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.
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