As we always discuss the first day of nursing school, your first responsibility is to know yourself! Recognize your biases and leave them at the door. If you can’t acknowledge each person for their unique self, other career options are available. You need to treat every person as if they are your most adored member of your family and care for them as you would wish them to be cared for. None of us will be a diversity expert or culturally competent across all cultures, but we all have the capacity to be sensitive to each individual and their needs.
My name is Diversity (a poem)
Dr. Grace Paul
My Name is Diversity
I come in various forms
I come in various shapes
With unique physical attributes
Doesn’t matter, accept me for who I am!
Because I am who I am!
My gender is male, female, either, neither or fluid
I am a gay, lesbian, straight, bi, pan, or asexual
I am a veteran, differently abled, young or old
Doesn’t matter, accept me for who I am!
Because I am who I am!
I come from one race, or a mixture of races
My ethnicity is varied, from any part of the world
When I came to GCC full time in 2011, I was a desk rat who had been commuting an hour each way each day, and my body showed the result of years of too many meetings and bad food choices. One of the best things that Nancy Oreshack recommended to me was our GCC yoga class . . . it was five minutes from my office and we got a tuition waiver! Although the first semester was painful and consisted of an hour workout followed by a Tylenol on the drive home, it was so worth it! I began to feel better and actually regained an inch of my height lost from years of hunching over a computer.
Since then I have become entrenched in all of our wellness resources. I’ve lost 38 pounds thanks to our Naturally Slim program. I learned to eat better thanks to the expertise of speakers like Shannon Smith, GCC nutrition faculty and registered dietician. I’m a regular swimmer thanks to Louise So, and before COVID I practiced Pilates with Mary Lea and yoga with Anna Hall. My doctors were lucky to find breast cancer early thanks to the on-campus mammogram opportunities that Margo Bates coordinates. I started walking regularly thanks to Meghan Kennedy of our CTLE and I continue with regular walks with President Leyba-Ruiz.
The best part of this wellness culture is the people. This is my community. These are my walking, swimming, hiking, and laughing buddies who keep me on track. According to Dr. Chris Drew, our 2022 definition of culture has changed:
“While in the past cultures were built around geographical, social class, ethnic, and family ties, this is changing. The internet allows us to create our own ‘tribes’ of people spread out around the world who share our personal interest and values.”
Are you a member of my culture? Perhaps you are, and we just haven’t met yet. If you keep a pair of sneakers under your desk, if you have a locker in the FW building, or if you carry a hydro flask, you may be one of my people! Let’s talk! Let’s walk!
***Our Fitness and Wellness was recently recognized (again!) as an Exercise is Medicine Gold Campus.
[I think I have more fun coming up with the title than writing the actual piece.]
For me, taking a risk means addressing your fears. Having courage.
Last week I let my fear hijack my motivations to write my 6×6 piece. I made the mistake of reading other posts before I finished mine and became overwhelmed by the incredible expertise and detail that was being portrayed by my peers. Self doubt set in, and before I knew it, I had started deleting paragraphs that no longer seemed “good enough.”.
So here I am, a day late, starting from scratch, but with a much lighter load, since I have removed the unnecessary pressure to finish by a deadline and follow the suggested guidelines!
I have decided that my sense of shame and disappointment for not living up to my usual standards is experienced daily in the classroom (and on Canvas, Zoom and Webex…) by our students. Despite what we may think about their apparent lackadaisical behavior, many of our students are stunted by their own negative self talk, made worse by the dreaded sin of procrastination. I have seen this happen so frequently over the past 30 years of teaching that I do not need a research study to back me up.
Negative self talk may include such notions as “I am not as good as my classmates,” or “my instructor knows so much more than me, so I am not going to say anything in class” or “I don’t think I can finish this work by the deadline, so why bother?”
Negative self talk is risky business. It can destroy a perfectly good opportunity for learning and life advancement. What can we say to our students that might boost their self efficacy? How important are the deadlines? How could we rephrase our guidelines? What if you could say one thing that could help a student muster up enough courage to get the job done without any self doubt? Would you be willing to take that risk?
I hope I don’t get scolded for my late submission! jk
Last week, instead of investigating an issue with one of my project platforms, I was exploring via Google Streetview a town in British Columbia verifying that photos of certain mysterious creatures inexplicably had their faces blurred by Uncle Google’s algorithms.
In an upcoming “thing” in a few weeks I hope to be making a case for the power of maybe misusing my “productivity time” for the exercise of following a curiosity signal. There’s something important to me, at least, about exercising that tingling when there is a promise of a trip down the rabbit hole– and it’s never about catching the rabbit, but just the chase.
Twitter of course excels in providing these jump off points… and I can hardly spend all my days chasing rabbits, but a good run, say 45 minutes, is something I can make room for. It feels like good brain exercise. This one started from a great source I have followed so long I cannot remember, ResearchBuzz:
I cannot fully identify why this tweet, among so many, was one that called to click. I am not one of the devoted trackers of these hypothetical creatures. Sasquatch is hardly a center of interest though as I unpack below, it/he/they (what are the pronouns?) is a metaphor I have exploited before.
And in Tweetdeck I did not even have the links preview like above which means the entrance to the hole was merely the text of the tweet “Everyone deserves #privacy . Even sasquatches. (Sasquatchii?) #GoogleMaps” and previously built in experience that @ResearchBuzz tweets good stuff.
Local Facebook groups were amused by a quirk of the interactive map-making technology that normally blurs the faces of people pictured in StreetView pictures. According to an observation originally posted on Twitter from CBC Vancouver municipal affairs reporter Justin McElroy, it seems the face-hiding feature also works on large wooden statues; the grinning face of the iconic Sasquatch statue that sits outside the welcome sign at the entrance of Harrison Hot Springs has also been blurred.
My curiosity could have ended there. The typical response might be to retweet, send a link to a friend, and move on to the more important work of the day. But something kicked off the switch here. And this goes back to the information literacy stuff I followed long ago from Mike Caulfield when he was calling it the Four Moves strategy and now is SIFT– the act of following sources upstream. I often do this as much of what is reported on web sites is a reframing of something published elsewhere, often itself a recasting of… It’s the act of reading of a summary of a research study, and going to the bother of finding the source.
But still, this blurring of Sasquatch statues hardly beckons for further research. I do not doubt the story in the Vernon Morning Star. And it’s questionably of importance. It’s something else…
Maybe it is an associative trail? There was some trigger of connection- I have never been to Harrison Springs but saw the signs for it many times in 2014-2015 when I was in Kamloops for a few months of a fellowship at Thompson Rivers University. And I actually recognized the statue!
But the real call is that this is eminently repeatable. Google Streetview is wide open for you to go anywhere in the world their car mounted cameras have gone, and explore yourself. It’s got so many, close to infinitely interesting elements for creative or explorative learning activities. Heck one time on a highway I spotted the Streetview car coming at me, and I waved– it took a year but I did find myself there.
This probably is not the efficient way to search for blurry Sasquatch… but I did get luck, I spotted a statue outside the the RV resort, a different statue than what was in the news story. But OMG, yes, the statue’s face is blurred:
Who is that blurred face creature outside the Springs RV resort?
Just wandering around the streets was interesting if not efficient. So if I use a search on “Sasquatch Statue” while in this area, it gets much easier:
Searching for Sasquatch Statues near Harrison Hot Springs, BC
Very quickly I found one (face blurred) near the waterfront:
Looks like Sasquatch. Maybe. As usually, the figure is blurry, and even more so in the face.
Now here is a fun thing you may not know, Google Streetview keeps a timeline of photos from different time periods, so if you click the date in the top left, you can see the same location taken on different dates. So I am able to document that Sasquatch, blurry or not, was there greeting visitors in September 2015, but not in August 2011!
While poking around, I noticed some interesting things with Streetview. It does blur the face of humans walking around, but not dogs.
The privacy of humans is protected by a blur, but not for pooches.
And the blurring on statues is not even consistent- I found this one at a housing development, and the woord statue seems to have blurred the figure with an eagle head, but not the bears.
Which statues get the blur treatment? Only Google’s algorithm knows
So there is some kind of hierarchy for facial shapes that get the blur treatment? Again, the relative importance of this is highly questionable (especially if anyone is left reading this). But that is maybe not my point
Do I have one?.
What’s the Point Alan?
There’s something to be said for just reading and interpreting information versus interacting with the sources behind it. There’s not enough time in any day to do this (or perhaps not enough justification), but these small acts can plant seeds for other ideas that may emerge later. Knowing/reinforcing a few things here:
Google Streetview is a fully navigable immersive world
Every single view can be referenced, shared with a URL.
You can search for things within the geographical context of a map location
And the Streetview has a timeline, to see the same view across different years
The application of the face blurring, to protect privacy, has some interesting loopholes in it.
I would never have gotten this by reading a story and retweeting it.
This also reminds me of some interesting digital art I came when I learned of the work of visual artist Emilio Vavarella… in his Google Trilogy, he exploited Google’s Streetview to examine unintended effects such as glitches, or the accidental appearance of the camera’s operator, as part of questioning of the people, technology, and errors in the large data sets we use regularly.
So maps are useful for finding locations, getting from one place to another, but there is so much more potential when you look with a curious eye.
That’s what I find, emerging from the rabbit hole.
PS This is an installment of my participating in the 2022 Write 6×6 Challenge, they may never anticipate what the heck gets syndicated into their site!
I dreaded my College Composition course in the fall of 1981. Not because I hated writing, but rather because of the teacher I was assigned – Mr. Luther Stewart. Mr. Stewart had a reputation at Scottsdale High School which included failing my brother in Freshman English. He was not to be trifled with. (And yes, he would hate that dangling preposition.)
Rumor was that Mr. Stewart had, at one point, been a lawyer but left it all to become a teacher. He looked more teacherly than lawyerly, with a largish bald head and over-sized glasses that magnified his glaring eyes. He didn’t smile much.
My own knowledge of Mr. Stewart stretched back to the first day of sophomore Advanced English, and he was my assigned teacher then. During the previous year, I had been on a Rumspringa of sorts from my regular academic persona. I discovered boys and drinking. I almost failed Algebra. I got kicked out of a class once, and I made my family very nervous. “What happened to Mary?” they all asked.
On that first day of sophomore year, Mr. Stewart passed out a chunky list of required reading, which consisted of no less than 25 classic texts. My then-14-year-old self balked and quickly retreated to a “regular” English class for the rest of the year.
Fast-forward to senior year, and Mr. Stewart was again on my slate of classes. This time, there was nowhere to run, and I resigned myself to being in his class. I entered Mr. Stewart’s room with a great deal of shame and a definite lack of belief in myself.
The regular assignment in his class was a weekly essay, and he allowed us to choose topics that were personally meaningful. I remember one such essay I wrote: “A Girl Should Make Her Prom Dress Instead of Buying One.” Let’s unpack this title for a moment. I am a “girl” in the 80’s. My pressing topic is prom dresses, and above that I am hell-bent on sewing my own.
I was a pom-pom girl. My path set out by my parents was to become a wife and mother (in that exact order). Nobody took me seriously, and I didn’t either. Enter Mr. Stewart. Our College Composition class was full of lively discussion, although the boys in the class were most vocal. On more than one occasion, Mr. Stewart would stomp his foot, raise his hand in the air, and exclaim, “Form follows the function of a reasoning mind!” We had debates in class such as “What is truth?” He taught us the art and science of argumentation.
As each week progressed, Mr. Stewart would provide detailed feedback on my essays, and his red pen was all over my papers. But deep down, I knew that level of feedback meant he cared and that I had something to offer. I felt like more than just a girl to be cast aside. My voice mattered.
With each essay, his ice melted, his encouragement ramped up, and I started to look forward to the weekly challenge of impressing him. Towards the end of the school year, he wrote the following feedback on one of my essays: “Sounds like you – a high compliment!” Today, I have these words on a sticky note on my desk, and I believe that praise is why I love writing today. And, it’s why, as a teacher, I want to hear and honor the voices of all my students.
I dreaded my College Composition course in the fall of 1981. Not because I hated writing, but rather because of the teacher I was assigned – Mr. Luther Stewart. Mr. Stewart had a reputation at Scottsdale High School which included failing my brother in Freshman English. He was not to be trifled with. (And yes, he would hate that dangling preposition.)
Rumor was that Mr. Stewart had, at one point, been a lawyer but left it all to become a teacher. He looked more teacherly than lawyerly, with a largish bald head and over-sized glasses that magnified his glaring eyes. He didn’t smile much.
My own knowledge of Mr. Stewart stretched back to the first day of sophomore Advanced English, and he was my assigned teacher then. During the previous year, I had been on a Rumspringa of sorts from my regular academic persona. I discovered boys and drinking. I almost failed Algebra. I got kicked out of a class once, and I made my family very nervous. “What happened to Mary?” they all asked.
On that first day of sophomore year, Mr. Stewart passed out a chunky list of required reading, which consisted of no less than 25 classic texts. My then-14-year-old self balked and quickly retreated to a “regular” English class for the rest of the year.
Fast-forward to senior year, and Mr. Stewart was again on my slate of classes. This time, there was nowhere to run, and I resigned myself to being in his class. I entered Mr. Stewart’s room with a great deal of shame and a definite lack of belief in myself.
The regular assignment in his class was a weekly essay, and he allowed us to choose topics that were personally meaningful. I remember one such essay I wrote: “A Girl Should Make Her Prom Dress Instead of Buying One.” Let’s unpack this title for a moment. I am a “girl” in the 80’s. My pressing topic is prom dresses, and above that I am hell-bent on sewing my own.
I was a pom-pom girl. My path set out by my parents was to become a wife and mother (in that exact order). Nobody took me seriously, and I didn’t either. Enter Mr. Stewart. Our College Composition class was full of lively discussion, although the boys in the class were most vocal. On more than one occasion, Mr. Stewart would stomp his foot, raise his hand in the air, and exclaim, “Form follows the function of a reasoning mind!” We had debates in class such as “What is truth?” He taught us the art and science of argumentation.
As each week progressed, Mr. Stewart would provide detailed feedback on my essays, and his red pen was all over my papers. But deep down, I knew that level of feedback meant he cared and that I had something to offer. I felt like more than just a girl to be cast aside. My voice mattered.
With each essay, his ice melted, his encouragement ramped up, and I started to look forward to the weekly challenge of impressing him. Towards the end of the school year, he wrote the following feedback on one of my essays: “Sounds like you – a high compliment!” Today, I have these words on a sticky note on my desk, and I believe that praise is why I love writing today. And, it’s why, as a teacher, I want to hear and honor the voices of all my students.
I dreaded my College Composition course in the fall of 1981. Not because I hated writing, but rather because of the teacher I was assigned – Mr. Luther Stewart. Mr. Stewart had a reputation at Scottsdale High School which included failing my brother in Freshman English. He was not to be trifled with. (And yes, he would hate that dangling preposition.)
Rumor was that Mr. Stewart had, at one point, been a lawyer but left it all to become a teacher. He looked more teacherly than lawyerly, with a largish bald head and over-sized glasses that magnified his glaring eyes. He didn’t smile much.
My own knowledge of Mr. Stewart stretched back to the first day of sophomore Advanced English, and he was my assigned teacher then. During the previous year, I had been on a Rumspringa of sorts from my regular academic persona. I discovered boys and drinking. I almost failed Algebra. I got kicked out of a class once, and I made my family very nervous. “What happened to Mary?” they all asked.
On that first day of sophomore year, Mr. Stewart passed out a chunky list of required reading, which consisted of no less than 25 classic texts. My then-14-year-old self balked and quickly retreated to a “regular” English class for the rest of the year.
Fast-forward to senior year, and Mr. Stewart was again on my slate of classes. This time, there was nowhere to run, and I resigned myself to being in his class. I entered Mr. Stewart’s room with a great deal of shame and a definite lack of belief in myself.
The regular assignment in his class was a weekly essay, and he allowed us to choose topics that were personally meaningful. I remember one such essay I wrote: “A Girl Should Make Her Prom Dress Instead of Buying One.” Let’s unpack this title for a moment. I am a “girl” in the 80’s. My pressing topic is prom dresses, and above that I am hell-bent on sewing my own.
I was a pom-pom girl. My path set out by my parents was to become a wife and mother (in that exact order). Nobody took me seriously, and I didn’t either. Enter Mr. Stewart. Our College Composition class was full of lively discussion, although the boys in the class were most vocal. On more than one occasion, Mr. Stewart would stomp his foot, raise his hand in the air, and exclaim, “Form follows the function of a reasoning mind!” We had debates in class such as “What is truth?” He taught us the art and science of argumentation.
As each week progressed, Mr. Stewart would provide detailed feedback on my essays, and his red pen was all over my papers. But deep down, I knew that level of feedback meant he cared and that I had something to offer. I felt like more than just a girl to be cast aside. My voice mattered.
With each essay, his ice melted, his encouragement ramped up, and I started to look forward to the weekly challenge of impressing him. Towards the end of the school year, he wrote the following feedback on one of my essays: “Sounds like you – a high compliment!” Today, I have these words on a sticky note on my desk, and I believe that praise is why I love writing today. And, it’s why, as a teacher, I want to hear and honor the voices of all my students.
