spin as we discussed the ethics of conducting research and how important it is to follow principles when engaging human participants in social work research. I thought about my work at Big Brothers Big Sisters and asked myself if we followed these principles when conducting our own program evaluation.

I think we do pretty well in the area of informed consent and confidentiality with data at Big Brothers Big Sisters. But on the issue of voluntary participation, it gets a bit grayer. Sure we will allow a parent to opt out of a survey if they aren't comfortable. But at at a basic level, there is some information that we have to know to be able to serve a child in our program. So in effect, participation in our program requires us to collect information from a child whether the parent wants it or not (like the child's birthday and information collected during match support conversations). This might not be the perfect situation, but we aren't conducting a major research project, just trying to serve the children in our program the best we can.

So where do you draw the line? Where do you say that this information is necessary to our ability to serve your child in our program - and no, you don't have to give us that information if you don't want to. I am sure that I will have many more questions like this in the months to come, and I am looking forward to all the conversations I will have on these topics with my new peers.

Tomorrow is another session of statistics, and my first class in research methods for social work. Plus Tom will be showing me my office for the next six months. Another exciting day awaits!

Arrived

2009-01-04T20:37:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in the living room of our home for the next six months. We arrived in Portland yesterday after a three day ride on the ferry and a day in Seattle. We found a nice place in a residential neighborhood in Southwest Portland. It's the home of a PSU professor in Poland for a six month sabbatical. The timing was perfect and it is wonderful to have a fully furnished, comfortable home to house our little family.

It's interesting to inhabit someone else's home temporarily, though. I wonder how it will feel as the months progress. Will this start to feel like home, or will it always feel like we are just passing through? Will I remain an interloper and be happy to leave at the end of these six months? Or will I have started to put down roots by then and feel torn when it's time to go?

The ferry ride was a nice way to travel, particularly at this time of year. This winter has been cold and snowy, and the roads through Canada would have been challenging. Being with small children in a car for seven days would have been its own adventure, as well. On the ferry, we could walk around with the kids, catch a movie or two, recreate in the small play area, and even play games in our cabin. We were also fortunate to make friends with another couple from Haines, Alaska, who had two small children. My five-year old daughter Celia played with Galen, an energetic four-year old. And my 16-month old son Ferguson, didn't quite know what to make of 18-month old Miranda, but enjoyed her company nonetheless.

We couldn't have asked for better weather on the ferry. The short winter days were clear and mild, and the biggest seas we encountered were only four to five feet tall. It's rare to find such smooth sailing along the Inside Passage in the middle of winter. Typically the North Pacific churns out storm after storm this time of year. We were worried how Jessica would fare on the ride, since she gets motion sickness on many of our road trips. But she did just fine and we never even had to break out the seasick bands.

After spending the morning in Bellingham and interviewing some of the residents we met, we were able to spend the day in Seattle on the birthday of one of our good friends from Alaska. He moved south seven years ago and is now a successful school administrator on Mercer Island. He and his wife have two adorable sons. We are hoping to see them several more times during our time here.

One of the special bonuses for our time here will be the chance to reconnect with friends like Mark and our family. Another of my dear friends from college lives about two miles away. She was quite surprised to see me at her church this morning. I had found the church on the internet last night and had no idea Maureen even went to church. It felt like an auspicious start to our time here, to find the right church so soon, connected to dear old friends. Then later today, we went into Washington to visit Jessica's sister Jona, her husband Jeff and my two nieces, Lindsey and Nicole. I did pretty well at Dance Dance Revolution, I must say, but I was no match for my eighth-grader niece.

Tomorrow is the first day of class and I feel a strange mix of emotions. I'm excited, a bit anxious, a healthy bit scared, and totally curious. I have really no idea what to expect. How will I fit in? Will I do well in my classes? What will my classmates and colleagues think of me? Will I just be a bumpkin from Alaska, totally out of my league? Or will I be able to hang with the rest of the academic community?

More than anything, I am curious to see what will happen. I really have no way to imagine what the next six months will be like. I know that I'll be taking a statistics class, a research methods class, and joining a reading seminar. But I have no idea what they will be like, or what it will be like to tackle my research project with Tom Keller. I am fascinated to see how this will all unfold and I am totally open to what comes my way.

On the Boat

2008-12-30T22:41:00.000-08:00

I'm sitting in front of the purser's desk on board the M/V Malaspina, one of the grand old vessels in the Alaska Marine Highways fleet. Jessica and the kids are sacked out in our berth. The wind is whistling past the windows and the vessel is starting to pitch from side to side as we enter the big water of Chatham Strait.

We left Juneau at 4:45 am this morning, after another late night of preparations. I had no idea how stressful it would be to pack our house up and ready it for our move to Portland. In the end it came down to a several late nights and even a few all-nighters. With two kids out of daycare, some of the only time we had to work were when the children were asleep.

But gradually throughout the day, you could sense the stress waning in both Jessica and myself. We've done all we can to prepare our house for our guests and to make sure we've packed the right things for Portland. And now we are stuck aboard the Alaska Marine Highway for three whole days.

It's a beautiful thing to be trapped on a boat with nowhere to go. Time slows down. Reading a book, having a conversation over dinner, fiddling with a video editor while the children sleep - all these acts come easy and don't require stealing time from some other necessary chore. Granted, traveling with children isn't quite carefree (I am scared to death that one of my kids will pop out the door while I'm not looking onto the icy outer decks). But taking a three day ferry ride gives one some luxurious amounts of time.

In addition to relaxing with my family during this ride, I hope to reflect more on what I hope to learn during these next six months. Today, as I popped off the vessel for a quick run up Starrigavan valley near Sitka, I was thinking how much I would like to improve my ability to focus. I've become a little too much of a multi-tasker, I fear. I'm wondering if academia will afford me an opportunity to hone my ability to focus on one project for an extended length of time. Already since leaving the office, I have noticed my email traffic slowing to a trickle. Maybe it won't pick back up again. Maybe I will be able to spend hours reading or writing one piece at a time, without constantly being drawn back into my inbox.

I could totally be fantasizing here, but I would like to see if I can work on this during the next six months. While our world might be a lot more efficient since we've all learned to do six things at once, I wonder how much we've sacrificed in quality. How will our society continue to produce profound works if we can't spend more than 15 minutes on any one task at a time? I think I've become pretty skilled at doing a lot during a short amount of time, but what have I given up by evading long stretches of thought focused on a single subject?

I'm sure the academic world will have plenty of distractions. And I am sure that I will invent some more of my own (like this video I am trying to produce right now). But I do hope to take the time to slow down during the next six months and learn how to go deep. If now's not the time, I'm not sure when I will ever have a similar opportunity.

Sacrifices

2008-12-24T08:18:00.000-08:00

I'm stealing a few minutes away from packing up our house (shhh...don't tell Jessica!). It's a busy week getting ready for our trip to Portland. We leave on December 30th at 4:45 am on the Alaska Marine Highway. The movers will come to get our stuff three days before. So its crunch time around here.

The end of last week was full of more emotions. One of the hardest things about leaving Juneau is thinking about the impact on my family. I am completely grateful to Jessica and my children for making the journey south to Portland with me. I couldn't imagine leaving them for even a short while to pursue this fellowship. It's also wonderful that the WT Grant Foundation Fellowship is so flexible as to allow us all to move south for six months. I reckon they realized that I couldn't have this rich research experience in Juneau, Alaska, and so are paying our way to move to Portland for six months. But even though the move won't cause our family financial strain, I do wonder about the impact on Jessica and my children.

Particularly hard was leaving Celia's preschool. She is five and has been attending the Juneau Co-op Preschool for the past three months. She attended last year as a substitute, but these past three months she's been there as a full student (three hours a day, three days a week). The teachers at the school are some of the most caring, intelligent, and devoted early childhood professionals that I've ever come across. Celia has forged a particularly strong bond with them and the school. She's also been doing exactly the work she needs to be doing there right now - learning how to interact and play well with others. This has been a challenge for her during the past year, and something that seems to have gotten harder for her at her previous day care facility. So it's hard to pull Celia from this wonderful place, just at the time that she seems to be making progress and creating good friends.

It makes me wonder whether the benefits of this fellowship opportunity will outweigh the costs. How can I say that this opportunity for me is worth more than the potential impact on my kids and spouse? Will I learn enough, will my work be important enough, to make it all worthwhile? Is it worth delaying Jessica's re-entry to the workforce so I can have this experience of personal enrichment? Is it worth removing Celia from the caring community of teachers, friends, and other families that nurtures her so well?

My hope is that moving to Portland for six months will provide Jessica and my children opportunities for their own personal enrichment. This may be my solipsism creating useful mirages. But I do think that the city will give Jessica the chance to maybe take some classes she wouldn't have otherwise had the chance to take. And we may find another wonderful preschool with just as much opportunity for Celia to learn. And the city might also provide great chances for Celia and Ferguson to have new experiences foreign to our isolated burg. I also have the sense that embarking on this adventure together will be the kind of intense experience that pulls us together and makes us stronger as a family unit.

But I still worry. And as ever the Catholic boy, I feel guilty about the sacrifices my family will be making on my behalf over the next six months and beyond.

Thank you, Jessica, Celia, and Ferguson, for taking this bold leap of faith with me. I hope the benefits to you, our family, myself, and the children affected by my fellowship activities will outweigh all that you are giving up to make this move possible.

How I Got Here From There

2008-12-16T21:53:00.000-08:00

Today was my last day in the office. At the end of the day as I packed up my family photos and cleared my desk for someone else to use, I had a strange sense of peace. I had expected to have a flood of emotions. Here I was, leaving this place where I had spent most of my waking moments over the last seven years. But now, instead of being washed over with memories of the past, I felt a serene calm.

Maybe it was the rush of work on my way out. Maybe trying to wrap up all the loose ends of my position created sort of a natural rest. It felt wonderful to unflag all the flagged emails in my inbox and clear all the tasks on my task list. While much work remains at the agency, my piece has come to a close, for now. So maybe it's okay that I feel somehow at peace.

I have been reflecting a lot lately, though. I am about to embark on a total adventure, something foreign to my life during these years of increased domesticity. Uprooting our family and moving to a new town for six months might have seemed something trivial during my younger years. But suddenly it seems like a very big deal. We're planning to come back to Juneau afterwards and I will return to the agency. But at the same time, it feels like we're stepping out into the void of change. And who knows where the void leads?

This one of the reasons I started this blog. While applying for the fellowship, it struck me that this experience may be one of huge personal transformation. In many ways, it feels like I've already started a journey. It feels like leaving for Portland and entering academia is putting my journey on an even faster track. I hope that this blog helps me reflect along the way, and make thoughtful decisions as my journey unfolds.

As I take this next step, I've been thinking a lot of my beginnings. I've been in the youth mentoring field for seven years now. Like I said in a previous post, I didn't come at this work with a real background in the field. What I've come to learn has been picked up along the way. In college, I majored in English and History, and took a heck a lot of Italian. I didn't steep myself in social work theory, by any means.

I've been trying to think of the moment when I really got excited about applying research to the field of mentoring. Real researchers may scoff at this, but I think it happened when I read Blink by Malcolm Gladwell. Reading the book, I had a rush of ideas of how we could use science to do our jobs better at Big Brothers Big Sisters. From reading Gladwell, it seemed like dating companies knew more about making the right match than we did, and we've been at it for more than 100 years. It struck me that maybe a little research could go a long way in improving our programs.

Then I had an amazing opportunity in the summer of 2007. We were just wrapping up the planning for the statewide merger of Big Brothers Big Sisters. It appeared that my job in the new agency would change from Executive Director to VP of Programs and Operations. Somehow I was recommended for participation in the Summer Institute on Youth Mentoring at Portland State University. When I learned about the institute, I knew I had to attend. It would bring five of the leading mentoring researchers together with 25 of us from the field for a weeklong seminar.

I applied for the institute and was accepted. I even got a few scholarships from Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and Portland State. I was so excited to be going. And then, a week from the start of the conference, I cooked a big dinner for my friends Eran and Sonya. I spent the whole night after the party awake on the couch moaning in pain. When I called Eran in the morning and learned that I hadn't poisoned him and Sonya as I had feared, I knew I better go to the doctor. Eight hours later, I woke up from an emergency appendectomy at Bartlett Hospital.

My first thought when I woke up was to ask the doctor if I could still travel to Portland in a week. I was so worried that the operation would waylay me and I wouldn't be able to attend the institute. I think most of my family thought I was crazy, but after getting the doctor's permission, I was committed to going to Portland. I couldn't lift my luggage, though, due to the large incision in my belly. So I had to ask strange men to lift my luggage for me. How's that for proof of my interest? I even gave up my male ego to attend the institute.

I was not disappointed. That week was the most thrilling week of professional development in my career. For once, I had the time to slow down and really think of how and why mentoring works in the lives of youth. And it was like being in school again. I got to ask all the researchers a million questions (driving my fellow participants crazy, I imagine). It was all so fascinating to me. I had no idea that there was so much research out there about youth mentoring. My brain got all fired up, just like it used to do when I was a school boy.

I also got to know the institute's godfather, Professor Tom Keller. We kept up a correspondence, and he encouraged me to apply for the Distinguished Fellows program through the WT Grant Foundation. I had no idea if I had a shot at it, or even if my wife would go along with the project. But with Tom's help and Jessica's support, I threw my name in the hat. Now, almost a year later, I am about to become a Fellow. What a ride it has been. I am excited and a little bit fearful of where it will end.

Leaving

2008-12-12T20:30:00.001-08:00

It's Friday night, and my last day of work is next Tuesday. I've asked for the last two weeks of December off so I can pack and get the house ready with Jessica. As I prepare to leave my job at Big Brothers Big Sisters, I am struck that I don't know how to say goodbye.

I've worked at Big Brothers Big Sisters for seven years now. I never knew how attached I would get to this organization and the people that work there. I will miss this place deeply.

I remember my first day on the job. I had no idea of what I was getting myself into. I was 29 years old and had gotten a job running an organization with no previous management experience. My first thought was, "what will these people think of me?" I realized that I was an outsider, that I hadn't paid any dues, and I was about to become the boss of people who knew a heck of a lot more about mentoring than I did.

That first day, it was just me, Jenny, Amber, and Natalie. There was a fellow in Sitka that had just been hired, but we were very small. I spent those first few months wondering what in the world I was doing, hoping that they wouldn't through me out on my ear for not knowing anything. I still have the "small box of courage" that my dear sister Monique sent me during my first few days on the job.

Somehow I hung in there long enough to learn a few things, I guess. Or maybe I faked it so well no one knew I was totally out of my element. Over the last seven years, I've gotten to know so many committed staff, and have shared joys and pain with many fine colleagues. We've grown into most of Southeast Alaska, and have since joined with our colleagues across the state into one team. What was once a tiny organization now employs more than fifty people statewide.

As I look to leave this organization for six months, it's my fellow staff that I will miss the most. We have so many caring, bright people working on behalf of Alaska's kids. And since we merged in August, 2007, I have had the great pleasure to work directly with many of our staff in communities across Alaska. I hope I can stay in touch, even though I will be out of state, and likely consumed by my work in Portland.

As I dive into the unpleasant but necessary task of finally cleaning my office and wrapping up my final remaining projects, I tip my hat to all the fine men and women committing themselves every day to brightening the lives of youth across Alaska.

Introduction

2008-12-11T19:35:00.000-08:00

As I write my first blog entry, I hesitate. How can it be that I am now a blogger? Do I really have something to write that can add value to the amount of information on the internet? What does this mean about me that I am about to take the plunge and be in small part responsible for the blogosphere?

These are interesting questions, and we shall see as my internet story unfolds. As I start this blog, let me dedicate myself to maintaining a true voice, careful to use my words for good, and to not get carried away with this thing.

My hopes in this blog are to give myself time for reflection as I enter into my fellowship experience made possible by the WT Grant Foundation. I hope that this blog helps me process all of the experiences that I will be exposed to over the next six months and beyond. I also hope that I can write something of interest to my peers, so others can learn through my experience. And I invite any readers that I may acquire to send me notes and help inform my fellowship experience, so that I can make sure that my fellowship activities are more relevant to the field of youth mentoring.