Bruised Feet

This week I was very excited. I was, along with two other graduate fellows leading backpacking trip in Pictured Rocks National Lakeshore, along lake superior in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. I love backpacking. I love knowing that all I need is on my back, that my feet are my transportation, and last but not least connecting the outdoors. Backpacking makes me feel very big, but yet very small at the same time. I feel most alive when I'm backpacking. This sport is rugged, it's a marathon not a sprint, and it requires you to look beyond the soreness and realize that the reward is so much greater when you've had to work for it.

I was on a five day trek which was easy, 7 miles maximum each day. We took our time, took long breaks, had naps at our lunch spots on the beach, we played log bowling, and gave kids time to be themselves. On the 3rd day I felt something was wrong with my feet. They were sore. Nothing out of the ordinary, it wasn't a blister, so I trudged along. I've been called a 'trooper' by more than a few people in my life and yesterday I was a trooper. Usually about 10 minutes into hiking whatever aches or pains you have go away and your feet and legs kind of become both numb and strong all at once. 2 hours in the pain had only increased, to throbbing with each step and I wanted advil. I have NEVER taken advil on trail. I took 3. In life, I usually take 2 and will take care of any pain I have. Advil didn't enough touch it.

By the end of our 7 mile day I could barely walk. I was going about 40 minutes a mile, I had also cried twice. I talked with my leaders and I had been holding up the group for the last 4 miles. I couldn't speak, I could only hobble, slowly. Aside from my own symptoms I had caused concern, fear, and anxiety amongst the group by the pain that I could no longer hide. I can honestly say that was the most amount of pain I've ever felt, and it lasted for hours. Turns out, I had bruised the whole tops of my feet. They didn't get black and blue, but they did swell and are still swollen 24 hours later. I can walk about 200 feet without them hurting, but more than that and I begin to limp. Bruised feet are no joke, and I wouldn't wish that on anyone.

My fellow leaders and I all came to the terrible conclusion that I needed to be evacuated. It wasn't a question of 'toughing it out' I had gone from a hindrance to hazard. My co-leader said to me 'if this was a kid we'd be doing the same thing. We know you're tough, but it's time'. Lucky for us though, the headmaster of the school I work at was visiting us that day and I had cell phone reception (a sign) at the lighthouse which we were having lunch at. I put my feet up on a pack and made the call to the school. I told the students who were very sad and thanked me for all that I had done. I cried again from the compassion that they gave to me. I told them all that I either wanted a high five or a hug before they continued down the trail to the campsite. They all gave me hugs. No hesitation.

This was by far the hardest decision that I've ever made as a leader. To take myself out. As a leader I feel that it's my responsibility to deal with a little more frustrations, to take a little extra weight, and to comfort and encourage my students. I am facilitating their experience, not the other way around. If that means that I am less comfortable, than so be it, I grit my teeth and bare it. But I knew I had made the right choice, because it felt right. I can't explain it any other way. I feel that when you make a decision you know it was a good or bad one by how you feel about it when you're done. If you have to justify it after you've made it, it was probably the wrong decision.

My Pepere (grandfather on my mothers side) once said to me 'every day, you're always learning'. This was great advice coming from someone who was two generations older than I was. I applied his logic to my situation. I learned when to back away. I've been further on hiking trips and carried more weight, but never had  felt the pain that I was feeling. I was positively facilitating their trip by evacuating myself from it. Tough lessons usually suck the most, and so here I am in a hotel waiting for their trip to end. A favourite quote of mine is "The mountain doesn't give you what you want, it gives you what you need" and maybe this time, this is the lesson I needed to learn.

'That bunny got a fine a** crib!"

Thank you student for that wonderful perspective on cottontail shelter in winter.

If any week is kid quote week it's always the week where inner city students come. As people who don't spend hardly any time in the woods they have some great descriptions of what they see. The students who I worked with last week were all inner city students from Milwaukee. They came here during one of the coldest times in December, and with only just enough snow to do the activities we had planned for them. They were definitely out of their element (it should be noted that if I were visiting their neck of the woods their knowledge would be invaluable). Their time was to replace a gym credit and they were snowshoeing, cross country skiing, and debris shelter building. All week long they kept us busy. We taught them how to snowshoe by playing kickball, taught them about animal and traditional shelters by building their own, and took them cross country skiing to experience a new way to travel.

Seeing the woods from their eyes was very refreshing for me. I can't think of a time where I have looked at the Northwoods and seen is as new. Growing up in Vermont this type of woods are home, and while there is a great connection then with this place there are very few and far between memories I can think of where I thought of my home woods as new woods. Looking around and having the things that happen often be magical is something that I forget. The last place I remember seeing and finding the newness magical was during my time in Skagway, Alaska living on the Denver Glacier. Waking up to 15 in more snow on top of an already white landscape was amazing. I remember the first time I saw an avalanche how amazing the snow looked liked a brief and wonderful waterfall cascading down boulders on the cliff side. I also remember beginning to listen for them, they kind of groan as the snow descends. I also remember how quickly the glacier could go from 80 degree and sunny to 25 and snowing. I also remember when things stopped being so magical, when the sun never setting was routine, and when the dogs howling became annoying.

Its very nice to remember what it was like to be surprised by everything. This is the exact reason why people go places different on vacation. I know I love going to camp for vacation where things are the same, but I also enjoy traveling to places that are new, and feeling the magic of wonder. Trying to describe thing later on to friends and family who weren't there I must sound like our students this week. We try to connect our past experiences to our new ones in order to better connect ourselves to these new and exciting events, thus making the new more relatable.

Thank you students for helping me see this place from your eyes.

Living without Coffee

So I'm now on day 5 living without coffee. I've read that the withdrawal symptoms go away within three days. Mine were pretty much gone day 3. However, I still was exhausted. About the only good thing was I didn't have to make coffee in the morning. On Tuesday I have a cup calling my name, but alas it's Saturday I've got a few days yet.

Are you all ready for some coffee facts?!
In one cup of coffee (I'm talking about an 8 oz cup, not the giant mugs we all use as our 'one cup' of coffee) there are 100 milligrams of caffeine. My coffee cup holds about two and half cups, so there was about 250 milligrams of caffeine entering my body every morning. A safe limit of caffeine per person per day is 400 milligrams. When I was working at the ski resort and a bed and breakfast this is about how much caffeine I was consuming per day. I would wake up, get my large coffee mug full (2 cups) and then I would have a cup between jobs, and one at 4pm (this would help me drive home). Four cups of coffee per day.

For some perspective as to what else has caffeine
 a Rockstar energy drink (8 oz) has about 80 milligrams of caffeine
 however, the Rockstar shot has 230 milligrams of caffeine packed into 2.5 oz.
A Mountain Dew 12 oz can has 55 milligrams of caffeine.

Looking at other hot beverages
Black tea has approximately 45 milligrams of caffeine
If you ordered a Venti (20-24 oz) brewed coffee from Starbucks you're looking at 415 milligrams of caffeine
From Starbucks a Cafe Latte has 150 milligrams for the same size.
Think to yourself 'Fine I'm going to just drink decaf"? haha cute, there is still caffeine in decaffeinated beverages. 30 milligrams of caffeine in a 20 oz decaf coffee from Starbucks.

There is also caffeine in chocolate, per 1 oz of chocolate there is 12 milligrams of caffeine. Other sources of caffeine include:
ice cream (coffee ice cream anyone?)
weight loss pills (why would anyone take these in the first place. want a bikini body? put a bikini on your body)
pain relievers two excedrin migraine tablets have 130 milligrams of caffeine.
breath mints (anyone ever try penquin mints? yup caffeine there)
There are even now caffeinated instant oatmeal breakfasts! What is our world coming to?!

Well, now that I've scared you all with my knowledge of caffeine. Don't worry, there are also reasons why coffee is good for you. Coffee is good for your liver, so if you also drink copious amounts of alcohol, you can counteract that with coffee, just kidding I have no idea. Coffee does have some nutrients in it. This is really only present if you grind your beans at home directly before making your cup of joe. There are also reports that coffee makes your smarter.

Coffee

I decided that I was going to give up coffee for a week. Why? Well because I felt very dehydrated and wasn't feeling very well in general. I also felt that maybe being off caffeine for a week and drinking lots of water would help flush out my system. Being off coffee would also give me insight as to how dependent my body had become on it. I drink a cup of coffee every morning (like most people) and I've been doing so for a few years now. Don't get me wrong, I love coffee. I was just curious to see how I'd feel getting off the stuff.

I know that caffeine is an addictive drug. I was wondering how I was going to be affected going through withdrawal. Was I even truly addicted?

Day 1:
In the morning I was OK. Tired, but still able to function.
Midday the headache started, persistent, behind my eyes
Had a cup of chamomile tea, felt mildly better.
Couldn't concentrate on anything.
around 4pm I wanted to die. My headache had started going down the back of my neck. I also wanted vomit.
Went to bed at 8pm and woke back up at midnight, I felt like a new person, no headache!

Day 2
Morning was slightly better than yesterday
headache didn't start until 2pm still persistent
It's 4:30 and I haven't had the headache drift down my neck yet.
Still can't concentrate on anything.
No puking feeling.

I'm still on Day 2 of caffeine free week. Clearly I'm having withdrawal symptoms. I didn't really think I was addicted until I went off it. So I took an online quiz to gauge caffeine addiction. Apparently, I'm mildly addicted to caffeine. Keep in mind that my norm is 1 cup per day. Withdrawal symptoms from one cup a day is a little scary. I'll keep you all posted on how my detox goes.

Immersing instead of Escaping

I had a very interesting conversation with a high school student at lunch today. At the semester school that I kinda- sorta work at right now (I also work for a nature center an hour and half away). At the school they are doing something called solos. Solos are basically at time for kids camp alone in the woods. They each have spot and they stay out for 24 hours by themselves. I want you all to keep in mind there are several safety precautions which in place to make sure every students physical and emotional safety needs are met. I personally see this as an excellent opportunity for reflection on their semester. I also see it as an opportunity to really connect with their spot.

This girl who I was sitting with said 'Solos are going to be so boring! I'm going to bring a book about the tropics or something while I'm there.'

She clearly wasn't seeing this as an opportunity to connect with the woods. Instead she was seeing this as an opportunity to sit in a tent for hours and read. She was also choosing a book which was going to escape the world around her. Don't get me wrong, I escaped all the time while I was in Benin. Every time I took a bike ride, or read in my apartment, I escaped the frustrations of third world living. This can be a very helpful for sanity. However, I found myself at some low points in Benin where I was completely escaped from the reality around me.

It is a fine line to walk between escaping and immersion. But I think for one night this girl should immerse herself in the opportunity given. Carpe Diem! Perhaps choosing a book that instead of escaping makes her feel more connected to her place. Books like A Sand County Almanac or Walden (even though Walden is based on a place in Massachusetts it's still a very similar climate.) would only work to deepen the sense of place.

Coding

Coding is how interviews are analyzed. What you do is you take, line by line, information from them and try to find what is said most.
So for example if I were to code the above statements I might say these things I found important informaiton

Coding
Analyzed
Interviews
line by line
what is most said

Sounds fun right? Well it's not. In fact it's extremely tedious and time consuming. We were given interviews to code and they were each about 6 pages long, 3 interviews is 18 pages of coding. The idea is those being interviewed are going to talk more often and in more depth about things that are important to them. So if you were to analyze this blog entry words like coding, analyze, information and interviews would probably come up most often. Wow. How amazing.

My roommate suggested that we put our coding into something called a word cloud. A word cloud generates an image based on words found in text. The larger the word in the image, the more often it comes up. It looks cool, it takes very little time, and it's a graphic representation of text. So I did that, and voila, the word cloud came to the same conclusions that I did only faster!

All interviews in the word cloud

I then thought, what happens when I use it to analyze other things? So I decided to use all the posts from September and put them into a word cloud to see what I was talking about most.

September Blog Entries

Apparently I talk a lot about people and going. It good to know that I enjoyed writing about school, work, place, teachers, education and curriculum. Environmental made a show, as well as time. Interesting stuff. Thanks word cloud for making coding more interesting! 

Teaching Sense of Place

A few days ago myself and my colleague had a bunch of high school students come to our nature center. If you look back at my post Standards you will see that myself and the other grad fellow were creating curriculum for this school. Trying to meet the schools curriculum and teach them about nature was difficult. Trying to work creatively within the rigid education standards was probably the most challenging thing I've had to do in the education field. Keep in mind, I am not a trained educator. I'm mostly self taught and I've been learning tricks of the trade through experience, particularly with my old job in New Hampshire.

They arrived, and the day felt like a blur. We had planned everything. We were mostly just along for a roller coaster ride. We talked about the scientific method, random sampling and avoiding bias in your data, making observations, how to orient yourself to a map, and the forest itself. At the end we finally waved goodbye to the students and we slumped into chairs. My colleague said it well when she said 'wow I feel like I ran a marathon' I agree.

Today we looked at our goals for this lesson and the overarching goals of the program and determined if we met our goals or if we needed to revisit them. We found that we did meet our goals and our lesson was in line with the program goals. But we felt that something was missing. The big picture was giving the kids a sense of place, to connect them to their plot. We had only spent 20 minutes at their plots this week. The truth was staring us in the face. We had connected the kids, in small ways, to the property, to each other and science, but we had failed to really hit home what we truly wanted. The vision was to have the students have ownership of their own plot.

I've had a series of posts focused on sense of place. I could talk the talk, walk the walk, but could I grow the feeling in others? Building a sense of place in myself wasn't a challenge but an activity, I could develop that by going out and observing. It's easy to use yourself as the guinea pig. While I was at my spot I had been observing a cocoon. I had been watching it grow and change. For a couple of weeks I would look to see if it was still there. I went the other day to see what it looked like now, and when I looked under the leaf it had been dangling from I noticed it wasn't there. I was sad. Where was it? I looked for the remnants of the cocoon and couldn't find it. I wondered if something didn't eat it or if the caterpillar completed its metamorphosis and flew away. I thought to myself the most I could hope for was that it flew away. Then I thought that this is a slight taste of how parents must feel when their kids go to college. I then realized with a bittersweet thought that my experiment with myself about sense of place, was working. I had become connected to a piece of my spot. I leaned back in the deer bed and looked at the sky thinking. I had succeeded, but why did I feel strange about it? My feelings towards the place changed. If someone had told me that a bird ate a cocoon anywhere else on the property I wouldn't have cared. But because it was my cocoon it meant something more. Even when I tried to rationalize life and death of a caterpillar I still felt uneasy. I determined that I felt this was because my experiment had worked. I had 'duped' myself into feeling emotions about the land. I had irrational thoughts about my place because I had grown to love it. I had fallen for my own experiment. I then had motivating thought, that sense of place WORKS. I had gone having zero connection to my nature center in Wisconsin to feeling the loss of one cocoon a few months later.

It had worked. But how do I get it to work in others. A huge part of my connection with this place is that I wanted to be connected. I was open to what it had to give me. How do I teach sense of place without sounding like a hippy with their head in the clouds? The first step is allowing the kids to spend as much time as possible at their places. It's not that I want to trick them into having emotional connections to their space, I want them to decide that they feel connected to their spot. I am going to work on putting as much time in the schedule to allow for the students just to be at their site. Having planned activities that will force them to look around, notice things will be a great way to help foster sense of place.