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.