Working on being a good staff trainer
Good morning. It is me. I would like to think that we are going to make it, but it’s still early enough to go back to bed. I’d like to write though for a bit.We’ve decided to make some coffee. It’s about 4:15 and I’ve been up for 15 minutes. I’m having some shredded wheat too so I know there’s a possibility after I feel full enough I’d want to crawl back in bed. Yeeks! Let’s hope for more than that, right?
Hmm, do you go through with me these same hesitations every morning? Do we start off most days wondering what we’re doing? We should probably read us more than we do, but until the work load is done we’re trying not to think too much of reading.
Ahh, just took care of the extra podcasts that iTunes doesn’t pick up. I’d forgotten that I’d gotten a bunch of the new ones. After I get done with downloading from iTunes, I need to go back to the store because it doesn’t pick up for some reason the latest two days. The one I’m listening to now is crazy and is guaranteed from keeping me falling asleep. It is called PodRunner and it is for runners … the beat gets kind of crazy fast. I don’t know if I can type to it, but it feels fun to try. Just have to think quicker.
Last night we had a doctor appointment with Dr. M. It wasn’t spectacular.
Actually, we were boring ourselves so much with ourselves that we excused him 10 minutes early. Normally he might not have taken it, but we both knew I was having problems concentrating. He’s pretty sure it’s because we’ve been out of the one medicine that helps us with that. I sure hope so because we were doing a tremendous amount of yawning. We just wanted to curl up on his couch and sleep a bit … but we couldn’t really do that … well we might have tried, but it wouldn’t have helped the situation any.
We talked about light stuff for a bit … most likely how we continue to be backed up at work. That doesn’t seem to be progressing itself anytime fast. We also got a new lady at work named Robin. More on that in a little bit though. I think I’m going to like her. I hope so … she’s going to be starting in two weeks – March 2nd or something like that. We’ll look forward - just that we’ll have to do more training.
There will be another new one today who is supposed to work on Friday’s … Man-o-man … this is tough stuff. I haven’t gotten the full day planned for today, so I hope she doesn’t come in too early. Yesterdays didn’t come in until 9:30 am. That gave us time to get some work done in the workshop. We had had newsletters to fold them, tape and label. I’d never done the job before, but we are of course familiar with the newsletters. Sisters were both at church and then we worked after they got home. It wasn’t too hard, but there was a lot of movement. We were able to keep coordinated the group though so everyone was busy and the product was making the right changes from one transition to another. I don’t think we messed up, but we might hear about something later. I hope not!
As to Dr. Marvin’s though. We progressed through the session and at one point about half way through he asked us if we wanted to work on the hard stuff. We agreed and then he was telling us about one of the Casies. I guess she’d been telling him of feelings about being left out … there was something about her not being able to set up her own rules on pudding. I didn’t know anyone had set them, but we weren’t real sure of what that was all about. It did put us on warning that we should be looking out after her and figuring if there isn’t some way we can help her. I always feel like I’ve been real mean if she gets neglected. It’s not on purpose, but in many ways this is a bigger persons’ world, especially with so much orientated on work. I suppose it would be kind of hard to understand being in the background most of the time.
I remember too that something was said about how we view things. We were talking to Dr. Marvin about the play we went to with Rich, Bob and Marcia. Many of us were trying to explain the show in our own ways … it gets bottlenecked though and we’re feeling so many feeds of happiness that we just seem like a glow stick. It’s kinda strange I don’t see it every day, but I know that our kids can do it too, but then I suppose most people do … it’s that exclamated feeling of joy that just washes over you. *Sigh* Life is then good.
I felt sorry for Dr. Marvin because once he did get us on solid track then we reflected it and zoomed over to the lighter fair. We could see it happening with not much stamina to get back to the harder stuff. It was like the words and thoughts weren’t connecting. I was feeling lame. *Double sigh*
Well, at least we did the decent thing in letting him go. Good Anns! It was a first and hopefully it won’t happen often now that we’ve started. I think Dr. Marvin is too aware to let us feel unimportant enough to be maintaining an hour. I think there was something of him that seemed tired too. Of course, he would have stuck it out, just it seems a waste of his talent.
Ok, let that go baby!
We might as well get on with the story of the new person. It’s our strong suit for the morning so far. Basically, we’d had 10-15 minutes left of the newsletter session when she’d come in. Rosa had brought her in and then she was ours just like that. It happens in a flash. It’s a different feeling of being in charge of someone because you want to help her understand everyone at once, and then you want her to “get” the clients, and you want to be liked too. There are a lot of priorities.
I don’t really know how to teach someone except for her to join in. I don’t know how the clients feel in that here is a brand new person and she’s going to be handed over in minutes more authority and responsibility than they might ever have. It just goes this way so you have to try and negotiate the balance between them, because if they are not set forward, they could sabotage any real sense of learning or teaching. The group did well yesterday and for the most part was on good behavior. They liked her right away so that helped.
The first exercise was about 30 minutes of introducing themselves. I had them say their full name, age, and if they could remember how long they’d been at St. Rose Center. Then we asked them to say something they liked best about the center and something they liked the least … The least one is always the hardest for them to do. Then I asked them if there was something Sr. Florine was helping them with and if there wasn’t a question they would like to ask the new trainer. I don’t think they did as well with the Sr. Florine question, but most of them had questions they wanted to ask her. They sounded like how old are you and do you have a boyfriend Hehehe our group will always be our group.
I think there was a little nervous tension at first between them because they were like more quiet and studious and then something funny happened and they all burst into a deep rolling laughter. Pswhoo. I thought it was me! After I figured out that they had this type of humor and spirit then we went looking for it. We’re just sneaky like this. I think Robin was able to feel warmly welcomed in. It was a good start.
The next thing was to go to break. She had helped us with that last few minutes of the workshop work, so by now she was feeling at least to that degree more of comfortable. We watched the group, but then sort of sat down at a table and talked a few things over. Karla’s group was in there and they’d gotten the video so we had it easy in that respect. Stephanie came by too so we introduced her … all the leadership group told her their names. It was more for the group than Robin at that point, because it would be silly to think she could remember all those names. It gives the clients a chance to be seen in front of her eyes and that’s extremely important for all of them.
After break we did an exercise on the safety cards. I led the group for about 5 minutes, and then I turned over the group to her and I sat out where she’d been as a partner to one of the guys who is sometimes troublesome. We had ended up with an odd count and had been working in pairs, so this turned out to be a good thing, because he needs that much more positive attention. It was good to keep him motivated with the group.
Robin did very well. It’s not to say she won’t improve, but given the circumstances of walking in so soon and to be leading a group … it really showed that she had a lot of trust in herself, me and the group. That kind of thing builds exponentially. I gave her another chance to lead later, but she chose the back seat. This was ok and the purpose of asking her. It’s a little hard because it is your lesson so she’s not sure all the value of what she’s teaching. It also worked out because Rosa was going to get her for a few moments and she would have to step away to learn the chrononotes. The woman seems like a fast learner. She is only 22 so she has a lot of good optimism too. She’s a psych major like the new one coming in this morning. You gotta know I’m going to like psych majors!
The last group that we were working on was on clocks and using a curved edge and a straight edge. I thought that this was an area that I noticed as troublesome for the Leadership group as well. It was a good method for getting them to draw their own clocks, but they really needed a lot of support to do it. We were working one on one with each of them so when Robin came back and joined, it was very appreciative. It got to be too close to the end of the day and this group seems to be out of shape, because they were REALLY too tired to work when we ended at 1:30 pm. This was a shame and will have to be redone in thinking that a 22 year old will be leading them … THOSE kinda people have lots of energy Hehehe.
I liked the exercise in that they each got a CD to draw two circles on the front of their page. Then they got the ruler to draw the marks. I tried to teach them with some success that they would split the circle in have and draw both sets of 12’s and 6’s, and then they’d put the ruler sideways and draw the 9’s and 3’s. Then we had them hold the 1” wide ruler between those sets of numbers to draw the other marks for 1’s, 2’s 4,’s etc. It worked out pretty good and some of them were there long enough to number the marks. There was some variation in whether or not they would get it.
I would like to start something new in that she records the progress for her group.
I’d like to see some kind of quality/quantity thing in that for quantity if you counted what they did right compared to the number of potential applications over how many were attempted you’d give things a numerical value. Then for quality you could give it a ranking of 1-100%, that’s how the other would come out too … as a ranking. Hmm, I’m wondering if we couldn’t bring in our spreadsheet material and use the columns to mark these two things and one other. I think there are 3 columns in the sheets we have. No actually there are 8 columns, but I wouldn’t have to be using all of them.
Let’s think it out.
Ok, ok … we’re good to go. We’ve done all our morning stuff and we’ve done a page calculating the numbers for the clock exercise … we had to guesstamate the numbers just to work out the plan, but I feel very good about it. I don’t know how much extra work it would be to have the trainers doing the work, but I’m thinking I would like to give it a try … I don’t want to add to their burden, but I’d like to make the efforts relevant to something and build on skill sets. We’ll have to see. But, for now it’s time to get out the door … so we’ll be seeing you soon.
1. Draw 2 circles using CD’s
2. Use ruler to draw 12s and 6’s
3. Use ruler to draw 9’s and 3’s
4. Use both sides of rulers to draw the remaining numbers
5. Label numbers on clock
Client #1 - .828
Client #2 - .92
Client #3 - .6384
Client #4 - .6864
Client #5 - .782
Client #6 - .5776
Client #7 - .7392
Client #8 - .8096
Just a few notes … think this is going to work
posted by Ann Marie @ 2/06/2009 07:01:00 AM
Comments: 0
