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!
Saturday, February 28, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
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.
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!
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!
Sunday, February 22, 2009
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.
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.
Wednesday, February 18, 2009
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!
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!
Saturday, February 14, 2009
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.
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
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
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"
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 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" Thursday, February 5, 2009
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?
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?
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
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?
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?
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