Being flexible

(Long time fans of this blog already read the following from a much larger blog post from 2012. I decided to cut & paste it here since I think this topic deserves its own blog post!

 Enjoy!)


You can't act the same at every situation.


You obviously aren't going to act the same at a library and a party! 2 different things!



This also remind me about Shaquille O'Neal's 2nd book "Shaq Talks Back"

photo from Amazon.com

Shaq mentioned that he spent his early years in a Newark ghetto, then his stepfather joined the military. So he was growing up in environments in which there is a mixture of racial groups. He mentioned that he's able to adjust to "white culture" and "black culture".


Shaq said "some people would call that selling out! I call it surviving in your environment!"




Amen to that!



In a ever-increasingly integrated world, you need to be culturally flexible.



You need to be able to adjust being around people different from you!



I was fortunate in that I went to schools with students from very different situations. My classmates were a mix of a low-income, middle class and a few rich students. My classmates came from various cultures. And each school I went to (ranging from preschool to college) had a different cultural combination.



And in my current job as a substitute teacher, I work at various school, ranging from private schools with an economically privileged population to public schools with large population of low-income immigrants. I have worked with preschoolers to high schoolers.

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Being that I was a public school student, subbing at a private school was an adjustment. For one thing, most public schools I've been to have large campuses. So it was a culture shock to enter a few private school campuses, took a tour and thinking "this is the whole campus? that's it?"


Also, public schools don't have religious services occurring during school hours. Many private schools are run by religious organizations and therefore, greatly emphasize their religion as part of their curriculum. Joining that environment was a new experience for me.


To be fair, a student from a religious private school will definitely feel the culture shock if he/she transferred to a public school. He/she will be thinking "what kind of school is this? We don't do morning prayers at the new school? We had morning prayers and chapel services at my old school."


Another adjustment in subbing at private schools is adjusting to 1st world facilities. I have been accustomed to 2nd world (and occasionally 3rd world) facilities at public schools. So in a way, the private school students are more prepared for the modern and future workplace than many public school students. Plus, at many private schools, the students are provided with their own laptops or i-pads. Makes me wish I was them :) !


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Yep, I got to be flexible to go to these different environments.


Being a substitute teacher also helped me with being flexible about daily plans.


Before that, I used to very rigid with my daily plans. My attitude is "I already planned to do this, screw anyone who wants me to adjust my schedule"



That attitude changed when I started to work as a substitute teacher. There IS NO SET PLAN in that job! You learn to be flexible fast!



Of course, I still have a schedule, and I still have to say "no" to others when I already had an important thing to do.



Knowing when to be flexible and when to be rigid is an important life skill!

UHM Summer Session

I have just completed summer school (2013 edition) at UH-Manoa.

There were two summer sessions. Session 1 was from May 28 to July 5. Session 2 was from July 8 to August 15.

For session 1, I took LIS 681: Books & Media for Children

This class focused on library materials for ages birth to upper elementary school.

This class focused on books as well as digital media (ie. websites, databases, book trailers, e-books, etc)

We went over the different genres for this age group, including picture books, poetry, folklore, biographies, fantasy, historical fiction, contemporary fiction, multi-cultural literature  and science fiction. Sometimes those genres overlap in one book.

We also went over Hawaiian books for children. Obviously that's important for Hawaii, but it has a special place in the professor's heart, since her regular job is the librarian at Kamehameha Schools.

We also get to do book reports for children's book. Much easier than doing it when we were children. Though instead of posters or dioramas, we just used power-points. We also made amateur-level video book reports using a program called Little Bird Tales.

We had guest speakers from Kamehameha Schools (our part-time prof's full-time workplace), Hawaii State Library, Bricks4Kids (a Lego group for kids), and Follet (a digital media company specializing in e-books). We also had a prominent children's fiction author  Cornelia Funke speak to us via Skype.

We also had volunteer activities at the Hawaii State Library. We get to choose different weekends to do the volunteering activity. The weekend I went, there was a storytelling session and a veggie stamp activity, where the kids get to dip a vegetable in paint and stamp it on paper. It was good to see kids enjoy creativity in a setting where they dont have to worry about being graded.

This activity told me I was taking the right path in working towards becoming a librarian and maybe work with children's activities.

It was a fun class and I suggest that class to anyone interested in working with children.


For session 2, I took LIS 663: Basic Database Searching


This class is focused on online searching.

Sure, most of us take the Internet (and using Google and Wikipedia) for granted.

But do you know how to maximize your results from online searches?

And more importantly, did you know there's tons of information online that aren't even easily accessible?

Many of us are familiar with having to pay an online subscription to a local or national newspaper.

The same is true about accessing academic journal articles. And in graduate level academics, you will be asked to rely more on academic journal articles instead of just relying on Google or Wikipedia.

If you're at UH, your tuition/taxes/financial-aid is paying for your access to academic journal articles via online academic databases

The databases include, but not limited to

Academic Search Premier
Medline
Sociological Abstracts
Biological Abstracts
ERIC
PsycINFO
and much much more

And the LIS 663 class is mostly about how to maximize your search results on those academic databases.

We learned how to best navigate the systems  and  use the best term combinations to get the articles you want.

Our searching skills were tested by homework in which you have to search for obscure information and you have to document your search with screenshots!  Tons of fun if you had tons of hours to search the info!

And our searching skills are also  tested by doing an online search in front of the whole class.  Yep, you might get asked "find me which college sports have the most corruption" and you will show the whole class how you might find that information.

That might sound intimidating, but the good news was the professor, Rich Gazan, is one of the coolest guys around. He is an easy person to get along with and he is very helpful.

Professor Gazan also has tons of knowledge from his previous work experience in online indexing as well as his academic research.

We also had guest speakers who talked about using medical databases, citation-based searching, as well as flaws with Google Scholar and Google Books. [Google owns Blogger too, so I hope they don't censor this post either]  We also had a guest speaker who got his PhD from UH-Manoa, who is now in charge of an European commission on climate change. Our assignment? Find articles that prove and disprove his claims on climate change.

And towards the end of the summer class, we learned about altmetrics, which I went over on the following blog post
http://pablowegesend.blogspot.com/2013/08/mister-worldwide.html


It was a long 6 weeks with tons of work, but we have survived and had some fun along the way.  I totally suggest that class, especially if Rich Gazan is the teacher!

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It was a good summer.  I got 2 classes over with, learned some things, enjoyed the computer labs and the outside scenery at UH!

I also got loan money, which help since my regular job (sub teacher) was on vacation.

Lots of work accomplished!

Now, it's time for party. Until the Fall Semester that is!

actions and consequences

Most of us know someone who went down the wrong path.

And in some cases, we actually have good memories being around that same person who went down the wrong path.

But at the same time, having good memories of someone DOES NOT mean that person shouldn't have face consequences of that negative behavior


However, some people think that the people they like shouldn't face the inevitable consequences of their stupid decisions.

For example, this teacher named Kate Selker was upset that one of her students was shot in the head, nevermind that her student was intruding on someone else's home!

http://www.salon.com/2013/08/09/young_black_and_shot_in_the_head/

And as the title showed, the teacher played the race card, acting as its racist to shoot an intruder who just happens to be a  different race from you!

And that teacher recited all the good memories of her former student, as if that erase the fact that her student was just asking for trouble when he intruded on someon's property!

Look I don't care how many good memories you have of the student, if he was intruding on someone's property, he is asking to be shot at!

After all, anyone mean-spirited enough to intrude on your property can be mean-spirited enough to attack you, stab you , put you in a choke-hold, rape you,  knock the phone out of your hand as you call 911!

You cant blame the property owner for shooting the intruder.


Look, I used to hang out with this guy named Justin Gonda. This was mostly during my junior year in high school. We used to chill by the school's shop building during lunch recess. There were about 3-4 other people with us, along with a few guests who occasionally came by.  Those were the funnest times I had during my high school years.

However, a few years after high school, Justin Gonda was arrested for sexual assault! He's in jail now!

You know what? It doesn't matter how much good times me and Gonda had in the past, Gonda committed a serious crime and has to take the consequences.


If this leads him to a direction where he gets assaulted or  killed (maybe by his victim's relatives? maybe by other inmates? etc?), he has to accept some of the blame himself!

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And this race card that Kate Selker is using is STUPID!

She said she used to trespass on properties when she was a teen and felt she got away with it because she's white, and her student didn't because he was black.

Selker  might think trespassing was no big deal for her. But if she had gotten shot while trespassing, I won't feel much pity for her! She's just lucky she didn't got caught!

Also,  Selker thinks it's racist for an property owner to shoot an intruder who happens to be a different race. That is so stupid. Selker's problem is her idiotic "white guilt", her "need" to over-compensate for "white privilege".



This over-compensating for white privillege is stupid and unnecessary! It's not racist to expect non-whites to behave properly! After all, Martin Luther King wanted people to be judged by the content of their character. Any fool who intrudes on another person's home shall be judged as a bad character, regardless of skin color!



Everyone needs to accept responsibility for their actions. Sure, some of us have work much harder to gain the respect of others. Sure, some of us face more obstacles than others. Sure, some of us have heard ugly racial insults said to our faces. Sure, some of us didn't have the economic resources that others have! Sure, some of us have physical or mental limitations that others don't have!

But it doesn't erase the fact that everyone still need to do the responsible thing and accept the fact that there are negative consequences for doing negative things!


Now here's a great comment to that same article!

myqjones 

The story is very much more complicated than it sounds.  Ms. Selker fails to mention the other children involved - Mr. Landry's two year old daughter, and the yet to born child carried by his pregnant wife.  Coulter did not "jump" a fence - he scaled an 8 foot tall spiked gate into a fully enclosed fenced drive way right next to the bedroom window where Mr. Landry's family was sleeping at 2am at night.  The drive was deeply shaded from the streetlight across the street by large trees and bushes.  And, the final major issue - this is New Orleans - the single most dangerous city in the US, with the least effective police force with well known slow response times.  Mr. Landry was standing in the enclosed drive, in the dark, with an intruder, family to protect, and low expectation of police response.
Now, this is just me, but if the intruder so much as twitched, they would be shot - center mass, with intent to kill (there is no such thing as shooting to wound, if you think you need to pull the trigger, then shoot to kill).  If they aren't completely disabled, then shoot again.
I would take my chances with the law after that.  My wife, child, and unborn child safety takes precedence over any vagaries of the law.