sara skates

So in my last post I vented about juggling too many things at work and not quite having a handle on how to keep everything all up in the air.  Cate pointed me in the direction of the Creating Passionate Users, where Kathy Sierra had posted about mind mapping software.

Holy cow.

It’s phenomenal.

Partly, I was stressing out about not only the regular hum of a semi-new job that is just busier than that of typical faculty (not to say that faculty aren’t busy, it’s just a very different kind of busy – I don’t carry student/teaching stuff with me in this new job; I do have to juggle lots of seemingly unrelated details all at once).  In addition, I’m prepping for a week-long teaching gig in Mexico – on the topic of bilingual deaf ed. 

The topic (being the root of my dissertation and all) floats my boat, but coming up with a week of classes is intense.  While poking around the Mindjet website, I kept thinking "Wow, this would be great to use while designing a course."  But then I’d think "but I don’t have enough time to tackle learning a new software package – I’ll wait til after Mexico."  Mindjet, however, has a library of case studies of how folks in various professions have used their software – and I happened upon a faculty’s member’s story….I was hooked.

Because not only can you organize an entire course conceptually and visually on ONE page, you can also link the heck out of supporting materials – graphics, other files (text, PDF, excel, etc.), websites, and you can embed notes to yourself (think lecture expansion material), and all sorts of other things.  So in the first night I came up with this (a PDF export of my mindmap):

Download week_plan.pdf 
Download Overview.pdf

- what is linked to for Monday’s class session
Download contextualized_and_decontextualized_use_of_language.pdf

- Wednesday’s class session

That’s the week’s overview, plus two of the 5 class sessions mapped out in lecture-ready detail.  Plus I had two more roughed out the next day.  Nothing is hot-linked in the PDF files, but the little paperclips link to the fuller daily sessions, as well as in-class exercise files and the like.  And there are website links too.

And holy heck but I never knew how hard it was to unpack the entire conceptual plan of a lecture into outline/powerpoint format.  Doing it with these visual concept "mind maps" is practically a breeze in comparison.  The stress-fest is gone – I have utmost confidence that I’ll be able to pull together a coherent set of class sessions, and enjoy it to boot.

Other features of the software allow linking to Microsoft Outlook components (contacts, appointments, tasks, etc.) – imagine the project management possibilities.  I mapped out my rather vast to-do list today at work – clustering things that belonged together, and linking to supportive materials.  I predict fewer episodes of chasing around after "dropped juggling balls" in my future.  Not just because this pulls all of my stuff together in one place electronically, but because managing paper lists of things to do and information will be a thing of the past.  You know how you have a to-do list, and you cross off half of it, but new things need to get added, so you start over?  When I do that – I inevitably leave something off of the new list.  I can now check that off as a problem I won’t have to deal with anymore

This weekend has been rather mind-blowing quite honestly.  I can do the linear "outline" format well – really well – I program SAS code after all, which requires a pretty well-developed set of linear logic skills.  (Not all coding is linear; arrays and macros and sql parts of programming add overlays of non-linear conceptual logic; however – SAS code and I’m sure other programming languages do rely on a rather high level of linear logic).  I have taught semantic mapping tools to future deaf ed teachers – it is a tool used a fair amount in K-12 education.  But I’ve never seen it used at the higher ed/teaching and analysis level.  Light dawns on marble head for goodness sakes – it just makes sense.

And it makes a less stressed Mama Sara   In the premenstrual crazies week, that’s saying something.  I am also drinking a fair amount of this – Get a Grip Tea.  It’s not my favorite taste (I think because of the bit of licorice in it), but I figure it can’t hurt so why not.  This one though tastes really yummy, but then I’m a sucker for vanilla/almond.

And work is buying me this so mind mapping beware!

I am sitting in my hotel room, the last night that I am in Chicago at a conference.  This conference has been a blast.  First off, Cate and her colleague Minh have been here too – and hanging out with them more or less perpetually has been a real joy.  Minh is a sociologist of many topics, and is endlessly intersting to talk to.  We got three adjoining rooms, and while it took a day before we could get one of the adjoining doors open, I tell you – staying in a hotel but shacking up with buddies while still having your own bed – it’s hard to beat.  We walked miles – mostly in search of food, but also yarn (wow, what a lot of lorna’s laces…), clothes (shoes and tye dye for me), and kid-inspired stuff (one each, not the whole set…).  We session-hopped together, knitting our way through the interesting talks we sat through.  (News flash:  Socks progress a heck of a lot faster when you spend several hours before and after lunch and in the evening knitting them.) 

Tomorrow, I skate with a friend of mine and then head home.  Next week will be a bear to get through – I am half of a keynote presentation on Tues, and I have a meeting at 9 am Monday with a bevy of folks in town for another conference altogether – we are meeting to share updates on all of our respective work on employment of deaf folks.  My part considers some fabulous results we are getting from a collaboration with the Social Security Association – we send them admissions and registration information about all of our students (including ones who never came here, but who went through the admissions process), they send up grouped and tabulated data on their age 20-50 income, employment, and enrollment on disability rolls.  News Flash:  College degrees make a difference.  (Bet you didn’t know that…).  Beyond those two key meetings in the early part of the week, I’ll have to dig out from being gone for most of this week, as well as complete a few things in the to-do pile that have been waiting a while.

But, I miss the kids, and I have about exhausted enjoying Chicago without a car and without folks to play with – so home it is.  I will close with a cautionary note:  Knitting socks out of this yarn is pretty close to experiencing some sort of nirvana.  I initially thought the aloe- and jojoba-infused yarn was a gimic – but it is the most delicious hand-feel while knitting.  Which makes the process of knitting all the more "aaahhhhhh" – I’m off to do more right this minute.

On the work front – things are *frenzied*:

*I leave for Chicago on Monday afternoon for a conference.  It’ll be a good time – my first in the field of Institutional Research (not that I haven’t been on the periphery for like ever), friends there, the potential for a knitting "special interest group", and quite probably a skating session or two with Chicago skating friends.  The beauty of online friendships is that conference travel nearly always has a friend or two in the area.

*I’m late with handouts and overheads/powerpoints for a teaching gig I have in Mexico the second week of June – they’d like to have a minute to translate them.  Which I utterly understand but they’re just not ready yet.  What was I thinking taking Russian while in grad school rather than Spanish…I mean, I had a year of Spanish in high school, but that’s not going to take me very far.  For the 4 languages I speak fairly fluently, and the 3 others I have college coursework in – you’d think Spanish would be in there somewhere, but no such luck.  I’m excited about the teaching gig – I’ll be working with deaf education teachers in Mexico and talking about stuff I did my dissertation on – but between here and there, there’s a lot to do.

*I found out the week before last that I am a co-presenter for a keynote at a conference to State Coordinators for the Deaf – here, shortly after I return from Chicago.  I have a conference call with my co-presenters tomorrow.  I *think* we’re in good shape as we have presented before – but this is cutting it close to the wire by just a wee bit.  There was much confusion while sorting out that I was to be in on this presentation – details were bubbling up and my boss jokingly said "well Sara, let me know if you’re a keynote".   Ha ha very funny – he really was kidding.

*While by the end of last week (somehow I kept my entire week clear of meetings last week – subtext, I got a lot of work done) my To-Do file was nearing "thin" (done) status, it has blown up this week.  I have a list a page long of Institutional Research requests.  None will take forever, all will take longer to do than I have time before I leave to Chicago.  I have been actively acquiring skills at managing such a slate of things in progress.  The to-do file was the first stab (electronic files, email, and select things in a folder), and the check list was this week’s addition.  I had to say "No" to someone today – although it was mostly b/c their deadline was quite tight – they had a pamphlet going to press and they wanted a new graph for it.  You know, right now.  The graph is not the problem – it’s finding and generating the data points that they wanted.

*on the good side, we got our contract letters today (for next year).  As per the current policy at my institution, raises are conditional on the "21-day enrollment report" in September.  Meaning, if the university’s enrollments meet their targets, we get our raises.  For the 2 years since this policy has been in effect, we’ve met the targets and gotten our raises – but I tell you, the process kind of deflates the excitement of a raise, if you know what I mean.

On the home front, things are good.  The school year is screaming to a halt.  Some summer camp things have been organized, a few other options need pursuing.  The house is getting a quantity of long overdue attention.  Exterior painting is progressing slowly.  A giant pod of rotten willow trees have been culled from the yard — it’s rather sad – it was a wonderful huge tree – or set of trees – the tree doctor said that he had seen larger individual willow trees before, but this set took the cake in terms of tonage of wood carted away.  Three of the 5 or 6 trunks were in danger of falling on houses, we were hoping to save the remaining ones, but they were pretty rotted too.  We have joined the minions of minivan owners – largely because Toby can get himself into his seat without much lifting on our part.  As Terry and Rhys continue to say re minivans, "hey, it’s not that bad".  Hannah likes the less deep bench seats as she does not need a booster seat in them   Yup, we kept her in a booster til well after her 9th birthday.  Terry is much happier – we punted a lot of stress with selling our house in CT and getting out from under that – and other sources of "not right" in our and her life are sorting themselves out.

That’s about it.  I’m getting going with the PT program – 4 months of 1-on-1 with my wunder PT – who has developed quite the plan.  Skating is low key given the shut-down season of many area rinks – which makes for peppy jumps when I do find ice (well-rested legs and all that).  I’m giving my coach a few gray hairs with double salchow attempts – when I pull everything together, they are just shy of being landed, but that’s a pretty big if and she just doesn’t like seeing the geriatric crowd flinging themselves on the ice.  My collection of bruises has been rather impressive lately.

By all accounts, summer will be not quite so frenzied.  I don’t believe it yet…we’ll see after I weather my first summer on this job. 

All in all, things are good – just busy!

Today is the day – Blogging Against Disablism Day.  I’m treating the topic fairly randomly – I had big aims of writing something coherent and unified and thought-provoking, but that didn’t happen.  This post on the language of disability did a good job at that though – it distinguishes the UK use of the term "disabled people" (‘disability’ refering to the ‘practical, political and social barriers’, not the physical (etc.) ‘impairment’ – in contrast to the US/Canadian use of "person with disability".  In the latter, the person is put first – and the disability is at its core a medical or physical phenomenon (not a societal experience).  It’s worth a read.

As the parent of a child with CP – his issues with the world include both physical issues (he does a lot of PT and work to maximize his muscles learning how to work as effectively as possible) as well as social/practical issues.  In the long run, we are fully confident that he will be a loved grownup who contributes to society by having an interesting job and interacting with a social community of his choosing.  We are also fully aware that he’ll have an extra piece of "stuff" to sort through psychologically.  I was talking to a colleague at work today (a faculty member at this college that has a large contingent of deaf students), who has a student with CP – this student was just coming to terms with a whole host of questions, like:
    Why did the CP happen? 
    When did it happen? 
    Why did it happen to me? 
    How can it be that these questions are unanswerable?
    What does it mean?
In some ways – Toby is already starting to ask about stuff like this.  A few months into this school year, we had a few interchanges where he essentially was asking when he would be done having CP and when he would be able to walk and run and jump like all the other kids.  Since it was his first experience included in a classroom of mostly typical children, I was not surprised that he was starting to grapple with the topic – and additionally, his head had popped to a new cognitive level so it was able to ponder such issues.  In the last month or so, the questions have changed – now he wants to know why we picked HIM as a baby, how we ended up with him, why we wanted someone with blond hair and a boy and who looks like him – essentially – how *he* specifically came to be and why.  He’s also stuck in a bit of a self-deprecating loop – saying "I’m ugly" or "You don’t like me" or "I’m not cute".  Really he’s at a new level of figuring out his place in the world – where he has a few less commonalities with the other kids at school than he sees that they have with each other.

Of course, our only responses involve trying to answer him at his level.  "Toby, Mama Sara and Mama Terry loved each other very much and we wanted a baby.  We lucked out and got the best Toby that could be – a beautiful blondie boy with a great belly laugh who is always singing and no, we didn’t have a choice about whether he would be a boy or not, and he has to work pretty hard at some things, but he just came that way. 

What I hope for Tobes is really not unlike what I hope for Hannah.  I hope most of all that he grows up knowing that he’s loved and knowing that he’s got a lot to offer the world.  People and their reactions to things they are not used to are at times weird – but that’s not because he’s at fault – that’s their issue.  I hope we’ll be able to give him a bit of a toolkit to react to the weirdness he’ll encounter – and that he’ll not feel "less of" a person for having a disability.  I hope he understands that while he’ll never be "able bodied" (and I feel it’s important to recognize his physical difference from most others in his life), in the end, it’s not a huge big deal.  What’s really important is that he finds good people in his life, and that he’s happy – and he has every physical thing he needs to do that.  Everyone does – no matter how severe or hidden their disability – at most they may need supports or helper-people in their lives, but they are not less capable of satisfying human interaction.  Mostly, what I hope we do well at is not ignoring his difference while bolstering his utter fabulousness.

I’m currently spending a fair amount of time finding stories of adults on growing up with a disability.  Educational and social policies have changed drastically – certainly even during my own adult years.  But it’s helpful to hear of their experiences and stories.  The web – while certainly there is a wealth of unhelpful stories out there – there are also some decent ones – here’s one on reflections from someone who went to a wedding with an example of a family doing a good job at raising a child with a mobility impairment to just keep doing what she was doing.  I picked up a copy of Home Bound:  Growing up with a Disability in America (author:  Cass Irvin) recently while on a trip to Kentucky – it’s an extremely well-written story of a polio survivor who grew up way before many accomodations for physical (or other) disabilties were the norm – before IEPs, before curb cut-outs, before funding for personal assistants, etc.  The author is excellent at highlighting things that made a difference for her (positive and negative) while growing up – both internal to the family and cultural and social events in her life.

Hannah is not without attention with respect to Toby’s disability – being the sister of a kid like Toby carries its own "stuff" with it.  She’s probably just getting old enough to benefit from some online sibling resources – discussion boards and the like.  Ditto for being a kid who has two moms – so far, it’ has been a pretty matter-of-fact issue in the house, with only a few challenging moments (one bus-mate in particular had a few interactions telling Hannah that it was "weird" and "wrong" to have two moms etc. – while Hannah thankfully told us about it, and was able to be quite clear with her feelings of being sad to hear that, it was fairly short-lived – losing her beloved Patrick dog was a much bigger issue).  For her too we hope mostly that she’ll grow up with a decent sense of self intact.  We KNOW she’ll have a fabulous base of accepting people for all their differences filtering into her being at the cellular level.  What we hope to foster is a sense that "fixing" it is not up to her – be it fixing other people’s "weirdness" about the issue when they exhibit weird reactions, or be it providing assistance to people who need it (there are times when it’s good to do that, there are times when it all does not have to fall on your shoulders), etc.

So much for random – this came out more focussed than I thought.  At the bottom of it all, I’m still learning to appreciate how utterly phenomenal we all are – in all of our differences.  We may not yet know how to respond to all situations, but by focusing on the fact that there’s a real live person on the other end of our interaction – well, the rest just sort of happens.  There are lots of other good stories – over a hundred bloggers are participating – head on over and check out some of the other entries.