Ayn's Multiple World

Saturday mornings are for putting it all together

Good morning this is me. We’re having a little trouble with the computer this morning in that she’s being sluggish. We might need to sign off in a little bit if she continues … sometimes that helps, right? It’s about 6 am. We’ve just finished our cereal and am thinking hot coffee be good … hold on. Ahh, right on that account. It’s a little too early for medicine, but we’ll check on that in about an hour.

Right now, we are worrying a little about that sciatic nerve problem we had before. My leg seemed at first to be hurting in back of right knee cap and I thought it was because we fell several days ago and we’re still a little sore, but then we realized the pain was all the way up our thigh and traveling against the back side of our back side. That doesn’t sound too good. We’re not immobilized though so we’re going to hope it goes away. I don’t remember what happened last time … we might talk about it our friend. I think he’s expected over about 5:30-6 pm. I’m not sure lately he’s been coming up to an hour and a half late. Don’t remember what that was about either. *Sigh* Maybe this is God’s way of telling me not to stress my brain out.

Should probably check my weight … think if I had a pinched nerve again it might be because of that. BUT, I don’t have to tell you what the scale says, though, k? Hold on. Oh dear … that’s not good. I umm don’t want to talk about it, k?

So, how’s your weather? Hmm … its really kinda hurting right now to be sitting … maybe a pillow will help, let’s try that. Well no … that’s not it either. Damn … ok, let’s focus on something else. We were in an IM earlier and now it seems we’re close enough to medicine time to do that. Maybe the regular pain pills will help.

Funny how this just seemed to come on so quickly. Ok, 6:48 … let’s see if that helps … We got our new medicine and we took another acem&m. We’ve got an edgy kitty this morning too. She on about her 7th round of settling me in … She just is edgy.

We need a little calm on this desk! One of us should actually be lying down. Ahh there she goes. It will be ok, until I have to reach for the mouse … then she’s going to get up and be unhappy again. It’s very distracting to have kitties running your life … I really feel for John (Garfield’s John). What a life he must have.
Ok … need to focus here … on what? Hmm, seems as its Saturday morning we should be telling you about the week? Hmm, think that’s been talked of somewhat … What else could we have missed. Yesterday … let me try and remember. Hmm seems we did some normal stuff. Got there on time, Don’t think we talked to sister though … maybe something in passing. The new Q said she had a doctor’s appointment … hmm, sounds suspicious though cuz there was no warning or particular illness. But, we’ll give her benefit of the doubt and that it wasn’t because Sister had planned on talking with her about commitment. We got to work pretty soon in cuz I remember having trouble so we started a blog entry and within two paragraphs had gone over to evaluate the work situation, and then we fell right into it. That was a good thing.

We worked all the way up to the client’s lunch on CARF stuff. We were trying to make the first book work together the way it should. I think we had to finish a few more entries … there was one long one that we hadn’t been looking forward to. But, that turned out ok too. It seems we took lunch at noon … hmm remember going to the office to eat though, because a couple of the staff who were speaking only Spanish entered the room noisily and I didn’t want anything to do with that. Shoot … forgot I wonder if we blogged about that already? There was a big deal on English/Spanish speaking from the day before at the staff training and we talked about it with Dr. M. I think there we came to the conclusion that it was ok to speak either language, unless the purpose of it was behaviorally to exclude. I think that does it … But, it will come up again to work through. Sometimes I get to thinking “What the Fuck do I care anyway?” And, then I can figure it actually upsets me … umm cuz we used the F word. Drat … hate that when it happens. I’m better now than I used to be at being a tree, but it still shouldn’t happen … Like with these two yesterday … it was one of the DSPs and the secretary. I had been toward the back of the room heating up my lunch and they came in … turned on the light, turned on the TV, and they did it without ever stopping their conversation - Whatever it was. They never said hello or gave me the slightest bit of concern … they acted as if I weren’t there … or that I was invisible. That’s kind of sucky. It’s never one incident though it is a track record of them, which helps to serve as a wall between us. I certainly don’t feel very important to them. So, I try to write them off, because I don’t want to be hurt by their exclusiveness. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be the first to be thinking of this though. Think its time to let it go.

Ok, what else … in my REAL life.

Since I was eating lunch in my office … I continued the work on the Tiger project until it was time for the Thinking Group. I already knew what I was going to do there, because we’ll be working on the questions/interviews for CARF with the clients for a while now. Seems like Sister came in a few times too. We talked again about placing the new wall mat somewhere … it turns out that its about 5’ x 10’ so should take up quite a bit of wall. I think there is enough in the staff dining room area where we’ll hold the meetings … that’s the space with a table and the tv/VCR so we can watch the 18 or so movies that come with it. Think they are short 15 minute presentations if at that, but they will be important to the program. Sister still hasn’t come up with a schedule, but I know she will work on that soon, because she is conscious of there being a 30 day free trial of the material. I’m pretty sure we’ll keep it, because I like it a lot already, but we’ll have to see. Sister has asked to sit in on the first meeting to see what kind of material it is. That’s going to be a little invasive, but we’ll just have to get through it. It might help if we did an outline we could look at easily. I sure would like to know how they do Power Point to TV screen … I wonder if it is just a matter of AV cord. I should check that out. Maybe its listed in the program help section. But, not right now. Yah … too much.

Ok, enough of that for now. Too much frustration in not knowing powerpoint yet. I can do the slides and such .. and we even experimented last time with adding a movie, but then we thought that the presentation would have to be done on the MS2003 version and we didn’t want to go into learning two systems, particularly if there are cords we don’t have. I think there were cords in our other electronics like PDA and Video camera, but we’re not going to think of all that right now. Best stay somewhere we can go productively further ahead.

Ok, what’s next … think we were going through our day … Maybe we’re up to the group time. I think that went pretty well. We got through about 5 questions. We’ll have to go over them again later. Things go slowly like in training them to understand Organization and the center mean the same thing. We work one on one where we would say on word and then they’d come up with the other. So if I said the name of the center, they would say “organization.” Just saying a word with that many syllables had to be worked on too and we gave them the visual of the O in organization being a big (held out arms) circle holding in all of the center. We wanted to make it easier so that we could give clues and they could follow. It’s very hard for them to remember this kind of stuff and we do a lot of relying on some of the folks with more ability. They might give the answer and then the others will repeat it. Some of the questions had to do with things like community involvement, and so then we’ll take quite a bit of time – say 10 minutes, of going through different ways they are involved in the community … such as I will say work and people will list place that individuals work in the community, or I will say stores, or museums and they will remember the ones they’ve gone to, or the same with food, where have you eaten?

They really get out a lot so its kind of fun for them to remember say for example that they had Turkey at where? Then they have to collectively remember what the two banquet halls were and which one was the fundraiser and which one was Thanksgiving dinner. In between you hear all the chatter as they are remembering other things that happened with it. Like if they went to the pet store, they might remember the two clownish ferrets. So, when we think of the zoo, we have them listing animals they remember.

I don’t remember the other questions right now, but we’re thinking you have an idea. After the meeting, we found ourselves getting back into the Tiger program once again. We knew by then we wanted to leave a clean copy on Sister’s desk and by the end of it, we also pulled out the work that had been done on the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th books for respectively accessibility, information management, and rights. I think the first book on input was really the biggest so hoping that the rest will go smoothly. We may have mentioned this, but we now know the survey dates to be the 21st, 22nd, and 23rd of May. We had had the first part to sister’s desk already with an explanation, but she was checking for locked doors after 4 pm when we were getting ready to leave, so we were able to hand her directly the work on the latter chapters. She seemed pleased to have something in hand and I was happy to give her something to be going on.

AHA … maybe this will help … this is an example of a report this is page 2 of 11 of the accessibility report.



I hope you will be able to read some of the words … oh well, that comes in pretty blury, but

Hey hold the phone ... guess what if you click on the picture above on the report it comes in clearer than blue blazes!!! Go ahead click and then when your ready just backspace and you'll be right here again. Go ahead give it a try "click!"

but, in general the first column is the location … that tells what book it is in – in this case the Input book from Persons Served, the second column tells which area of the book, title and doc number which is like a page number. If you can’t read it … this is what information is given in the item name.

1.A.1.06, Policy Affirmative Action
Equal Employment Equal Access
Policy, 1.1.1, doc57

The 1.A.1.06 is the latest reference number and the 1.1.1 is the older reference number from back in 2003. Doc57 is the same as page 57, but it will go across all books so that we might have docs like listed as doc2033. The Third column is the big column … I will show you in a bigger version of what the first set of keywords is for the first item on our policy for affirmative action, etc.

“race, color, religion, sex, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or other handicap unrelated to mental ability, motto, discrimination, Board of Directors, Sisters of the …, employment training, promotion, work assignment, Illinois human rights act, Catholic Charities, IDHS, responsibility, Civil rights act, federal assistance, deny benefits, personnel policies, available, informed in writing, annually, workforce analysis, client service data, categories, participant roster, recruitment, selection, public solicitation, advertisements, position, hours, educational background, screening team, job experience encounter, hiring, employment handbook, job description, reviewed, upward mobility, skills, training programs, outside workshops, counseling, discharges of status, EEOC, investigation, compliance, revised 11/20/2002”

This is really handy because the third keywords column and the item column you can type in the keywords, so for example when I typed in civil rights; I came up with 4 documents that had as keywords civil rights. Two were from the Input books, one was from the accessibility book, and the 4th was from the rights book. All in all it’s just some pretty cool stuff. It is the first really, really major step in pulling together collectively information that is in the system, but isn’t always as accessible in the development of ideas and the clarification of processes already put in place. I can’t really explain the true thrill of having so much information at my fingertips. It’s an unbelievable system. I would like to play around with it a little bit more today … and see where we might go, but I also recognize that I have school work to be completing and that has to be a priority too.

Let me try to integrate one concept to check the system. Let’s look up the term “race.” When we print out a report, we find that we have 22 items which contain the word race. Let’s see how the center is doing. The first item we’ll let go … it picked up “race” within someone’s name. The next one is in our Policy on Affirmative action, equal employment, and equal access policy. It lists race among other potential discriminating factors that we are against stereotyping. The next doc is our policy on accessibility. It lists race as a potential barrier to service. Next, is our policy and procedure for admission; it states that we will not discriminate amongst other things race. Next is a repeat. Next is a Pol & proc. On ineligibility saying that we will not discriminate. The next concerns our pol and proc for waiting lists and according to compliance in state reg 119.215, we will not discriminate. It comes up next in our participants roster … which uses race as a category from which we categorize. Next one is again in that one person’s name, so we’ll skip it. The next doc says we used the word, race in a demographics study of the annual report in 2001-2002. The next document is an assessment testing whether individuals in a work setting get along with people from different races, amongst other possibly discriminative standards. The next is recognition in the ICAP test that we chart by race amongst other variables. Next is in our pol. and proc. manual … we state that it is included in our variables. And, then it repeats in our admission policy. We skip a couple more repeats, but then find race being acknowledged again in our client Bill of Rights as something we determine we will not discriminate against. The next document also states we will not discriminate against, but it is found in our mission statement. As well, we hand out a program participant’s handbook, which states again we will not discriminate. There are just two more documents. The first one put out in our rights documents from the United Nations, Challenge of Human Rights and cultural diversity, and the other put out by the US General Assembly as a resolution in the universal declaration of human Rights. The first talks about being in a diverse world and cultural relativism and the second discusses general rights including justice and peace in the world and being entitled without distinction such as by race.

Pshwoo that’s a lot of information … let’s see if we can narrow that down.

Ok, let’s see if we can put this together then … We can say that … the US General Assembly has made a resolution on the universal declaration of human rights. As such, the United Nations have written a challenge for human rights and cultural diversity. Our center concludes that it will not discriminate against race and other variables in documents such as our mission statement and policy and procedure manual, policies on affirmative action, equal employment, equal access, accessibility, admission, and waiting lists, client Bill of rights, and in the program participant’s handbook. We do include race as a variable on our participant’s roster, demographics listed in annual reports, and in the ICAP, which relates to adaptive and maladaptive behavior. We are in compliance with IDHS State regulation 119.215, and we test our principles with an assessment for workplace readiness to evaluate whether or not the individual surveyed is getting along with people from other races.

Wow! That’s pretty darn cool if you ask me. That’s a very strong statement as to the center’s position on race. It would be a good thing to write in a report, or to present to staff, or for that matter to the clients – though concepts holding all the documentation we do might go past them. And, even here now with it sitting before me … we have to ask so what does this mean. Clearly, we can show a path from greater to lesser – from national concern to our beliefs and in the final conclusion of checking things out. Yes, we do check to see if people are getting along with people from other races. Let’s see if I can put together a stronger concept for my head to hold. What exactly does this all mean?

It seems that starting from the top we state in our mission statement and policy and procedure manual that is given to each of the staff and reviewed annually. We affirm that when we hire people and when people are either on hold, or are enrolled into the program. The individuals are each told about the policy in their handbook and each year they are told about this non-discriminatory standard when they are reminded of their rights during their annual meeting. For reporting processes individuals are listed as to their race, but this is more from the aspect of assuring that all races are given fair opportunity to participate in the program.

The center shows that the greater majority of persons served come from minority backgrounds, which is matched by the community we serve. Finally, to test whether or not the staff teach and the individuals served learn the practice of being non-discriminatory, it is a test item checked in a workplace readiness assessment. Upon review, we can assure that the center – Administration, staff and individuals follow through on their non-discriminatory practices due to race, and other, which is all participatory of national and international policy.

Oh man that’s so cool. Now if we were going to follow that through, we might ask ourselves, should it be included in any other documentation. I’m not sure right now exactly how we would take that next step, because we seem to be covered pretty well. We might though set up one policy and procedure or teaching method demonstrating how we communicate this lesson to staff and individuals served. Hmm, this might mean that eventually, we include in our documentation of locations information that is getting out to the various groups. This could begin as high as the governance board – and as well-rounded as Town Hall or the Thinking Group. That might be a suggestion in the future, although we have to consider … what is the general priority over thousands of concepts that we are logging into the keyword search?

Hmm, Just wrote a note to the boss. I gave her a few of the paragraphs from above, but added a few thoughts. This is soo cool.

Pshwoo … that made me feel good. I know she’s a little concerned about my spending too much time toward the program director position, but it is very seriously as much a part of what we’re already thinking and have thought, particularly know in accordance with this Paper Tiger program that was purchased a couple of years ago, and now just updated. I want her to realize how great her investment of a couple hundred dollars has been and will be. You need to be able to impress the boss, because it is her mind that ought to be best stimulated, because it is she that sees to the direction of all. If she gives this work priority for my time, I should be able to make things happen, and I want to say right away that it can be from the direction listed by the Administrator or team. When I gave her those documents from the first four books yesterday, there were documents I asked for for the first book. I thought that might be a problem, because I think all along that’s what she had in mind that I was supposed to be doing and here I am turning the work over … we asked if her secretary could collect 25-30 documents. Those were all things up at the front office and just needed to be copied, such as current rosters, meeting minutes, and newsletters, calendars, and such. We told sister rightfully, that doing that kind of running around was bothersome to our back, because it required a lot of standing in front of the copy machine. Sister is exceptionally good at doing that kind of task, because in reality I know she’ll take charge of it WITH her secretary. She’s very accomplished of going down lists. If she then (hopefully without too much complaint) comes up with the list, I will be able to devote more time to updating things that are my direct responsibility. Like I know that we need to update our Incident list of how we’ve dealt with current problems. In fact, I think I may have already done this, but I don’t remember what happened to it. That kind of stuff is hard for us. We’re hoping thought that it will be in a common place like reports. We’ll see. After the reports are gathered they will be listed as new documents in the current 2005-2006 documents book, I will include them into the Paper Tiger and that will be that. WooHOOO!!! Just got to keep processing.

The next feat will be to turn the 2nd, 3rd and 4th books with information already in them into properly coded documents according to the new CARF standards. That way I’ll make sure we are thoroughly covered.

This brings us to the next thought … if we can manage some time free, particularly on Monday, I would really like to do some work with getting the book itself into the Paper Tiger. Now that I can work on it from home, I would like to get it into a new section I opened up called 2005-2006 Standards. That means it comes from the book.

This can be coded so that it will appear on top of each set of documents, and we also coded the survey guide questions, so they would follow in searches right after the standards statements. That took a little time to negotiate, but I think it should work. There is still some question as to whether the documents should appear on top of the total presentation, or within the actual questions. That proved pretty difficult. For now … we’ll let that go. Need to be progressing our thoughts.

Our friend just IM’d for a bit, and then we wrote a 2 minute note to Dr. M. Basically, what the friend said was that he wouldn’t come over until after 8 pm. … Lately, he’s been late, so we have to say sometime before midnight he’ll be here … he said he’d bring shrimp, but we’re pretty sure that our Christmas present isn’t going to be fixed. This has been more important due to the sciatic nerve problem.

I know it is still there, but hasn’t seemed to be as much problem with the medicine … just have to monitor that closely throughout the day. We got a real bad attitude going after he presented his little bombshell. We told him that it no longer involved him though … he had just stated what was going to happen … now it is up to us to make sure we dissipate the bad mood. Mostly, I think it comes from our general feeling that we’re often treated as a second class citizen. We had felt that as we earlier explained with the secretary and DSP coming in and ignoring us – even to just say hello before intruding on the quite space, and now our friend thinking whatever things he’s into today are more important than meeting up with us. That means we’re thinking that we are second rate in his book too. I think we fought back subtly by making sure that he knew we would think about him later as appropriate last 8% of the day thoughts, but for now we were going to get back to our stuff. He made a point of saying he would think of us all day, but we were in no mood for that … as we mentioned we’d developed a bad attitude. Now, we have to switch it around by thinking … no … we aren’t second rate, even if it may be true we’re not a very high priority in his scheduling. It doesn’t mean he thinks less of us … it’s just that his priorities follow a different course. On our own we have priorities too. And, for now that means more time for writing, work, and school.

Those are the self chosen activities we are honoring.

It’s almost 11 now and I would like to say after 10 pages, we’ve blogged enough, but I’m going to slow down once more, use the washroom, get one last cup of coffee and analyze have we written enough, or do we go now directly toward school. Hold on, check that out in a minute. Hmmm. 5,375 words so far … I didn’t realize anyone was counting … but it must be a new feature with Word 2007. Pretty cool if that kind of thing were important. That’s then about 538 words per page. Or about 110 words about every 20% or 1/5th of the page. That could be handy for something. No, I don’t know why my mind works like this, it just does.

Shoot that was scary … glad we made a copy first. We messed with the table of contents, but we didn’t have any title headings so it didn’t work. It did make our page disappear and that was a litttttle scary. We’ll figure that out later (Brehm, 2005) (Brehm, S. S., Johnson, D., & Whitford, Q., 1956)

References:

Brehm, S. S. (2005). Social Psychology: Fred Whitford Study Guide . Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.

Brehm, S. S., Johnson, D., & Whitford, Q. (1956). Every good boy. Chicago: Houghton.

Hmm, that worked Pretty good, but we don’t need a big blue heading … and we need to change the word to reference. Everything else looks wonderful, but there were some obvious problems such as listing more than one author … we’d have to fix that. Ok, that’s been fixed, but there are a few other problems like in the citation part, it included the initials, and in the format section it doesn’t include electronic things, which is where most of our resources are from. But, it’s an improvement. Ok, ok … don’t mean to just play away this time … let’s consider something else now of importance, WHILE noting that we need to set a noon deadline in getting serious about school. We might have to in fact work our way toward that direction. We don’t want to lose the day entirely. Hmm, thinking we should do our lunch now … it’s 11:30 pm. Think we can do the oatmeal thing? Yah, let’s try that. Then maybe an early frozen dinner about 4:30 pm and a snack type thing with friend about 8:30 pm – shrimp, crackers and wine.  That makes us smile we been thinking about shrimp lately.

Ok … moving along fine here … we put away a few dishes while we were heating up lunch. That was like being in reality for a moment right? We might want to use this last half hour for eating and doing what? Hmm, maybe we should post, since we know we’re going to need time to reread AND then maybe set up a new entry that will include doing the work for school … why don’t we think that process through … it always helps. OK OK … we can do this.

First … we want to go to school and we want to devote the next 8 hours to be doing it. BEFORE our friend comes over. So, what do we have to do? Well, we have to write a paper, and we might acknowledge that we haven’t finished reading the chapter. How far did we get? Hmm?? We’re only 20% done with the reading. We’ve read about 8 pages out of 42. Good chance by now we’ve forgotten all the information. Ok, with that … why don’t we check out what information is necessary to complete the paper. Oh man! Look at that … I just looked to the left screen and sure enough write in the social psych section under this u02d02 label is a copy of the assignment. This is it.

u02d2 Roots :

For this activity, you will locate an article on the Internet and discuss it and the text readings from this unit.

Instructions:

1. Locate and read one psychological research journal article related to stereotyping, racism, prejudice, discrimination or sexism. Briefly summarize the article.

2. Incorporate the article you located into your discussion response. List the full reference for this article using the APA 5th edition style guidelines reference lists and citations.

3. Remember to cite information from the text readings as appropriate.

4. Consider the following:

o What are the roots of prejudice, discrimination, racism and sexism?
o What theories could be applied to reduce prejudice, discrimination, or sexism in your professional setting?

Resource

Pasted from

Hmm, ok interesting. I remember talking to Dr. M. about this. Off the top of my head, I can’t yet distinguish all those words. I know sexism is about being either female or male, and racism is about various races. But stereotyping, discrimination, and prejudice are words that collide in my mind. Maybe we should make that a goal … in talking to Dr. Marvin, he was able to logically separate the words, but I could tell he had to think about it … It seems at first glance to could hold a prejudice – pre-judge, you could stereotype – commit an act, or you could discriminate by categorizing one group lesser than another group, whom you might exalt. That’s pretty loosely based at this point. It seems like all this stuff is coming up all over the place this week and that’s not necessarily a bad idea. Seems to be its time. We’re thinking now the route to go might be in studying the Guide BEFORE we do all those pages, if we decide to still do it after reading the guide. The guide should help us frame in the essential ideas. Then perhaps we can understand better or more clearly when we read the chapters. BUT, we don’t have as much time as if this had been read during football last Sunday or during the week. AND, we can now acknowledge that the Bears are going to play again tomorrow at 2 pm … so that time prior might be spent toward reading next week’s chapters. Because about 5:30 I think the second game is coming on and we know we got into that last weekend too. Ok, … better get started then. Though we have to think. Noon to 4 put into reading and outlining and 4 to 8 put into writing … Maybe it will be readjusted a little toward that time, but not by much if we’re going to get it all in today … So, with that … we better get going and simply reach over and open that study guide. Ok, dears, you can do this … now go … shooo!

posted by Ann Marie @ 1/20/2007 11:46:00 AM Comments: 2