Mentoring Journal [Pepperdine OMAET journal]

Author[ Shea
Title[ Monitoring – Book Reflections, 1 ]

 NOTES     

Abstract[
January 24, 2002 5:25 AM Pivotal times and the person(s) who played a part, hmmmm, I know that Shea said that one shouldn’t think about external events. Here’s a run-down on the cast of characters (as best as I can currently remember, and this is without doing any drugs in the 70’s, 80’s, 90’s . . . ): 1967-68 – 4th grade (?) – Mr. Marks, first teacher that I remember who read a chapter book to us and made the reading come alive (“Charlie and the Chocolate Factory”). Actually, he’s the first adult that I even remember reading to me. I’m sure that my Kindergarten and/or 1st grade teachers probably took a stab at “The Ugly Duckling” but apparently no long-term neurons fired during those sessions. Little wonder that reading and books were more a bother to me until high school. 1974 – 15-years-old – funny thing is that I can’t remember the guy’s name (it’s in a journal somewhere I’m sure), Bible-study leader, young guy, only a couple of years old then me. He played a pivotal role as a leader, basically we were on the same page one night in April 1974 when he looked at me at a home bible-study and said that God had a special gift for me. That led to a 15-year journey of discovery and searching. Actually, this guy only intervened one other time (helped get me started on the bible-quest), but other than that I had almost no interaction with him. So I’d define him more as a being a catalystic element but not really being a mentor. Interestingly, while there were teachers and adults whom I listened to, I never really ever fell under the tutelage of anyone person for the entire time. Even as a 15-year-old, I gravitated toward like minded friends and we formed our own “leadership” without the benefit of adult organizations, structures or prejudices. (January 24, 2002 01:20 PM – his name was Greg). 1976 – 1978 – Religious Studies major at Loyola Marymount University,
1978 – 1981 – Biblical studies BA at Biola University
1984 – 1985 – Theology MA at Fuller Seminary (not completed)
1986 – 1991 – Communications-News-Editorial BA at CSU Fullerton
1993 – 1995 – Teaching Credential/CLAD – Chapman University
– Ok having begun this journey largely leaderless, I found myself a born-again among Catholics at LMU and then a much wiser academic (compared to my adolescent beginnings) among fundamentalists at Biola & Fuller. As I mentioned before, there were teachers many but no one whom I’d call a mentor. 1979 – 1994 Pacific Bell, summer-hire Frame Attendant, 15-year Communications Technician, accidental career. My sister knew someone in the personnel department, I just wanted a job, they liked my work-ethic and I found a temporary 15-year career. There was a group of us who came into the company and same department around the same time and we all did the same training classes but there wasn’t any formal apprenticeship or tutelage. 1995, Spring – Katherine Harmon. Long-term sub 6th grade, first full-time teaching position, Katherine was the other 6th grade teacher. She was the mega-year veteran who knew the “painless ways” of getting things done. 1997-2001 Lon Brunk. Lon and I were both up for the same District Technology Director job. He got the job (thank god!). I met him after he got the job when he’d come to my school to help us get started with our Magnet grant. This was the guy that took the job that I wanted and I should have kept him at a distance but we immediately found a kindred spirit in each other. While he never actually “took me under his wing,” because of his more years of service and friendship, it was nice having a friend in a High Places. Over my years as Tech-Coordinator, it was great being able to drop by his office or contact him and get assistance. He was the only one in the district office or admin or on my site who really understood what I did and the burden of my job. When I left my old district it was definitely time, but I wasn’t looking forward to going to a place where I didn’t have the district technology director’s ear. He was the model for me of someone having to do the political job of keeping all these admin primadonnas happy and move the district’s technology forward with an impossibly over-flowing schedule. He’s the man! Dad. I wasn’t going to include Dad because he was never the “hey, let’s go fishing together” kind of guy who tended to communicate that we were more tolerated than wanted. His universal response to our childish and adolescent tendency toward messing things up was the rhetorical “can’t you do anything right?!” Needless to say, this didn’t foster any sense of being or wanting to be mentored by the man. That was my first thought regarding “mentoring” and my father. Then I started thinking about the long hours that I tend to put in, often leaving with the evening janitor. I have a particular high level of expectation in my self and my work that doesn’t even think about long hours and expects the same from my fellow participants. So I’ve definitely “followed” in his footsteps. Of course, those endless afternoons working with him pruning trees as a pre-teen were so aggravating that it taught me that I’m often better off working alone than aggravating others. JBB CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO SHEA INDEX
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This began, as many things begin for me, with a segment on Tech-TV’s “ScreenSavers” show (2/26 – “New Blog on the Block”). One of the show hosts, Leo Laporte, has promoted BLOGGing, or web-logging (creating a web-journal) for some time and I’d thought to use the technology for my ARP journal but then (amazingly) realized that it might be over-kill for this simple journal. Then two things happened. The first was that I thought that a web-log would be a great way to support my mentoring/writing project in a way that email and IM just wouldn’t do. This is because I needed a way to send/set-up an assignment that would follow in my “writing as natural language” approach, and allow for my mentee to easily add to the log. The second thing that happened was the “Screen Savers” segment that introduced a new BLOGGing software called Movable Type. Back when I thought about BLOGGing last Trimester the choices seemed to be between Greymatter and BLOGGER. Basically, BLOGGing is a little bit like having a web-mail account. The software is either installed on the server that’s hosting your web-page, or the BLOGGing package will provide the web-space (with their banner ads on your page). You access your BLOGGing web-account (again, either on your server or their server), and after you login you’re given a rather simple text editor to write your journal with. There might be some simple BOLD ITALIC text formatting options and some offer spell-checking, but it’s really all about writing the journal entry, pushing the “publish” button and having the software add the new entry to your web-journal. How is this better than just writing one’s journal like I’m doing right now? Well, to create this journal that I’m writing right now, I have to write the text into a $200 editor/freeform database called askSam because my HTML program, Dreamweaver, isn’t set up for text editing (no spell-check, no organizational automatic linking, etc). Then I have to transfer (copy and paste) the completed text into a table created on my journal page in Dreamweaver (another $200 program), then FTP the whole thing up to the Pepperdine server. And any time that I want to update my journal I have to have Dreamweaver and askSam loaded (or at least Dreamweaver). With the BLOGGers, once the software is installed, all I need is a computer with Internet access (and no expensive HTML or editing software required). Additionally, if I want to make the journal into a journal community and allow others to add their own entries, without the BLOGGing software, they’d have to send me their text and then I’d have to manually add their comments, which isn’t so bad if it’s a very small community with few contributions, but that can quickly get out of control. The other non-BLOGGing option is to give the participants access to my web-page and let them add the entries themselves, but that requires that they have their own HTML/editing software and that I’m will to trust them not to mess up my whole web-site. Hmmm. With the BLOGGing software I create an account for all of my contributors and they can add their own entries via the Internet without giving them access to my whole web-site or even any of the formatting tweaks. Well, at least that’s the theory. Per the “Screen Savers” segment there is a new BLOGGing kid in town, Movable Type, which purports to be more than a simple text editor/web-log package. The program offers greater control of the look of each entry (templates) and some database-like functions (categories). ‘Nuff said, I downloaded the set-up and poured through the 10-page Installation guide and 40-page User’s manual. Okay, forty hours later I was no closer to getting things running. I’d edited the CFG files, uploaded them via FTP to a folder I’d created on my Pepperdine site, checked the file attributes of the files I’d edited, crossed my fingers, clicked my heels three times and . . . nothing. The thing about this kind of software is that one has to have a pretty good relationship with one’s web-server, meaning that they have to allow you to run custom CGI scripts on their server (not the norm with the free webpage providers like Tripod and Geocities). They also have to have Perl version 5.004_04 or greater running and be willing to let you know where it’s located on their server. In that it was Sunday and I’d already spent two-days on this project with no results it was time to consider alternatives. Oh yeah, some time after the thirtieth-hour I did call Pepperdine’s IT support with questions about CGI and Perl and the poor fellow on the other end was . .. ummm “not qualified to answer” my questions and suggested that I call on Monday after 10 AM. Ack. So, on to the alternatives. I ended up creating an account with BLOGGER and let them host the journal on their servers. It took about ten-minutes. It’s not as pretty as the others and doesn’t offer spell-checking (damn), but it’s doable and delivers on it’s promise. I think that I’ll revisit Movable Type in the future because the organizational/control aspects really appeal to me, but I’ll make sure that I have some cooperation from my webhosting service. JBB

Okay, having finally gotten the BLOG up and running it’s time to start the assignments. My take on this project (A-2) is that I want to help my mentee develop her writing skills using this technology (BLOGGing) to deliver the assignments and log in her responses. Because my mentee got a bit antsy to get started she posted her first story while I was still deciding on how to do this stuff (the “Maria” story). Prior to this she’d sent me a copy of a story (written with Word Perfect!) called “Martyrii” about someone not having a very good day in the Roman Coliseum. Interesting stuff . . . a couple of things came up when comparing the two “stories” that lead the first assignment: missing details or data. In her first story, Maria, I didn’t pick up that it was the child’s point of view in the “Frankenstein’s Monster” story because the only information I had to use to place the story in its “historical” context was the girl’s name. The second story, “Martyrii” was much more clearly placed in a discernable time/place. So the assignment was just to create the picture of a place, to just focus on bringing the reader into a place. JBB

My mentee was more than a little nervous about doing an writing assignment for me, all the more because she knew that the assignment was going to be posted on the Internet. But she performed beautifully. She told me that she was anxious just about looking for a photograph or some visual prop to use and I told her that I wanted the image to go from her eyes to head and to “see more” so that she could write a better description. I think she did quite well. Next thing I have to decide whether to have her do another “landscape” or to have a character populate the picture. JBB

I feel really bad about the gap, but my mentee understands that I am juggling a large number of projects right now. So, I decided that we should see about populating the pretty picture that she “painted” in her last assignment. The great thing is that I have no idea how she’s going to do this. She’s created the space and now it’s time to put people in it. Now the difficulty is know how much “static” description to put in to make the room and person(s) real and how much to leave out. The other point is balancing that description with the action of the scene. Also, having previously written a paragraph about the room she has to incorporate that description into her next assignment and not assume that the reader has seen Assignment #1. Here goes. JBB