Month: April 2012

I have met with the program chair of the Criminal Justice department. I am creating the totally online course based on her requirements. I have seen the Introduction to Criminal Justice textbook and think it will be more than adequate. I have read most of the Instructor’s Resource Manual with Test Bank by Lisa Anne Zilney. The guide is very user-friendly. I am anxiously awaiting the text book’s arrival.

Included with the textbook and manual is a PowerLecture DVD-ROM. It includes lecture, power point presentations, a test bank, concept videos and many more features that make this a most interesting tool to work with. I will be meeting with Charlene to find out what it will look like when we place the course into Instructure Canvas. I think it will be most interesting and a real challenge to come up with ideas that will work.

Next week I hope to explore the textbook’s online content. I have not had the time to get into the system to explore what is available in that forum. Apparently this publisher offers the instructor a variety of tools to help in the creation of an excellent course online or in the classroom. I have not seen anything quite this thorough to date. The textbook doesn’t deviate too much from the early text by Bohm and Haley. It does seem to be far more learner and instructor friendly. I am hoping I can start condensing the content I am finding into something usable for the course, based on Charlene’s specifications.

Apparently  my Alma Mater, the University of Utah has decided to use the Canvas system. It is supposed to be more user-friendly. So far, I have been struggling with it and probably have not watched enough videos on how to use the system. The more I can learn about how to use it, the easier it will be to use it. I am including a video on how to migrate courses from Bb Vista to Canvas.

I was raised in the Minnesota Northwoods. I lived in a small town called Pequot Lakes. It was named after an Indian chief from a small tribe in eastern Connecticut. The most common  explanation for the town’s name comes from the Wikipedia and was found “… in a 1936 interview [with] Laurence Anderson, who moved to the town in the mid 1890s. He stated [per Wikipedia], “…a daughter of Waubanaquot, Chief of the White Earth Tribe, was named O-Pequot and lived north of the town on the north end of Sibley Lake. She graciously allowed her dugout home to be used as a school and a church for the early settlers of the town. When she died, she was buried in the town cemetery.” We never really knew where the town’s name came from. Interestingly enough, this same town would and could not [state law did not allow the selling of liquor to American Indians] let American Indians in the local bars to drink. Most of my Indian friends lived off the reservation in poverty or nothing more than tar paper shacks.

It never really occurred to us to discriminate or notice that my friends and classmates were different. I did not notice their poverty or nationality. Our school-house had all grades up to K-12 in one building. Our classroom held about 20 children. At least fifty percent of the children in the school, including the teachers, were American Indian. While my mother and father built their own home and a motel, it never occurred to me that American Indians did not have the same freedoms my family did. There were a lot of people who did not have money in this small resort town. I am certain that there was crime in the town. However, we never locked our doors when we left our home. Our neighbors didn’t either. My brother and mother and I would walk to the town to go to the movies every week or when the movie changed in the summer. It was about a five-mile walk. We were never afraid, when we walked to town and back in the dark, not of the animals or other people.

By the time I was twelve, my mother and father came to a parting of the ways. My mom and I moved to St. Cloud, Minnesota which had a population of 15,000 people. To me it was the “Big City.”  It was a ninety percent Catholic town; and after living in a town of less than 550 people it seemed huge and strange. There were Catholic churches about every ten blocks. In Pequot Lakes there was only a mission church and the sisters came once a year to stay at our neighbor ladies home, so they could drive to town and teach us heathens God’s word. I suppose I never really learned past the heathen part. It was a mortal sin to sit or attend a Lutheran service; but in Pequot Lakes I attended services with my aunts from my dad’s side almost every Sunday, when our church didn’t have services.

In St. Cloud I learned what it meant to be unacceptable. Since my mom was divorced, she was an outcast. Since I was somewhat of a heathen, so was I. My mom sent me to Catholic school and it became very clear by the time I was high school age, that not only was I an outcast, but I was treated by the popular boys like I was a walking disease. It wasn’t long before I quit my Catholic High School and enrolled in the non-Catholic school–St. Cloud Technical High. It wasn’t long before I found out I didn’t fit in there either. I soon began hanging out with other misfits. Finally, I had enough and quit school after my tenth grade year. I had gone from having many friends in Pequot Lakes, down to just a few really good ones. Unfortunately, these friends did think money mattered and they did see nationality or race. However, they had very little of the first and a whole lot of the second.

It wasn’t long before I found myself married and divorced with four children to support and only a high school education, obtained through the GED program. I did love anything related to criminal justice and read everything I could get my hands on. A decade went by before I could afford, with help of federal grants, to go to college at St. Cloud State University. It was here my life was to change forever. I had four children and had one on the way. I married a U.S. Marine just back from Vietnam and swore I would never live in poverty again. I was going to get a college education and work for the government.

I was inspired by a sociology professor at St. Cloud State and eventually landed in Salt Lake City, Utah. I enrolled in the University of Utah and stayed there until I received my Master’s of Science degree in Political Science. I studied everything I could get my hands on in Criminal Justice studies. I did an internship at the Salt Lake City Police Department, under a federally supported program in the Crime Analysis Unit. I entered statistics into the FBI’s Uniform Crime Report and helped set up a grid to determine where and what types of crimes where being committed in the city, in order to staff those areas with more police officers. I soon became familiar with international crime and international law and organizations. Before long, I was working on my doctorate at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in its prestigious political science department.

Another divorce occurred and I found myself alone and homeless in Tacoma, Washington. Oddly enough I was still a misfit. With the lack of money and time, I had dropped out of my doctoral program and came to Washington to be with my mother during her declining years before her death. I found myself homeless a time or two. I was bound and determined to eventually get back to the university, finish my doctorate and teach. I no longer had any wish to work for the American government. Having tried my hand at working as a correctional officer for the state of Washington, I soon realized my degrees were not respected. The only thing that seemed to matter was I was poor and working at whatever job I could find.

When I found the eLearning program and met Norma Whitacre, she seemed convinced I would never get to teach in the area of Criminal Justice. I was, very,  determined to prove her wrong and find a way to get the tools I needed to teach the subject that interested me and burned to be shared. So far Bellevue College has given me the opportunity to create curriculum for a course on campus. Every quarter, I struggle to keep finding an open door and the funds to keep going. The federal government is still paying for my classes and I am moving forward with each passing school year. One person is responsible for these funds. She works for King County and Worksource in Renton. She is one of the most dedicated people I know.

I have come a long way from the days when you could leave your doors unlocked and that quiet sleepy resort town of Pequot Lakes, now population 1936. There have been key people all along the way that have guided me and helped me get my education and use it. In the end the people who have helped me are my instructors and professors, the Catholic clergy (key members) and my friends that have listened to me in my down times and helped pick me up. The federal government and its programs for those without funds has been key to my ability to afford college and my university studies. The newest addition to this list is my mentor Robin Jeffers and Charlene Freyberg, who has unfailingly offered to help me achieve my goals  (honorable mentioned to Michael Reese).  I will always be eternally grateful that people like this exist and I was lucky enough to find them!.

The week began with the Easter celebration all around us. We decided to take a trip to see the daffodils in Mt Vernon. They were brilliant. Unfortunately our week was not going to stay as wonderful as it began.

Monday morning I found out my oldest sister’s son, my nephew, had suddenly passed early that morning. He was finally completely retired and had just begun enjoying life. A few years back, he had retired after 25 years working at the Pierce County Jail. He retired as a Lieutenant. He had served in the Coast Guard, at Northwest Detention Center and with HCI Inc. as a government contractor after he retired from the jail. Then after coming back from a trip to Mexico, he died very quickly and unexpectedly of double pneumonia. His funeral was a sad affair this past Saturday. It was very hard on his mother and wife. Actually, it was hard on the whole family.

We both had a lot in common.We had both gone through the state Correctional Officer training program and had been certified. He was certified long before I was. On the day of my graduation, he was a the Criminal Justice Center in Burien. I was happy to see him that day. I had decided to work in the state prison system, at McNeil Island.. He worked for the county at the jail and had been for several years at the time. His sister spent a few years working in community corrections. The three of us had a connection to law enforcement. However, my experience was not something I wanted to continue. I was more interested in teaching. I found corrections depressing, to say the least. I had hoped when I retired, I could teach part time. Now I am doing just that…working on teaching online.

I have been reading everything I can get my hands on while waiting for the new text book I will be working with. I have spent hours trying to learn how to use Instructure Canvas. In the meantime, I am getting my band together to put on a gig in May. Just as I was setting up a practice, my bass player suffered a major heart attack last week at the age of 56. It has been a bit hard to concentrate. I could use a bit more living and a little less dying.

I have been working on getting an teaching assistant  internship set up for fall. At the same time our money problems have begun to take over. April 21th is the last day of unemployment for me and my husband will be laid off on the 27th of April. My job at the college while helpful just doesn’t pay the bills. Unemployment for my husband will not cover our bills either. I wonder how this will impact my abilities to concentrate and get the course up online. It should be an interesting project. My nerves are on edge. I don’t seem to be able to sleep very well. The deaths of my nephew and good friend and bass player weights heavy on my mind these days.

I know things will get better . It seems it is always darkest before the dawn. When one least expects it after the storm, the sun comes out, a rainbow forms and the fresh air spreads the fragrance of the flowers bursting forth in the spring. Life just cannot be contained. There is a season for all things.

I have decided to take an independent study and create a whole new Introduction to Criminal Justice course in Instructure Canvas, the new learning management system at Bellevue College. I have encountered several problems. Since I began the study, I found out they may make a standard application that every instructor will have to use in the Canvas system. Every course would be like the last course and every instructor would be required to use the college’s set up.

The program chair of the Criminal Justice department is using a new book this fall quarter and I will have to re-design the syllabus I created. I had the new edition of the text-book used in Spring quarter. That edition will not be used in the fall. Hopefully the new text will get to me before most of the quarter is over. A lot of new text-books are being requested and it can delay delivery dates. I use the syllabus as a guide for designing the course. I need to decide the most important big idea I want the students to take with them five years after they have forgotten much of what they have learned. That big idea is stated in the course objectives and outcomes.

The next stage is deciding what tools I want to use to get the information from the text into the student’s memory storage area. It seems that a lot of what people believe about the criminal justice system is myth and doesn’t match the reality of how it was established and how it really works in today’s world. In my mind, if a case should go to the courts, the prosecutor and the attorney for the defense play out a scenario once seen in the middle ages. It is like two knights fighting for the winning spot (in the press). No one is mortally wounded today in the battle; but lives are changed forever and occasionally the defendant is put to death by the state. Needless to say the stakes in this battle, even in the 21st century, are extremely high. The system is a bit archaic and it is all we have to work with in the present.

The whole process begins when society create laws to regulate behavior. It is an ever-changing process.There are many different ideas about how law is created and what concepts or theories they are based on. That is not in the scope of this course. An interesting study on how laws are created and based on what theories, belongs in the study of Criminal Law. However, the students need some information on the subject and given this in the basic introductory course.

Once these concepts are reviewed, we move to the study of the men and women we trust with the task of arresting and investigation violations. Because they belong to an organization that has its own set of goals and objectives that often clash with the goals and objectives of the courts and correction organizations, we can study and research their successes and failures and how they fit into the criminal justice system. Law enforcement is often very different from the federal level, state to state and so on. One of the most important aspects of this study is the morality and ethics of the people assigned to protect us from criminal behavior and the goals and objectives of the organizations they belong to.

Actually the fact that what we call a criminal justice system can function in the first place is amazing. Even more amazing is that we call it a criminal justice system.  Many of our constitutional rights have been replaced with plea bargaining. Once in court, should things progress to that point, choosing the jury becomes a game of high stakes. Often jury selection appears to be just another high stakes… game. We find ourselves asking the question, which jurists can we pick to support our position or which person will deadlock the process when it comes to a decision? There are many more questions like this as we continue the study.

America’s attempts to rehabilitate people who have found their way into the system seem to be handicapped by the legacies of the past. Maybe it would have been easier to just tie the defendant to a pole and dunk them in ice-cold rivers. If they were guilty they would drowned and if not… What we do today, is lock them up them together and hope they will somehow come out better people. In the most severe cases we kill them. That way society doesn’t have to pay the tens of thousands of dollars it takes to warehouse them in our prisons. In the end, do we really know what is causing this behavior and if we did could we fix it?

Now the real thinking portion of the project begins. I must use Web 2.0 technology without the help of an on campus classroom to help students understand how it all fits together and plays out in real-time. This course may be used by Bellevue College or some form of it; if I can put the elements together in a way that is conductive to learning in an online environment. On top of this, I need to learn a system that is completely new to me. Actually, since I have already begun the process, it is like learning a foreign language.