Re-entry Survived

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.