All posts by Hollis Easter

Monthly Roundup – November 2013

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Here’s the quick monthly roundup for what I’ve written this month, organized by subject. I’ve provided links to make it easier to read the articles.

General

  • Fear and Gratitude: Giving Thanks 2013 November 28
    Nobody told me that Lyme disease comes with constant fear attached. Antibiotics help with the physical symptoms; here’s how I’m working on the mental ones.
  • Try The Honey Badger Diet! 2013 November 10
    This… is the honey badger (diet)! You may be surprised to learn that honey badgers do care about some things. They’re actually very sensitive to the size bias and body loathing that are rampant among Mellivora capensis. Honey badgers receive a lot of negative messaging encouraging them to hate their bodies and feel stupid about their eating …
  • Why You SHOULD Get Chills From That “Homeless Veteran Timelapse Transformation” Video 2013 November 08
    Man, we loves us some transformations. Makeovers, interventions, whatever you want to call ‘em. We love the idea of saviors, too: people who come in and do the transforming/making over/intervening. This is enshrined on a pretty deep level of our culture, from religious transformers to Home Makeover shows to boot camps to alcoholism interventions to Teach …
  • Site Policies 2013 November 08
    Privacy policy, ad policy, comment policy, etc.
  • Honey Badger Empathy Survey 2013 November 07
    Survey conducted using Standard Empathy Instrument (Quantitative) version 2.5, n = 577. In light of the perhaps-surprising results of the initial survey, we attempted to repeat the survey to investigate whether the initial results were anomalous. Regrettably, nearly all the honey badgers had engaged themselves in other activities (seeking honey and larvae, hunting and eating cobras, …
  • Of Mice and Mindsets 2013 November 05
    What can we learn about growth mindsets from a video of a Russian mouse trying to steal a cookie? Quite a lot, actually.

Crisis hotlines

  • Compassion and the Little Prince 2013 November 19
    What can we learn about crisis work from the Little Prince and a retired counselor from Mississippi? We can learn how compassion and love connect in crisis.
  • Pathologizing Language 2013 November 06
    Most of you have seen the video about the Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger, with narration by Randall, somewhere in your travels around the internet. I delight in using the honey badgers to teach about crisis hotlines; we’re using the honey badger in our initial training to talk about inappropriate sexual callers, frequent callers, the …

Music

  • Frankenstein’s Musical Laboratory 2013 November 17
    Dr. Frankenstein cooks up a new musical instrument in his lab, combining the beauty of a violin with the speed of a typewriter.

Math

  • The Sheriff’s Star: Playing Math! 2013 November 26
    How can you make a regular 7-pointed badge for the Sheriff of El Dorado County without a protractor? Does it work with any number of points? We’re playing math!
  • Triangles and Pyramids: Playing Math! 2013 November 10
    Triangles and Pyramids Playing math! I like playing with math. These days, I don’t need that much math for my daily life–enough to calculate whether I’ve got enough gas to get from A to B, to balance my checkbook, to budget for the training class I’m starting, to figure out expenses on Frost and Fire‘s new album… …

Money

  • How Much Does Grad School Cost? 2013 November 14
    Grad school is expensive in lots of ways, but people often forget opportunity cost. In this post, we look at how much more money you have to make after graduate school to make up for the lost earnings and growth you missed during school, and we reach some conclusions about how much you need to …
  • How Much Does Grad School Cost — Followup 2013 November 16
    This post follows up on some things people have raised in the lively discussion about my earlier post, How Much Does Grad School Cost? Please start with that post if you’re just joining the discussion now. Thanks!
  • What’s Wrong With Your Savings Account? 2013 November 01
    People use savings accounts for the wrong thing. Savings accounts aren’t for making your money grow; they’re more like insurance policies. Here’s why.

Cooking and herbalism

  • Finishing the dandelion tincture 2013 November 15
    Straining and bottling a homemade dandelion tincture (whole herb), with lots of photos. Part two of a series.

Technology and fun

Words

Fear and Gratitude: Giving Thanks

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They say you never see it coming… that one day, you’re walking around living your life normally, and the next day, boom, everything changes. For me, it came one evening last spring, when I scratched my neck and found an engorged deer tick on it. I figured it wouldn’t be any big deal, but that I’d go to the doctor and get it checked out just to be sure. Lyme disease is no big deal, right?

I spent the next fifteen months on antibiotics.

Fifteen months of riding a downward slide where nobody can tell you where the ride stops or whether you walk away or get carried out in a coffin at the end. A year and a half, now, of trying different doctors, of being told that Lyme disease doesn’t exist, of being called a psych case, of trying different antibiotics and hoping we’d find one that wouldn’t kill me with side effects. Another deer tick, this spring, which restarted my infection.

Eighteen months of research, now, of learning to understand some biochemistry so I could decipher what the treatment protocols were saying, of discovering the bitter political controversies within the medical community, and of praying for someone who might help. This will be familiar to anybody who’s gone through serious illness–the feeling that you’ve stepped onto an elevator that’s in freefall, with no way off.

I knew Lyme (and Bartonella, a coinfection that I also got) could make you pretty tired. I didn’t know it could make it impossible to stay awake for more than 30 minutes at a time, or that it would disable the vision in one eye, or that it would paralyze half of my face, or that I’d suddenly forget the names of people I’d known for years. I never saw it coming that it could do all sorts of damage that might be permanent… and that the only way to find out whether it’ll be permanent is to keep living until it goes away. I didn’t expect that sometimes I would wake up and my right shoulder wouldn’t move—that, no matter how hard I tried, I wouldn’t be able to move that joint—or that the disability could shift to different joints in a matter of minutes.

All those things eventually became normal. Humans are remarkably good at adapting to adversity, and I’ve been surprised to find that I can deal with that stuff pretty well. I can say, maybe with less grace than I’d like, “I’m sorry, but I’m having a horrible Lyme day, and I can’t do that walk we talked about—could we sit and have coffee instead?”. I can find ways to avoid stairs when my body can’t handle them, I can find new hobbies when mountaineering becomes inaccessible, I can make sure that I never go on stage without a music stand because my memory has grown unreliable. I take a bunch of supportive medications, and I probably always will, but I’ve learned to deal with that pretty well too. I can do this.

Nobody prepared me for the fear.

I had no idea how much mental discipline it takes to survive diseases like Lyme. But I’ve learned, and that’s what I’d like to talk about today.

I don’t remember what it’s like to walk outside and not be aware of the risk of deer ticks. I can’t sit on the ground without constantly checking for ticks that might be crawling on me, and I can’t pet my cat without checking her for ticks, because I’m flatly terrified of getting bitten and starting the downward spiral all over again. I don’t remember any other way but this.

I learned how the bacteria that cause Lyme can basically turn off your immune system, leaving you undefended against everything that’s out there, not just Lyme. They say it’s really important to have good hand sanitation when you’re a Lyme patient because you’re basically walking around in the world without a functioning immune system. So I wash my hands a lot.

My allergies have all gotten worse since I’ve had Lyme, and the asthma. Nobody’s had a good explanation for this, but it seems to be pretty common among Lyme sufferers. So now I live in fear of being near people wearing perfumes or colognes, because the whiff of perfume from someone walking past can leave me on the floor gasping for air. I used to hug people a lot, but the risk of getting perfume on me means it’s a gamble I can’t afford anymore.

And then there’s the constant fear of slipping backwards in treatment, of relapsing, of needing to be hospitalized, of needing 24/7 intravenous antibiotics, of side effects, of coinfections, of needing to fight with insurance companies to have the treatment covered… it comes with a hefty dose of fear, every day, without remission.

I could go on, but you probably get the picture. I earn my living at a crisis hotline where I talk to all kinds of folks, and I’ve heard similar stories from people dealing with cancer, fibromyalgia, lupus, Parkinson’s, chronic fatigue, and a host of other diseases. It’s all the same story.

So where does gratitude come into it?

It seems as though surviving these diseases brings a common theme: you learn to be grateful for good things when they come, because they don’t come as easily anymore.

There’s a lot of bad stuff that makes up the background radiation of life with serious disease, but after a while, most of us learn to accept that that’s the “new normal”. Maybe not with grace, maybe not always with success, but we learn to get through it. (Sadly, this often involves hiding the bad stuff from people we love because we don’t want to bug them with it, but that’s another story–and that’s part of why support groups matter.)

The thing is, there’s lots of good stuff to be appreciated too. I don’t think I noticed it as much before I got sick because I was pretty happy and didn’t really need as much good stuff to cling to. But living with Lyme is tough, and I find that noticing and being grateful for the good stuff is one of the things helping to get me through.

I’m uncomfortable saying there’s some huge “silver lining” to Lyme disease, because dammit, I’d give this up in a second if someone could get me healthy again. But for now, I have to find a way to keep living even though I’m always afraid of relapsing, and gratitude is part of that way.

Gratitude doesn’t fix problems, but it can make them easier to live with.

Thanksgiving

It’s Thanksgiving in the USA today. It’s become a major corporation-fueled shopping event in recent years, and people joke that it’s the day when we give thanks for what we have and then immediately go out to buy more. The corporate world has encouraged us to fixate on the “giving” part of Thanksgiving—so we’ll buy more stuff—and spend less time on the “Thanks” part.

But I love Thanksgiving, partly because I love the traditions and the foodways and the ritual that surrounds the turning of the year, partly because there may never be anything in the world so beautiful as my backyard blanketed in snow and seen through our dining room windows… but mostly because it’s deeply good to make time for reflecting and giving thanks.

When I was a kid, I didn’t really understand all this stuff about “being thankful”. I thought it meant that you had to say thank you when someone passed the stuffing, and that if you didn’t do it, someone might say that you’d been “spoiled” and had bad manners. So being thankful was basically just a way to avoid punishment from members of the extended family.

And then I’d always get worried that if I left anyone out, I’d be labelled as ungrateful, so I’d make these mammoth lists in my head, and it never really worked for me. But I’ve come around to believing that while gratitude is partly about offering thanks to others, it’s also about changing the way you exist in the world. So I don’t worry so much about being thankful for everything, and instead I try to be thankful more of the time.

I’ve spent the last year learning that quality of life is largely about what we choose to see. Gratitude doesn’t change the external circumstances at all—it won’t alter the facts. But what I’ve learned from hotline callers, who’ve known this far longer than I have, is that you can affect how you feel by changing what you choose to notice. When I seek opportunities to be grateful, it makes the genuinely awful stuff easier to bear.

So here are some things I’m grateful for todayHollisGuitarWalkerChristmas2011

I’m grateful for the family who’ve loved and cared for me so well over the years: Steve (Dad), Karen (Mom), Ruth and Byron (grandparents), George and Peggy and Hollis and Phoebe (grandparents who are gone now), all my aunts and uncles and cousins.

I’m grateful for Jasmine, whose love is a function that’s continuous everywhere and has infinite value. Aww. I’m grateful for the dreams we share (and those we haven’t finished negotiating), and for all the memories we’ve built together. I smile when I look at my pictures of her dressing a turkey last week, and I remember that she came and held my hand every time I asked her to come to the Lyme doctor with me so I wouldn’t have to be alone.

I’m grateful for Tabitha, my dear little cat, who survived a car accident last year at Thanksgiving and dragged herself home in the dark with a broken pelvis, mewing gently in what must have been utterly horrible pain. Thanks to a good veterinarian and months of TLC from us, she spent the afternoon chasing mice around the snowy backyard and is now curled up on a table watching The Magnificent Seven with my dad.

I’m grateful that we found a gluten-free bread recipe (my mom is GF now) that worked really well for making stuffing, since I firmly believe that stuffing is the whole point of the Thanksgiving menu . I’m grateful for playing Bananagrams with Byron and Jasmine while Ruth looked on, for an abundance of good food in a time where too many people have nothing to eat, and for a heated place to live as winter advances.

I’m grateful to Pope Francis for saying some important things the world needs to hear. I’m grateful for things that make me question how I spend my money and my time… and grateful that I still feel like I’m mostly making good choices in that regard.

I’m grateful for the bright stars on our evening walk tonight, and for the bitter wind that froze my cheeks and reminded me of the years I spent hiking in the Adirondacks all winter long. I’m grateful for the hope that, even though my body was exhausted and full of pain today, I might one day head back into the mountains.

I’m grateful for people who read my blog. I keep being surprised by how much pleasure I take from sharing ideas with you folks, and it gives me a ton of satisfaction to log into the analytics page and see that people are reading. Thank you.

I’m grateful for people whose music has carried me through so many sleepless nights in the last year and a half. Right now I’m listening to Annbjorg Lien and Roger Tallroth playing an absolutely gorgeous rendition of the Miller Boy’s Brudmarsch, but there are so many other people who’ve also helped me with their songs and tunes.

With less explanation, I’m grateful for:

  • Fountain pens and gorgeous inks, bottled so they’re more environmentally sustainable.
  • Chaga (Inonotus obliquus), the mushroom that helps support my immune system.
  • Tristan Henderson, for helping get me set up with a mandolin and an octave mandolin.
  • Not having to take quite as many pills every day, compared to last year.
  • Melissa Running and Bob Mills, for being there when I needed them, and for fostering my new musical loves.
  • Dr _______, for believing in me, treating me, and helping me to learn how to live with Lyme.
  • The team at NASCOD 2013, for listening to my presentation and saying so many wonderful things about it.
  • Sam Sanders, for recording Frost and Fire‘s album, which comes out next week.
  • Fragrance-free laundry detergent, because it means I can actually wash my clothes.
  • The bletted apple tree in our driveway, so rare that most orchardists have never even heard of one, and the way we’ve helped the local orchard to develop scions of it so it can live onward. It reminds me of Todd Alessi, our friend and piano tuner, who loved its apples very much. He died last month.
  • Peter Edwards, who moved to Vermont this year for a job that means I get to see him much more often.
  • Frost and Fire, for being my musical partners and friends. Susie Petrov, for being my friend and teacher and mentor for years now. Katie McNally, Shannon Heaton, Valerie Thompson, and Liz Simmons, for sharing some lovely music last weekend.
  • Days when I wake up and my body doesn’t hurt. There aren’t many, but I’m grateful for them.
  • Teachers who’ve led me toward the tools for surviving the mental and emotional parts of long-term illness.
  • Casey, who’s covering the hotline shift today so I can spend time with my family.
  • The fabulous garlic dill pickles we make from the Dinosaur Bar-b-que recipe.
  • WordPress, for making it so I can type this and you can read it.

And lots of others. Too many people to list, too many things to list. I’ll think of twenty more as soon as I hit “Publish”. And that’s kind of the point. Gratitude doesn’t change the facts, but sometimes it helps us to choose our response to them. Oscar Wilde wrote that all of us are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.

For me, that helps me to get through living with constant fear—seeking constant gratitude balances it out.

I’m a little uncomfortable posting this, because I’ve gotten really tired of people telling me that I need to “just focus on the good things”, and I get furious when I hear people implying, e.g., that poor folks wouldn’t be so homeless if they had better attitudes. That’s not what I see gratitude as: it’s not about ignoring the bad stuff or pretending it doesn’t exist. It’s about finding ways to even the balance out a little bit. It’s not about complaining or not-complaining. It’s about balance.

I can’t always live with gratitude in mind; I don’t think anyone can. Sometimes everything hurts too much, or it’s all too overwhelming. I’m not trying to say that anybody else needs to change, so if what I’ve written seems simplistic or irrelevant, please discard it and move along. I’m just writing what’s working for me right now. I hope it helps you!

If you liked this, please share it with a friend—especially if it’s a friend who struggles with a long-term illness.

The Sheriff’s Star: Arithmetic Solution

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The Sheriff’s Star: Arithmetic Solution

If you haven’t already read the problem description for the Sheriff’s Star, you might want to do that before looking at solutions.

The arithmetic solution doesn’t use anything beyond division, and so it’s theoretically fine for 1849 gold miners. It would be tedious to do some of these calculations by hand (I’d use a calculator), but it can be done.

My mom (Karen Butler Easter) was the first one to present this solution to me; I didn’t find it on my own. She’s an excellent lateral thinker, and it shows in this solution: straightforward and lovely.

Arithmetic Solution Master 2013-11-27 02_r1_c1Start by marking a center point and then use the string (acting as a radius) with a pencil at the end of it. Mark out a circle. (You could also probably do this with a compass or a pair of dividers—it seems likely that a goldsmith might have both.)

Arithmetic Solution Master 2013-11-27 02_r2_c1We could certainly calculate circumference based on some numeric methods here, but it’s easy just to measure it, and that’s likely to be precise enough for our goldsmith. So we measure it with the string, marking the string to show the total length.

We measure that length and then divide it by n, which is the number of points we want the star to have. We call this new amount x.

Arithmetic Solution Master 2013-11-27 02_r5_c3Then we go back to mark the string up with equally-spaced points. If you have a calculator, you can do this by multiplication or by repeated addition; if not, you might just mark the length of x on a piece of paper and use that repeatedly to mark each segment.

This approach is similar to one that’s frequently used for laying out repeated measurements in woodworking: a story pole or scantillion.

Arithmetic Solution Master 2013-11-27 02_r6_c3 Having marked up the string with equal segments, we transfer it back onto the circle and mark those points. This avoids all kinds of fun math that you’ll find in the trigonometric solution.

Arithmetic Solution Master 2013-11-27 02_r7_c3At this point, you can form the star however you want. Some badges have deeper grooves between the points. How might you accomplish that?

There you go! Simple, easy, and not much calculation involved. Head back to the Sheriff’s Star page to see links to other solutions people have created.

Have you come up with a new solution? Leave a comment!

The Sheriff’s Star: Playing Math!

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The Sheriff's Star (c) Hollis Easter
The Sheriff’s Star (c) Hollis Easter

I put this scenario together to clothe and house a math question that came up one night at a party. It’s part of my ongoing quest to show how math can answer interesting questions and be a fun form of play. This is appropriate for students who’ve learned some trigonometry, homeschoolers of any age, or people who just like exploring with math. Let’s play math together!

The Setup

The year is 1849. You’re a talented young goldsmith from New York who’s just finished your Aurifaber’s Residency at Thomas Higgins & Co just outside Boston. Like many young folks in those days, and like Huckleberry Finn 40 years later, you’ve decided to light out for the Territory and seek your fortune out in the world.

After some arduous traveling, you made it to Culloma, California, the center of the gold rush. (Luckily you missed out on some of the hardest traveling the mountains had to offer.) You set up a goldsmithing shop in the center of town and quickly developed it into a thriving business as prospectors brought their gold, silver, and other precious finds straight from the assay office and into your waiting hands. Your reputation grew quickly, backed by hard work and an eye for detail.

The Sheriff of El Dorado County

One day, the county’s Sheriff walked in. He sat down and thrust out his badge, a worn and venerable-looking six-pointed affair.

Star picture from Sumner County, KS.

“Can you make me a new one?” said the Sheriff.

“Certainly!” you replied. “That’s no problem at all–silver, gold? What’s your preference?”

“Oh, I don’t much care about that–why not go with silver, or whatever’s cheapest. Here’s the thing, though: I’d like it to be a little more distinctive. All the other Sheriffs in the area have five- or six-pointed stars, but El Dorado County is coming up in the world and I’d like our uniform to reflect it. Could you do a seven-pointed star? Or maybe a nine-pointed star for me and seven-pointed ones for my deputies?”

The Problem

You don’t have a protractor. The Sheriff wants his badges to reflect the highest standards of police work, and that means he wants all the angles to be equal, so the badges look great. You don’t have any tools for measuring angles.

What you do have:

  • Plenty of paper for laying out designs
  • Writing tools
  • Pins for affixing the badges to uniforms
  • Your goldsmithing tools and materials
  • Brown paper and string for shipping the badges
  • A ruler
  • A basic understanding of geometry and trigonometry
  • An indomitable entrepreneurial spirit

How do you solve it?

A short form of this problem is: how can you draw a regular n-sided polygon without measuring angles?

There are at least two solutions: one uses cleverness, triangles, and trigonometry; another uses cleverness and basic arithmetic. Both are fun.

How would you solve it? Is there a way you could use some tasty math to approach this problem? Can your solution create a regular n-sided polygon for any n >= 3?

Solutions:

Once I finish typing up the solutions, I’ll replace this paragraph with the link to the solutions page. If you’d like to be notified when I post the solutions, please follow me on Feedly or Twitter or leave a comment on this page.

(If you’re interested, there are lots of kinds of Sheriffs’ badges on Google. Check ’em out! Regrettably, they didn’t have Google in California in 1849.)

Please don’t post your solutions on this page, because we want everyone to have fun playing math. Once the solutions page is up, you can post your solutions there! Enjoy yourselves!

 

Iconic Hipsters

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Iconic Hipsters (c) Hollis Easter
Iconic Hipsters (c) Hollis Easter

I mean, I was into them before they became all iconic and everything? Because, like, to be iconic is to be known by everyone, and I was into them back when they were still pretty much on the d-l and almost nobody had heard of them.

Hipsters are so ironic that their ironic irony has now become ironically iconic. Ironic, no?

Pipers’ Gathering 2013 Instructors Concert (listen)

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I had the privilege of teaching Scottish smallpipes and Scottish border pipes at the Pipers’ Gathering in Burlington, VT each of the last two summers. There, i taught private and group lessons on bagpipes, showed a lot of people how to stretch and prevent injuries, sold a lot of pipers on the virtues of metronomes, and had some fabulous tunes with friends.

This year’s Gathering was especially meaningful for me because I had the chance to share the stage and teachers’ rostrum with so many of the pipers who’ve shaped my playing: Hamish and Fin Moore, who made my instruments and taught me at several summer camps, and Iain MacInnes, whose album Tryst is the reason I love smallpipes. It was a great time.

My Home Town


For the evening concert, I decided to throw some curveballs. I began with a familiar pipe tune, My Home Town, but sung it a cappella rather than playing it on pipes. We talk a lot about the role of bagpipe music in shaping and being shaped by the larger oeuvre of Scottish music, and I think it’s fun to present pipe music in different ways.

Ae Fond Kiss


A lot of pipers spend their time compartmentalized within the piping genre of Scottish traditional music, and I think it’s important as an instructor to spend time showing people things outside their experience as well as familiar material. Most of my bagpipe classes involve singing at some point, so I thought it would be nice to include some songs. This one, Ae Fond Kiss, is a Robert Burns song I’ve loved for years. If you like it, you’ll find it on my band’s new album.

Navigator

I believe it’s worth sending people home from a concert having thought about some things—as storytellers and the descendents of troubadours, I think we owe it to our audiences to give people some “stuff to chew on”. Here’s a song called Navigator that does that nicely. I like to introduce it to people as a reflection on what things actually cost—and who does the paying.

(It’s also nice to get the audience singing, too—this crowd was pretty energetic about it, and you’ll hear that they sang beautifully!)

Julottan / Eklunda-Polska #3 / Slangpolska fran Sormland

I’ve been on a Scandinavian music kick this year, with a new love for Swedish music. There were some Swedish bagpipe players in camp (even though that wasn’t an official part of the Gathering’s curriculum this year) and I wanted to give them a nod—plus I wanted to share some vulnerability on stage. I explained that teachers always seem to be asking people to take risks… and then we don’t take them ourselves. So I asked their indulgence for playing my newest instrument—guitar—and my newest repertoire—Swedish—together on stage, despite my nerves. I’m joined by my buddy Bob Mills, who’s playing his newest instrument: the Nordic mandola. (which you can also hear here).

I was scared, but it came out well, and the real point was that lots of students told me in class the next morning that they had really appreciated having a teacher show them what it was like to embrace vulnerability. Given that I see my role at camp as being teacher first and foremost, I call that success.

March of the King of Laois

We all get by with a little help from our friends. I wanted to bring a host of friends on-stage for the last tune, a classic clan march from Ireland. I’ve loved this tune for at least 15 years now; I expect I always will. Here on stage with me are Bruce Childress (guitar), Bob Mills (Nordic mandola), Katie McNally (fiddle), and Iain MacHarg (Scottish smallpipes). I’m playing smallpipes too.

Thanks for listening!

Want to leverage your language skills to impact people more?

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Leverage

Leverage (c) Hollis Easter
Leverage (c) Hollis Easter

To review:

Levers are tools for multiplying force. Some dude* once suggested that if you gave him a long enough lever, he could move the Moon. (He’s probably right, although he ignored the need for a fixed fulcrum. Anyway.)

Leverage is an abstract term relating to levers. Some people use it to refer to the specific force-multiplication ratio offered by the lever (e.g., 4:1 leverage vs. 8:1 leverage), while others use it to describe the state of having access to adequate levers (“She’s got enough leverage for that” basically means “she has access to a big-enough lever to accomplish what she wants”).

Some people use leverage as a verb. These people are wrong.

You use a lever to acquire leverage. The lever provides the leverage, in the same way that a car provides transportation and a burrito provides nourishment.

You would not say “I transportationed that car!” when you mean that the car transported you from here to there, nor would you exclaim that you had “nourishmented the heck out of that burrito” when you meant that you had eaten the burrito and extracted delicious nourishment from it.

Similarly, you should not say that you leveraged tools when you actually mean that you used the tools to gain leverage. It makes people lose their minds, and some of them will want to grab their levers and leverage you with them.

Did that make sense? No? Exactly.

*: If you remember the dude’s name, you probably also remember how to use “lever” and “leverage”. Congrats, fellow pedants!

Yes, this is intended to be somewhat humorous. Yes, I do loathe the use of “leverage” as a verb. Yes, there are other verbs (like “vacuum”) that I will tolerate even in this context, and yes, that makes me a bit inconsistent. Yes, this is intended to be somewhat humorous. 🙂

Reachout Training Re-Design: Early Results

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This summer and fall, I’ve been substantially redesigning the training program for new volunteers at Reachout, the crisis hotline where I work. At some point I’ll get around to writing about the rationale for the changes, but in brief:

  • Trainees seemed to be less and less fluent in reading, so the existing training program that used lots of training manuals was taking longer and longer
  • We saw a lot of variation in preparedness among trainees, due largely to the variable quality of training offered by peer trainers
  • Trainee retention was way down and getting worse
  • Trainee time-to-complete-training was high and getting higher

Something needed to change.

We more-or-less scrapped the old training model, committing one semester to experimenting with the new approach I designed. It was very important to me, going into this, that everyone understood the reasons for the changes and also got it that the new method might fail completely—since that’s a risk with any total redesign. Everyone needed to get on board with the fact that change was necessary and the fact that our first efforts might not work.

People agreed. And so we jumped in.

Training Weekend got a makeover, focusing almost exclusively on listening and doing a good job with the mechanics of taking supportive-listening calls. We set that as the outcome measure of the Training Weekend: we’d call it a success if we thought that most trainees could handle a simple listening call at the end of the weekend. They succeeded.

Since then, we’ve been doing weekly classes taught by staff. Lots and lots and lots of practice: my rule for teaching was that, wherever possible, we would give the trainees a chance to practice each new thing within 30 minutes of learning it. We assigned homework for the first time in years, and we’ve spent a lot of time on values clarification in addition to hard skills.

The true test of all this will come later on: in the months and years of seeing how these trainees do as volunteers, in the long effort of hotline service. But we can still look at some measures now.

 Early results

We’re currently in week seven after Training Weekend, and all of our trainees are currently taking real phone calls (under supervision) as part their practicum experience. We started the semester with nine trainees, and all of them are on the phones right now.

I collected data from the last six semesters of Reachout training. I looked at the total number of trainees (discarding those who never finished Training Weekend), and then counted those who were still involved with Reachout at this point in the semester (retention) and those who were already taking calls under supervision (training speed).

To give the previous semesters the benefit of the doubt for things like vacations, I extended the time period a bit, to eight or nine weeks. So the previous semesters are slightly over-counted. I expressed these later amounts as a percentage of that semester’s trainees, since that makes comparison easier.

Semester Number of trainees Still here after 8 weeks On phones by 8 weeks
Spring 2011 7 5 (71%) 1 (14%)
Fall 2011 14 12 (86%) 7 (50%)
Spring 2012 17 9 (53%) 1 (6%)
Fall 2012 16 12 (75%) 7 (44%)
Spring 2013 12 7 (58%) 3 (25%)
Average of previous semesters 13.2 9.0 (67%) 3.8 (28%)
Fall 2013 9 9 (100%) 9 (100%)

There are lots of ways to look at that data, but on the primary measures I cared about (retention and speed) we’re doing really well.

This stuff matters because we spend somewhere between $700 and $1,500 per trainee by this point in the semester once you factor in food, hall rental, staff time, printing costs, and all the rest of it. The semesters where retention was low (Spring 2012 comes to mind) represent major losses for us in economic terms, not just in terms of future shift coverage.

Losing some trainees is inevitable, and it surprises me that we haven’t had anyone drop out this semester—I think it’s unrealistic to expect perfect retention rates. But if you look at our hotline’s annual budget (somewhere around $140,000 in 2012; we work really cheap when you consider that that includes a building, heat, insurance, three full-time salaries, several part-time people, and a training budget) and then look at our trainee retention losses in 2012, the numbers add up. If we assume $1,500 in expenses/staff time per trainee, the 12 trainees who dropped out by this point in 2012 cost us $18,000—12.8% of our total operating budget for the year, and that doesn’t even consider trainees who dropped out after this point in the semester.

So, I’m excited. I think this class is going to be among our best-trained groups in years, but in any case, we have reason to be pleased with the retention and training speed numbers. It’s great to see that careful instructional design and performance improvement principles really do work in the field.

Compassion and the Little Prince

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Compassion and the Little Prince

I believe that crisis work requires us to love the people we’re helping. Here’s why I say that.

Wind, Sand, Stars, and Love

“Life has taught us that love does not consist in gazing at each other, but in looking outward together in the same direction.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars

I remember falling in love with Saint-Exupéry as a kid. I read The Little Prince at home and then, as my French fluency grew, I read it again as Le Petit Prince in Tom Ham’s class. I remember discussing it in Tom’s classroom on the second floor of Potsdam High School’s older wing, near the music department that was my home-away-from-home for so many years. In my memory I can still smell the peculiar stuffy smell of old carpet heated by ancient steel radiators, the dust mingling with the hot metal smell and only slightly cleared by the breeze through the windows we always left open.

A bit later in life, during my flight training to become a pilot, I rediscovered Saint-Exupéry; or, I should say, discovered him anew. I hadn’t known that he served as one of the pioneering aviators that took the craft of flying to new heights, routinely navigating through dangers far wilder and more intense than the ones I found aloft. He wrote a number of excellent books that touch on his time as a pilot—flying the mail through France, north Africa, and the high mountain ranges of South America.

One of those books is Wind, Sand, and Stars. I recommend reading it in bed with the lights down low, the better to imagine picking your way through the Andes at night, alone, with nothing but the stars to guide you. Picture flying alone, at night and in a storm, the struts and windows of your airplane creaking and moaning in the wind, racing toward a distant airfield knowing that your only aid will come from a guy with a lantern standing at one end of the runway… if he remembers to wake up this time.

This strikes me as kind of similar to how crisis feels.

The Little Prince

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.” — Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince

In crisis work, we spend a lot of time talking about empathy. Most social work folks have heard of unconditional positive regard, which basically means that we try to give callers the benefit of the doubt and assume that they’re good people who are doing the best that they can.

I sometimes frame it as a reminder: that whatever the facts may be, people are mostly doing their best, and that everything works better if we assume they have good intentions than if we treat them like idiots, self-saboteurs, or fools.

The Little Prince’s quote feels relevant here: in the crisis context, we often see more clearly if we look with empathy (the heart) than if we look with the eye (the rational fact-checking mind). Connect with how people feel and you’ve got a solid chance of helping them—and until you do that, all the intellectual stuff in the world won’t help them.

Where we choose to stand

“The heart of crisis work is compassion: standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people in their pain.” — Peter Meyers

Peter is an old friend of mine, a sweet man with a wild eye, a Master’s degree in Episcopal theology, and a career running the crisis hotline in Jackson, MS. We served together for several years on the national board of Contact USA, which gave us plenty of time to talk. Being of a similar mindset—guys who like sitting around and Thinking About Things—I enjoyed those conversations a great deal.

Peter’s vision of crisis work was simple: we are there to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people in their pain, neither dragging them out of it nor pushing them ahead, but staying with them. Being fully present and fully honest with the hard stuff that brought people into crisis, looking unflinchingly at it with them, and helping them to feel that they don’t have to deal with it alone, no matter how bad it gets.

In Peter’s philosophy, what is essential about the work of crisis counseling is that we be there, seeing with our hearts, shoulder-to-shoulder with the person, looking outward together at the stuff they’re going through.

“Looking outward together”… that’s why I think that crisis work is about love.

The Little Prince and the Fox (c) Harcourt, Brace, & Co.
The Little Prince and the Fox (c) Harcourt, Brace, & Co.

I hope you can all appreciate how hard it has been for me to refrain from pointing out that, by writing that immortal line about seeing with the heart and essential things being invisible to the eye, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry also shaped—way back in 1943—the definitive answer to the question: what does the fox say?