Here I am, back on the road again

At a certain point in history, I was constantly traveling. My parents lived in a different section of the country from me during my college years, when we were young, we went on so many road trips they simply became a matter of course. But for the past decade plus, my entire life has centered around the Bronx, and teaching, or translation/interpreting. For the past 12 weeks, we've been in a crucible - a container specifically designed to withstand fantastic temperatures, while at the same time allowing the metals within to compose a supposedly stronger, more resilient alloy. We've been tested, and tried, and not found wanting. Truly, we have woken up this morning to a much deeper understanding of the life process occurring around us, to a clearer perspective of our roles in it, and a renewed sense of purpose. Each of our personalities - all of us bringing worthwhile leadership qualities, - had begun to mesh, we each played off each other, we all contributed to make the classes we began and fought and worked through, the best that we could, and we had all come to rely on each others' strengths, become a unified team keeping each other afloat and keeping the communication very open, not unlike a Spartan phalanx.

And now we are off to widely disparate, very far away places.Many of us (including myself) have networks already where we're headed, and so will be far from alone. Though we won't be able to simply turn to a classmate during a budgeting issue and say "hey, how did we do this on the last case study?" Or, "I'm about to publish this OpEd, can you look at it real quick for me?" or, "Is this supposed to be a chi - squared analysis? Or a regression equation?" The process is a bit more difficult. Ah well. It's amazing how, despite our resistance, we've become so amazingly reliant on each other. I guess this is what Jim Collins is talking about when he suggests 'getting the right people on the bus'. Today was bittersweet: we were all excited for the new opportunities, sad that it won't be until January when we're all in the same space again.

And so, following the theme of a bit of song, Bob Seger:

So, MiGoVaSWOT?

This morning started off with a presentation by PMF, one of the NUF's long-time supporters, on financial management, and the highly utilitarian value of Excel and building Macros. While I enjoyed a bit of a review of what we've heard up to now in our budgeting class (structural balance, material errors, amortization rates, time value of money, etc.) and our Public Affairs class (bond structures, bond variations, bond markets, bond manipulation, bond refinancing) I believe the presentation might have been better focused on simply the ways in which the financial model they had set up and were demonstrating during the presentation might have better been manipulated to our greatest advantage in strategic budget planning. Unfortunately, this section of the presentation seemed incredibly rushed, though, I do happen to have the contact information and can likely ask for a more detailed explanation.

In the meantime, I've taken a few more initiatives to heart about the use of social media, and have recently developed and populated a LinkedIn profile. Then, while I was at it, I took something of an initiative to go on the hunt for other, related social media resources that might be of some pertinence to the effort I'm making in the MPA degree. Here's a smattering of the links I farmed from the internet:

• Latino Rebranded: Latinos and Social Media - Louis Pagan takes a look at this crucial viewpoint. How are we showing up? 
• The Center for Hispanic Leadership - Interestingly, we've just finished an online lecture for one of our classes entitled "Public Management" where the professor spent a good amount of time discussing how to effectively write a mission statement. CHL's is as follows:  "To empower the professional growth and talent development of Hispanic Employees through the use of culturally-tailored curriculum that helps accelerate the awareness and potential of their unique skill-sets and capabilities in the workplace."
• The Hispanic Alliance for Prosperity Institute -  "The only proven Hispanic national grassroots network for economic freedom"

Some interesting reading, to be sure. This week also brought us an introduction to PAF 9180 "Policy Analysis" - essentially a research class, which should help streamline us into the Capstone writing experience. Those of us in the cohort who have either completed major research proposals before, or their PhD *grumbles* will recognize the format, and quite likely the resources. The Craft of Research Booth, Colomb, & Williams is the very same text that we utilized in the Intro to Research seminar I took during the latter part of my graduate studies at NYU, which is to say, that right now I'm sharpening up my three minute elevator story (you really have to read the book to get this.).

Oh! and we got our Stats final grades back today. If the graph of the class' grades is a skewed curve with a long left tail, I was closer to the peak towards the right. 'nuf sed.

The anti-hero

Another Social Studies teacher friend of mine sent along this video of Jay Leno at Universal Studios in California. It brought tears to many of us...

Today we're turning in the memo format book report on Little Pink House - the novel style history of one of the most famous eminent domain cases in the history of the country Kelo v. New London, to which I've alluded in a previous post. Tomorrow is the Stats final, I'm a bit sorry to see it go, I keep repeating this at the end of each session to whomever will listen: had I but known all the statistical manipulations we just learned during my first graduate school experience, how much better would my analyses have been, how much more would I have possibly understood about the research I was reading, and so forth. Ah well. In the end, given that we've just completed quite a bit of deliberating with Prof. Mitchell who, like me, enjoyed making the crossover between stats equations and Public Affairs, in regards to economic development, its effects on children's education, tax abatements and their direct relation to businesses being able to afford to stay in town, and thereby also weakening the tax revenue pool with which to fund school systems, (which historically are the critical things that large corporations go looking for in terms of criteria to stay in a location, because they need excellent schools to train an excellent workforce, in order to maintain a leadership position in their respective fields. So, you see how cyclical this becomes) there's this rather amusing equation to be extracted from the vast waste fields of data (both good and bad):

AGERICH(hat)= 3.141527 - 2.5 SMOKING + 10CEDUC - 8HTMES + 0.6802SMOKING*HTMES

And that said, let us not forget to always pronounce "chi" as [kai], and not "chai" [tshai] which is a very heady, fragrant, flavorful tea from the far East, made incredibly popular by coffee house franchises the world over *shudders*.

Tomorrow brings more mentor presentations, and hopefully an interesting look at a few local organizations. More on that probably this weekend, after the actual interviews happen. Stay tuned.

Las piramides de parangaricutirimicuaro

This past week has been quite the adventure. We received our midterm exercises (2 midterms and a paper) graded, and it turns out I managed above 80% on everything. Going forward, I'm fairly conscious of where the differences were in what the professors were asking for, and what I did so that when finals time comes around, I'll be better prepared. This week's main focus is getting started with Sermier and budgeting, and turning in the communications paper on Wednesday, which will likely take up the entirety of my schedule on the morrow.

Last Wednesday, as a result of no shortness of puppeteering on the part of one of our classmates who has a personal connection with the man, Puerto Rico Secretary of State Kenneth McClintock (some NY Daily News articles that include his name here and his bio here) came and spoke to our group about the island nation becoming a state incorporated into the union of the United States of America, and the benefits that integration might confer. This particular policy proposal was one that I might not necessarily agree with, and whose argument had a few holes, though I will have to argue that at a later post as I'm sitting with notebook in hand where I scribbled various thoughts and counterarguments during his conversation.

Friday was the last day of interviews on Fridays, as the school - pursuant to a directive from CUNY central as a money saving initiative - all facilities, buildings, and so forth will be closed for Friday's during the summer months. However, not to be outdone, I signed up for interviews with CH2M Hill, which has quite a few project happening on privatization of municipal services and where I might be able to infuse quite a few of my linguistic resources and be able to leverage the experience towards language access policy research. The Port of Seattle is in dire need of a fellow to develop a curriculum related to their Workplace Responsibility program speaks directly to my experience writing curriculum, especially for distance learning. New York Power Authority - whose energy sustainability projects really fall in line with my passionate drive to create precisely those types of solutions for the future (they were, after all, a huge drive behind my political choices in the elections) would likely stretch my capabilities, as that environment is clearly something that is outside of my comfort zone. The one organization that had selected me was Indianapolis Private Industry Council, whose inherent need for language ability and someone who has a clear mind of how to engage the immigrant community and develop vocationally related hard skills, as well as codify explanatory curriculums for such was clearly apparent during our conversations. That's an interesting position, and to be clear, there is likely to be a good deal of language access policy to municipal services to be written there. An interesting analysis of the process is delineated at my good friend 4everjung's blog

All of this is happening, I should note, as we're learning about simple vs. multiple regressions in Statistical Analysis, barreling towards a policy position paper deadline (see above,) and having to complete a 3-6 pg memo on the novel "The Little Pink House" which is less of a novel and more of a historical case study of how Kelo vs. The City of New London and starting Prof. Sermier's Budget class this week is swirling about in our brains. In times like these, the concept of 'zanshin' in budo: staring at a distant mountain, not so much a spaced out, disconnected vapidity, but more of an eyes on the prize sort of stare comes to mind. I'll see if I can't track down the kanji and put it in here.

And now for some PAF 9100.... wish me luck.

It's time for the calculator

This past span of 4 days has been all about statistical manipulation. Bring me a data set and I'll force myself to calculate the area under your density curve! After getting woken up at cat o'clock, feeding the animals, and taking the general for a stroll, I was sitting on the edge of my bed holding my noggin in my hands trying to figure out how to relieve the pressure on the inside. My roommate came in and asked why I had such a long face.

"I've failed just about every math test I've ever taken." I replied. To which he countered,
"But you can explain this stuff to me! If you can do that, you'll be just fine! Besides, you're the professor!"
In reality, I almost got teary eyed; there it was again - that inherent faith that people have shown that I'm on the right path, and I have no idea what I've done to instill that in them. I told him he was right, and I went with the warrior spirit mentality - ichi go, ichi e - one chance, one opportunity, right now, immediate victory.

I managed to get through the initial run through the exam with minimal hang ups, then went back through to check the math at least 4 times. I reworked one problem set so many times I had to stop myself from doing it again after I was convinced it wouldn't yield a separate result. At the end, I was more than 95% confident that I had done a reasonably good job.

I walked out of the class amphitheater with a wave to the professor, and proceded downstairs to sit out in the sun on the patio outside of the vertical campus. As luck would have it, that was also the man travel path for everyone else exiting the exam, all of whom wore faces summed up in an excellent Spanish word: extraviada. The first to come out was C.C., and she appeared nearly on the verge of tears, but after a few minutes of discussing the problems and a few lighthearted jokes, we got back to feeling more positive. About half an hour later, the remainder of the cohort - roughly a dozen folks - swarmed out of the building en masse. A scarce few seemed to have better feelings, and several began invoking a higher authority.

If I've managed to do well on this exam (and, judging by my score of 80% on the first homework, and having done the second one also in a similar fashion,) then I will have finally conquered, for what it's worth, the computational arrhythmias inherent in my linguistically predisposed mind. That's got to account for something, no?

"Masakatsu agatsu"

True victory, is victory over self.

Schroedinger's cat

One of the great examples that Neil Bennet, our phenomenal Statistics professor keeps sharing with us is his supposed 'Neil's black box' in which is contained the totality of a given population, from which a simple random sample (SRS) of sufficient size can be selected. I asked him last week, if that was not somehow representative of Schroedinger's cat, being that the population of Lilliputians may or may not exist at any one given time, though the supposition that they do is the driving force behind the grandiose theorizing that we were undergoing as a result of this class. He got a chuckle out of it and really, that's all I was after...

The process of certification for NYS teachers is a similarly exhausting experiment in logic. One must send funds, frequently the evaluators of the applications are temps who simply check over files for correct entries, and you can never get anyone on the phone. There is an online system in place, though the atrocities committed in logging on, logging back on after a certain amount of time, being able to find the correct information inside the online system, are voluminous. My experience was thankfully somewhat streamlined, though this last piece has been quite the stomach turner. I had submitted the length and breadth of my experience to the New York State Education Department nearly a year ago, more than sufficient time for them to review my qualifications, the fact that I'd been tenured in NYC, my 12 years of full time work, my Master's degree + 30 hrs, my continued professional development in AP Language and Literature, QTEL, SMARTboard, pick a thing for Foreign Languages, I've done it.

Today, fully 4 days before my initial certification was set to expire, and now that there are statewide layoffs of roughly 8,000 teachers expected for this year (6,500 of which are expected from the city alone, while at the same time Bloomberg Eduaction, Inc. has managed to find money to open more charter schools, fund the induction of new teachers, as well as the Teaching Fellows program, and the city's involvement with the Teach for America initiative, but I digress) the Professional Certification arrived in the mail. I think I'll frame it and put it next to the cherished photo of my friend and I at the Yankee Museum during our trip to the new Yankee Stadium during its inaugural season, or perhaps file it under 'Boulevard of Broken Dreams.' I wonder if they'll count studying for a Master's in Public Administration as appropriate professional development to maintain my certificate...?

Hotel California

It's a strange feeling, being a leader in a group of other leaders. That feeling is multiplied existentially, temporally, and cross-sectionally as we come together for more events, study groups, and cohort wide projects. One thing has risen to the top, however, and that is the fact that we all need to work together - we live and die as a team, and we leave noone behind. Tonight's study group was an exercise in precisely that, with those of us stronger in the statistical analysis of data doing everything we could to maximize the two hours we had scheduled in order to bring those with less understanding up to our level. We ended the night making a priority list of items about how the next study sessions need to be run, and delegating responsibilities for the warehousing of resources online, orchestrating the bringing of snacks, etc, to several key members. I so should have done this earlier.