I've decided...

Well, I haven't heard from UO Law yet about my application, but I've decided to attend Willamette. 

I've spent some time playing on Excel (doesn't everyone plan their life in Excel?), and Willamette just makes sense. An American Bar Association rule limits work for full time law students to 20 hours or less per week. Though I am leaving my UO job on June 15, I will continue to work with the Alaska Alternate Assessment for kids with severe cognitive delays. And even though the Alaska work is "part time," it is often more than 20 hours per week. So I need to attend a part time Law program. And the UO does not offer a part time Law program.

And realistically, a part time program makes sense for me. I am 52. I haven't sat in classes for 7 years. And I knocked my brains loose in March 2010, leaving some broken wiring that I am still trying to reroute. So I'll take four years to finish rather than three. I'm not in any rush.

The Generosity of Strangers.

Sidney and I had the best day of our brief Autism Research Careers today.

We met with Dr. Eric Fombonne, the Director of Autism Research at Oregon Health Sciences University. It was a "cold call" made possible with the kind electronic introduction of Dr. David Amaral of the MIND Institute at UC Davis. 

Our Pie-In-The-Sky hoped-for outcome of the meeting was that Dr. Fombonne would help us identify research subjects for our pilot research project. 

Our Second-Best hope was that he would be willing to write a letter of support for our project, so we could seek involvement with other agencies, trading on the value of his name and reputation.

At a minimum, we hoped he would say nice things about the COAST.

We were rewarded with the Pie-In-The-Sky! with fresh whipped cream and chocolate sprinkles

Dr. Fombonne has agreed to help us find the research participants (and in fact believes he can weave our research into ongoing grants), has agreed to write a letter of support for our Human Subjects Research approval application to the UO AND has agreed to shepherd the project through the OHSU Human Subjects Research approval process. He suggested a much more powerful research design, suggested improvements and additional data to collect, and then invited us to lunch with his colleague, Dr. Arlene Hagen. Dr. Hagen is a child psychologist, in charge of the Child Development & Rehabilitation Center at OHSU. She also happens to be married to Dr. Fombonne.

During lunch, the two seemed to become more and more excited and eager to help us. By the end of lunch, they had agreed to assist in recruiting parents for our research and in helping us gain the appropriate approvals. After lunch, Dr. F, Sidney, and I returned to his office, and he invited in his assistant Marie. Marie was given a long list of tasks, and encouraged to work with us in completing them.

SO, we have a little more work to do this weekend, and we will submit a slew of documents to Marie for dissemination to key personnel at OHSU. A very large magic door has been opened.

Dr. Fombonne's closing comment was something like: "It isn't fair that you would be prevented from conducting interesting research simply because you are not well known. I see it as my role to assist you and make it possible to do the research. Then the data will speak for themselves."

Yes. A simple, but incredibly generous, attitude.

It takes a lifetime...

... to be an overnight success.

One of Barry Sherman's girlfriends once said something like that, to explain Barry's career in the Entertainment Field. Something about how he was working steadily for a dozen years and was nowhere yet. 

That has been the story of my Autism career. I've been a special educator for 26 years, deeply involved in understanding the impacts of autism on child and family. And then Sidney and I have spent three and a half years developing the C.O.A.S.T.

You may recall that we met with Dr. David Amaral of the UCDavis MIND Institute in February, and had an amazingly wonderful meeting. Dr. Amaral suggested we contact Dr. Eric Fombonne, the new director of autism research at Oregon Health Sciences University. 

I did. 

No response. 

After a month, I emailed again. 

And then I asked Dr. Amaral if he wouldn't mind making an electronic introduction between Sidney and me with Dr. Fombonne. 

Bless his generous heart and spirit, Dr. Amaral did just that. Less than 30 minutes after his email to Dr. Fombonne, Dr. Fombonne has offered to meet with us next week. 

Sidney will be in town. Friday, we will meet with Dr. Eric Fombonne, Director of Autism Research at Oregon Health Sciences University. 

This is a Very Big Deal.

Any year now, Sidney and I will be an overnight success...

Road Tripping...

A road with ice...

I've been in Alaska all this week, conducting test administration fidelity observations of our assessment for kids with severe cognitive delays. Four days in Anchorage (where it has been snowing all week), one day in a tiny village, Kwethluk which is home to 153 families.  I visited the school, a building about half again as large as my house, which contained all ages of kids, kindergarten through twelfth.  The kids were lovely, primarily of the Yup'ik tribe. 

A sign on the front entry bulletin board declared a unanimous vote of the school board to cancel school on any day where the temperature was -40 degrees, or the windchill and temperature reached -65 degrees. Good to know. Kids, don't forget your mittens...

I worked all day with the teacher who works with kids who have severe disabilities. She was very nice, had been nervous about my visit for more than a month. I practiced the reading test with her before she administered the test to a student. The child was very cooperative and friendly, seemed to enjoy the extra attention (me), and did pretty well on the test. 

After the reading test, I spent another hour with her on the writing test, and wrote out fake student responses for her to practice scoring. I spent the entire day in her classroom.

The Adventures of Rural Alaska Travels: The flight to the village started with a 6:40 AM flight from Anchorage to Bethel, and then a transfer to a single propeller little plane that seated 6 passengers and room for cargo. For my 8:30 AM flight, I shared the plane with the pilot and co-pilot (I called shotgun, but was outvoted) and a clothes dryer and freezer in their shipping boxes, destined to Aniak, another little village. We were headed to Kwethluk (my destination), but detoured to offload the cargo in Aniak, because there were 5 people waiting to board in Kwethluk, but they wouldn’t be able to get to the chairs with the cargo still on board.

The “airport” in Kwethluk is a landing strip and a tin shed, a little larger than a barn. Not sure what is inside, but it isn’t a waiting room. The system is: the “agent” at the village meets the plane and drives the passenger/s to the village. Passengers leave their contact and return flight information with the agent, and he or she calls to tell you if the plane is arriving on time, late, or not flying at all (“weathered in”). If the flight is going to happen, the agent comes and picks you up to get you to the airport. You don’t want to go early, because you can’t get inside, and it is pretty cold outside. My return flight to Bethel was scheduled for 1:30, so I was to call at 1:15 if I hadn’t been contacted.

At 1:15 we discovered the planes were “weathered in” and not going to pick me up to take me from Kwethluk to Bethel. My flight from Bethel to Anchorage was scheduled to leave at 8:45 PM. So I needed a way to get to Bethel, about 50 miles away.

Finding Plan B: Apparently, the teachers and teacher aides in the class all felt a great protectiveness of me, and wanted to be sure I made it to Bethel for my flight. So three different people got on their cell phones and started calling around to discover if anybody from the village was going to drive “the ice road” to Bethel that afternoon. At first it was looking like that wasn’t going to work out, so then they started devising . . .

Plan C: Plan C was to ride on the back of a snowmobile to Bethel. Two snowmobiles would go, so that we’d all be safe (not sure what that means, or why two is safer than one, but they seemed pretty sure about the two snowmobiles being the minimum). I was hoping that we would be stuck with Plan C. But the snowmobilers wouldn’t be able to leave school until 5:00, so the Cell phone ladies got to work again, and finally located Myrna, who was headed to Bethel around 3:00 and had one more seat in her car.

The Ice Road

Did I mention that the “Ice Road” is the frozen Kuskokwim River? The river freezes in October, and starts to thaw in late April. The ice is currently about 6 feet thick. 

I rode in a car on a river yesterday.

The rest of the travel was uneventful. A long wait in Bethel, short flight to Anchorage, finally back to my hotel room after another 20 hour work day...

I'M IN ! !

Willamette University College of Law is willing to take a chance on me as a member of their student body. There is a letter waiting for me in my PO Box, hopefully with details of scholarships and financial aid offers. Willamette is nearly twice the cost of UO, so...

Still waiting to hear from UO. 

But, well, I feel pretty proud that Willamette would like me to join them. 

Ilu Hotzi...

Hotzi Anu, hotzi anu mi mitzraim, hotzi anu mi mitzraim day-enu! 

I am in Anchorage all this week, working with our academic assessment for kids with severe cognitive delays. 

This week is Passover. 

What's a girl to do?

Well, of course, attend the Anchorage Congregation Beth Sholom (frozenchosen.org) community seder. One of the cool things about belonging to a tradition is knowing that all around the world (with adjustments for time zones), Jews are sitting down to a very similar celebration. 

A serene experience of belongingness.

Surrounded by strangers.
 

To Russia...

...with Love.

I have discovered that my google blog has some very fun tools for analyzing my audience. Number of page views by date, number of followers, type of computer and browser, etc.

I recently had a day with 21 page views. Twenty One? Wow, I wondered where my audience lived.

Mostly in Russia, apparently.