Caring for Children with Chronic Health Conditions

I work at Creative Learning Daycare with children that range from the ages of two-years-old to about three and a half-years-old. I really enjoy my job very much. One of the many requirements for my job is attending workshops to receive credit hours. If I don’t have enough credit hours by a certain date I won’t be able to work there anymore. So one of the workshops I chose to attend was being held at Tennessee Tech University at Jere Whitson. It was on a Monday, April 6, 2009 at 7:00 p.m. The topic was “Caring for Children with Chronic Health Conditions” and we were being trained by Mrs. Paige Paul.
We first started out our training session by breaking up into groups and discussing about if we knew anyone that has a chronic health condition. Some of the conditions were asthma, cancer, and diabetes. Some of the people in the room even have these conditions and were brave enough to talk about it with the rest of the class. The most popular of the conditions that were discussed were diabetes.
A slideshow was provided along with her lecture on each condition and what it was. She also had a few videos that gave a more visual view on the conditions. We were trained on how to treat the children that had the chronic health condition. Make sure that they were to be treated like every other child. Also we were to make sure that we would have support from our fellow staff members and the child’s parents on taking care of the certain child. She told us that at first the child can be a bit overwhelming but with time we could grow with the knowledge of providing care for the child. The session lasted about two hours long and I received a certificate for taking this workshop.

The Writing Festival

All semester Mr. Andy has been talking about the Writing Festival that would be held on Thursday, April 16, 2009, during dead hour and told us that we were required to attend it. He also said that some of us will be presenting our projects in it. Well my friend and fellow presenter Brandi Redding and I were a part of the few that were required to present our project in it. We presented our Unit 4: The Anti-Essay assignment which was a three-dimensional poem that we wrote ourselves and presented it in a way that we could have audience participation. Our poem was titled “Money” and we would make our audience guess the title. How we did that was I would just start reciting the poem while Brandi would start drawing random lines on the white board. By the end of reciting the poem all the lines on the white board would spell out M-O-N-E-Y. Our audience found this very entertaining and they also appreciate the play money we would sign and hand out to them as a souvenir. The reason why would do that so they could prove that they stopped by our booth to their teachers.
There were many people that were involved in the whole festival. We had quite a few from our class presenting their projects along with us. A couple booths down from us were a few students making music with stick, buckets, pipes, and their own hands and legs. Everyone seemed to enjoy that booth very much. I had a couple other friends of mine presenting from other different English classes. My friend Hunter presented his poem (which made no sense to me). Another friend of mine named Emily made a poster board about pollution and how harmful it is to our environment. She even attached trash to her shirt to prove that she feels that the world is in danger. Everyone did a wonderful job at presenting their projects.

The Winchester Lecture

On April 8, 2009, it was announced by my professor in my History 1020 class that the History Department was hosting an event. It was the 2009 Winchester Lecture and it was presenting speaker Dr. John M. Coski. The topic of his lecture was “The Confederate Battle Flag: The Evolution of a Controversial American Symbol”. It was held at the Derryberry Hall Auditorium on Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 7:00 p.m. We were told if we attended and wrote a page of notes we would be awarded extra credit. Many people attended the event. The auditorium was almost packed with the History Department professors, teachers from other schools, war veterans, some children with their families, and mostly filled with students that attend Tennessee Tech University. Most of the students were in the same boat that I was in with the whole extra credit situation.
The speaker, Dr. John M. Coski, is the historian and library director at the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, Virginia. He is also the author of The Confederate Battle Flag: American’s Most Embattled Emblem. He said he wrote the book because he started seeing different variations of the Confederate Battle Flag everywhere he went, so he started to do some research and became more involved and interested in it. The confederate flag has been recreated so many times throughout history. Although the flags do look very similar, at the same time they also look extremely different from each one another. Both the book and the lecture discuss the flag’s history and the many different meanings that are attached to it. Many view the flag and its meaning in different ways. To some they view the flag as a symbol of white supremacy and racial injustice. To others, they think it represents a tradition Southern heritage.

Relay for Life

It was around 10:30 p.m. on April 24, 2009, I was sitting with my neighbors playing some Halo 3 when my friend Brandi Redding called me. She had just got off of work and asked if I wanted to go to Relay for Life with her. I told her that I would and that we would meet up in an hour. Well we actually met up about a hour and a half later because my neighbor Alex had accidently spilled his sweet tea on me so I had to go take a shower really quick.
Finally around 12:00 a.m., Brandi, her roommate and fellow sorority sister Karla, and I went to Relay for Life which was being held on the Tennessee Tech intramural softball fields. I have been to a couple other Relay for Life events back in Crossville, TN the past couple of years. In the past there were a lot of “older” people and very few people my age. This by far was a whole different experience for me. This event has almost every college organization that’s at Tech participating. Each organization had their own booth to raise money for cancer. Some had food, there were dunking booths, corn hull, jail, auctions, softball games, volleyball games, basketball games, and much more. I had to bail a girl out of jail because she was taken while we were in the middle of an intense conversation and I really wanted to finish it. The area to walk was around the booths, and at all times each organization made sure they had a member walking. I saw a ton of people I knew and even met a couple of people thanks to Brandi. It was great seeing everyone work together to raise money for Relay for Life. We were there for about a hour. I was very glad that I went.

TTU Softball

Throughout my childhood I was exposed to every kind of sport. I even learned how to play those sports and enjoyed them. However one sport didn’t tickle my fancy and that was softball. I just never understood the rules and the physics to it. Everyone tried to teach me but it was an impossible mission to get me to play.
In spring 2009 semester of my college year, I was asked by my friend Whitney to play on a co-ed and all girls’ softball intramural teams at Tennessee Tech University (TTU). I told her that I was extremely terrible player and it would be a bad idea for me to play. After five minutes of her trying to convince me I gave in and decided to play, but only if no one would make fun of me or get mad at me.
We were to suppose to have our first game two weeks after our agreement but our games kept on getting canceled due to the rain flooding the softball fields. This brought me great joy to find out that I didn’t have to play. Finally our co-ed team was canceled so I didn’t have to deal with boys getting on to me about my lack of skills for the sport.
Then on Friday April 17, 2009 at 7:00 p.m., I played my first TTU softball intramural game ever. I was exceedingly nervous and had no clue what I was doing. I played the catcher position. I was scared because of the batters possibly hitting me in the head with their bats. After realizing that I wasn’t going to get hit, I started to relax. My teammates never once got onto me for my lack of skills. They were extremely supportive. I now like the game softball all thanks to TTU.

The Clothesline Project

On April 2, 2009 just after our class Sociology, Brandi Redding and I were heading to the UC when she first mentioned the event that was going on in the Tech Pride Room. She was explaining The Clothesline Project and what all she knew of it and asked me if I would like to go see it. I told her sure because I looked at it as a campus event to blog about for English 1020 and I expected to be there for about five to ten minutes. Little did I know what was yet to come? We first walked in and it was completely silent in the whole room. There were these pamphlets about the program explaining what it was about. The Clothesline Project is a visual display of violence towards women using t-shirts. Each t-shirt is decorated to represent a particular woman’s experience. The can either be decorated by the survivor or by someone who cares about the survivor. There were many different colors of shirts. Each color represented a particular situation. White represents the women who have died of violence. Yellow or Beige represents battered or assaulted women. Red, Pink, or Orange is for the survivors of rape and sexual assault. Blue or Green represent survivors of incest and sexual abuse. Purple or Lavender represents women attacked because of their sexual orientation. There was a mass variety of colors that was on display to show the world just how these women and children had suffered. There was also a shirt that had a homosexual man explain his experience with his dad beating him because of his gender preference. Many victims had survived and lived to tell their story but many had died but their story is something no one could ever forget. I was in that room for about forty five minutes reading every single shirt, amazed at the unbelievable stories that were told by descriptions, stories, and drawings. Each shirt had a different story to tell. I greatly respect the women, children, and a few men that had the bravery to tell their story so people can see what they had been through and know that this is a serious matter than happens everyday.

Poetry

I have never been a big fan of poetry. I have never understood it and it makes absolutely no sense to me. I tried to understand these poems but I just can’t seem to grasp what they are saying. “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufock” which was written by T.S. Eliot, was the longest one out of the whole assignment that was given. While I was reading it, it seemed that it had no set pattern to it. It would rhyme and then it wouldn’t, then it would go back to rhyming again and then stop. That poem kept confused me a lot. The second poem was called “London”, and it was written by William Blake. This was the shortest poem of the whole assignment. To me it seemed kind of a depressing poem. It first starts off by saying that he was walking down a street. Then it talks about men, a chimney sweeper and infants crying and I guess he heard these while he was walking. This poem gives off this dark vibe because it mentions curses, plagues, and hearses. So this gives me the idea that London is an extremely depressing place. In the last part of the assignment I chose “10th Street Pelican” and “Witness”. These poems are written by Alison Watkins. What makes her poetry so neat is she gives a visual and music while she reads her poems. This makes it 3-dimensional poetry. She explained all this in her artist statement. In the “10th Street Pelican”, she had a video of the Pelican floating of top of a body of water with this Hispanic beat playing in the background as she is reading. In the “Witness”, it has a video of all these paintings of these people and the music is someone playing the guitar. I found this 3-dimensional poetry to be the most amusing to me because it stands out.