Binary Fission

I'm ashamed to admit it, but I have been working on the fourth chapter of my dissertation for over six months. The preceding chapters each took an average of four months, and I've blown right past that. It feels especially overdue because I submitted the last chapter on December 30, 2015, and so my committee has not received anything new from me in 2016. I did spend a month this summer working on an article draft, and several months in the winter were spent revising earlier chapters, so I have made progress in other ways. Nonetheless, I'm uncomfortable with the pace I've been on and with my delinquency in delivering work to my committee.

Today, however, I had a realization--one that has been quietly dawning for some time, but which finally flamed out into the wide open air at 11:00 AM this morning. 

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In over six months of work, I have generated a lot writing. Even as it has amassed, I've mostly felt burdened by how much still remains to be done. At some point, I began to suspect that I already had a monster, and it was not done growing. I tried not to worry about, and stayed committed to my original plan.

This morning, I decided that there was just no way that I could fit two topics as big, broad, and deep as the Urban Crisis and the War on Poverty into one chapter. Although they are intimately related, the JCC movement responded in different (though not contradictory) ways to the destruction and rebuilding of their urban surroundings. 

Once I pulled the trigger and separated the chapter into two, I felt an immense relief. My monster baby has been transformed into fraternal twins, different from one another but obviously of a pair. More reassuringly, I have written TWO chapters so far this year, each averaging about four months! There's still more work to do, but a burden has lifted.

Character

This week, I've made a transition from crunching numbers and plotting graphs back to the historian's bread-and-butter, reading and analyzing archival documents. In doing so, I have been reunited with several historical actors that, throughout the years, I have grown an immense affection for. These are not the central players in the dissertation--they're not the ones calling the shots that I am lauding or criticizing, or at least not them alone. One was a social worker at a JCC who, by all accounts, was beloved in the community and undervalued by her supervisors. Another was a JCC Board member, a Judge, who was upstanding and decorous but also wrote whimsical poems and earnest eulogies.

I have learned a lot from the characters in my dissertation about how to live a meaningful life, which I did not expect. I'm a systems person. I like big questions and broadly-applicable arguments. My dissertation is supposed to explain why non-Jews use the Jewish Community Center with such regularity. And yet, I think the most precious lesson I have learned from writing on this topic is the value of investing your time and energy in building community. These characters were listeners and helpers and gave freely and widely of their time and resources. Perhaps I did not learn this from them, and it was a case of self-selection; I was drawn to them because I also value community, voluntarism, and investment in human capital. Even if this is so, they have deepened my belief in the importance of caring for and sustaining community.

Mental Health First Aid

Yesterday I attended a day-long training to become certified in Mental Health First Aid (MHFA). This course teaches you how to support an individual in the midst of a mental health crisis until assistance arrives from an appropriate professional. The training also teaches how, in a less emergent scenario, you can facilitate a conversation with a person who is struggling with a mental health disorder. 

I was compelled to become MHFA certified for two reasons. Primarily, I believe it is vital that anyone who works with young adults be prepared to talk to them about their mental health. Too many times I have found myself sitting across from a student who is telling me about their stress or anxiety or depression, and I have had to try and help them without knowing any strategies to make the conversation successful. Secondarily, I have anxiety and seasonal depression. I believe it is important to speak more frequently and openly about mental wellness, to combat the stigma against people who live with mental health disorders and to encourage people to seek appropriate professional treatment.

The training was immensely informative. I learned that mental health disorders compromise an individual's ability to carry out daily activities, to enjoy life, or to have satisfying relationships (which we were told to remember with the schmaltzy but helpful mnemonic of "live, laugh, love"). The course then covered the characteristics of depression, anxiety, psychosis, and substance use disorders. We practiced a process called ALGEE for assisting and supporting individuals experiencing a mental health crisis. After Assessing their risk for suicide and self harm, the best thing to do is to Listen nonjudgmentally and Give reassurance and information. This means to calmly and genuinely express your concern for their feelings, and to accept and validate their experience. The last steps are to Encourage appropriate professional help and to Encourage self-help and other support strategies. The course provides ample opportunity to review the steps of ALGEE, to observe how it can be tailored to a variety of disorders, and to practice using ALGEE in a variety of scenarios.  

Having completed the course, I feel much more prepared to discuss mental health--both disorder and wellness--with students and peers. More specifically, I feel like I now have a framework and a set of best practices that will improve the likelihood that these conversations will be effective in planting a seed of encouragement for someone to seek appropriate professional help in moments of crisis. Just as with CPR, I hope this is a set of skills that I never have to put to use, but I feel much more responsible and prepared having learned to administer Mental Health First Aid.

A Quarter of a Million Decisions

I came across the following passage in A Tale of Love and Darkness by Amos Oz, and although it is about the writing of fiction I think it's generalizable to writing, period, including the writing of history:

“If you write an eighty-thousand-word novel, you have to make about a quarter of a million decisions, not just decisions about the outline of the plot, who will live or die, who will fall in love or be unfaithful, who will make a fortune or make a fool of himself, the names and faces of the character, their habits and occupations, the chapter divisions, the title of the book (these are the simplest, broadest decisions); not just what to narrate and what to gloss over, what comes first and what comes last, what to spell out and what to allude to indirectly (these are also fairly broad decisions); but you also have to make thousands of finer decisions, such as whether to write, in the third sentence from the end of that paragraph, “blue” or “bluish.” Or should it be “pale blue”? Or “sky blue”? Or “royal blue”? Or should it really be “blue-gray”? And should this “grayish blue” be at the beginning of the sentence, or should it only shine out at the end? Or in the middle? Or should it simply be caught up in the flow of a complex sentence, full of subordinate clauses? Or would it be best just to write the three words “the evening light,” without trying to color it in, either “gray-blue” or “dusty blue” or whatever? ”

Cascading Benefits

When I began studying the historical budgets and accounting materials that I have discussed this week, my primary aim was to answer a central question of my dissertation. There have been some auxiliary advantages, however, that I did not expect:

1.     Between this work and the corpus analysis project I completed this summer, I got a lot more practice with Excel.  I already knew the basics—inputting data, adding and deleting rows and columns, and building formulas—but I learned a lot more about how to create graphs and charts. My sister created the first few line graphs for me, and by taking them apart and swapping data in and out, I learned how to create generate my own. I also played around with different formats and settings and discovered new ways to make my data visualizations more helpful.

2.     I have a better understanding of the value of money—both as currency with variable purchasing power, and as a resource that organizations and businesses carefully allocate. For most organizations, labor and personnel are both the most costly line items in their budget and the most necessary to keep their programs productive, successful, and innovative. To pay for staff and for high quality programs, there is always a balance to strike between raising income and raising barriers. For organizations that serve working class or lower middle class clients who do not qualify for subsidized or public programs, there is always a risk that clients will not be able to afford higher fees—leaving the organization with even less income and the client without a valuable resource.

3.     Finally, the biggest benefit to pursing this forensic accounting was the satisfaction of learning something new. I never expected to perform so much arithmetic in the course of my dissertation research! I’ve been surprised to find how much I enjoy using quantitative methodologies to analyze the past. I would now like to do even more quantitative work in future research projects.

Even though my foray into historical accounting and budget analysis was intimidating, I found it enormously valuable and would encourage other scholars to attempt similar inquiries in the context of their own projects.