Helping One of Our Own

Polly Sundeen and Cole

Polly Sundeen has been a vital part of the community that makes up Irvine Valley College since it really was a little college in the orange groves, as Rebel Girl likes to say. Polly has worked here for over 25 years, since 1988, predating most of us on campus, including the president himself and the rebellious one as well. Currently a Senior Administrative Assistant, Polly has also served in leadership roles on the Classified Senate and CSEA.  Polly and her family need our help.

As some of us know, Polly's son Cole was diagnosed early on with Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy.

As Polly writes on the family's YouCaring fundraising site:

Cole has Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy and lost ambulation nearly 5 years ago. Not having an accessible van has limited where he can go and what he can do with us. Each day he misses more of our everyday activities by having to stay home because we aren't able to lift him in and out of our truck to go places. Everything is affected - medical appointments, holidays with family, even his grandmother's funeral. 

Polly, lacking the funds for an accessible van, has had to make do with what she has, a considerable burden on her and her family and a factor which limits teenage Cole's ability to be fully engaged in life.

Transportation has become especially critical since, as of this week, Cole is one of 12 boys nationwide to be selected for a clinical trial at UCLA for an experimental drug. They leave at 4:45 in the morning to get there on time but they are so grateful for the opportunity. As Polly says, "This is the trial I never thought would happen for him and will give him improved quality of life...not a cure but as close as we probably will come in his lifetime."

Polly and Cole, learning to walk

The Sundeen family's campaign to raise funds has been embraced by the faculty, students and staff of  Beckman High School where 16-year-old Cole is a junior - as well as the Tustin Unified School District. That effort has result in raising over $20,000 dollars, a third of the $60,000 goal.

Surely we who have worked alongside Polly and the institution she has served faithfully for over a quarter of a century can, as the the campaign is titled, Help Cole Get There.

To donate to the campaign, follow this link: Help Cole Get There.

Every amount brings them closer to their goal. Rebel Girl knows that this college and this district has the resources to make a difference here.  Let's do it.

Cole, boy at the beach

Let's take them there.

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Malcolm Gladwell on School Shootings

Illustration by Oliver Munday

This morning Rebel Girl came across this via The New Yorker. Malcolm Gladwell has been busy.


Thresholds of Violence: How school shootings catch on
excerpt:

....We misleadingly use the word “copycat” to describe contagious behavior—implying that new participants in an epidemic act in a manner identical to the source of their infection. But rioters are not homogeneous. If a riot evolves as it spreads, starting with the hotheaded rock thrower and ending with the upstanding citizen, then rioters are a profoundly heterogeneous group.

Finally, Granovetter’s model suggests that riots are sometimes more than spontaneous outbursts. If they evolve, it means they have depth and length and a history. Granovetter thought that the threshold hypothesis could be used to describe everything from elections to strikes, and even matters as prosaic as how people decide it’s time to leave a party. He was writing in 1978, long before teen-age boys made a habit of wandering through their high schools with assault rifles. But what if the way to explain the school-shooting epidemic is to go back and use the Granovetterian model—to think of it as a slow-motion, ever-evolving riot, in which each new participant’s action makes sense in reaction to and in combination with those who came before?...

...In the day of Eric Harris, we could try to console ourselves with the thought that there was nothing we could do, that no law or intervention or restrictions on guns could make a difference in the face of someone so evil. But the riot has now engulfed the boys who were once content to play with chemistry sets in the basement. The problem is not that there is an endless supply of deeply disturbed young men who are willing to contemplate horrific acts. It’s worse. It’s that young men no longer need to be deeply disturbed to contemplate horrific acts.

To read the rest -and you should - click here.

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An Abundance of Caution

 And now it's just a box of caution....

Rebel Girl had help on Friday afternoon when she returned to the college to honor her word that the memorial would come down. Temperatures peaked at about 104 degrees but who's counting?

Look for a revival of the memorial at a different site sometime this week.

Replication of Marshmallow Experiment Tempts IVC Faculty

Gratification delayed

by Kyle Overuse (special to Dissent)

     In the year 1972, when IVC was just a satellite campus in the SOCCCD’s eye, Stanford University professor Walter Mischel was conducting what would come to be known as one of the classic behavioral experiments in psychology: the Marshmallow Experiment. After assembling a test group of about 600 four-to-six-year-olds, Mischel asked his minions to seat each test subject at a table in a small room. A marshmallow was placed on plate on the table, and the child was told that if he or she could just refrain from eating the marshmallow while the experimenter was out of the room, he or she would be rewarded with a second. Alas, seventy percent of the children could not wait the fifteen to twenty minutes and gave in to temptation, thus losing their reward. Thirty percent, however, waited successfully and earned the second marshmallow. This minority, the experiment claimed, had a better chance at success in life than did the majority group, simply because the minority exhibited that valuable life skill of self-control and delayed gratification.

A psychology classic

     At Irvine Valley College this last week, the sudden overnight appearance of a giant marshmallow placed where the partially constructed liberal arts building had stood led certain faculty to speculate as to whether Mischel’s experiment was being replayed in a different context. After its usual careful research, DtB confirmed through a possibly administrative source speaking on the condition of not being identified that this indeed was the case.

     “If faculty can keep from entering the giant marshmallow for 12 months, they will get two liberal arts buildings instead of one,” the source confirmed. If, however, the academics give into temptation and enter the building, or try to eat it, then they will only get one building.

IVC's current, solitary marshmallow. Enter not.

     Rumor has it that the second building would be constructed on the corner of Irvine Center Drive and Jeffrey Road. The source denied that the second building would be used for IVC’s recently delayed program in Campfire Sciences.

Yesterday: IVC remembers Umpqua Community College: a moment of silence and more

Yesterday in the Irvine Valley College A-Quad, students, staff and faculty gathered at 10:27 to mark the one week anniversary of the Umpqua Community College shootings.

"Nine Chairs, Ten Candles" is transformed as onlookers add their words.

At that time and throughout the day, people wrote wishes, prayers and hopes and hung them on the installation.

Rebel Girl was  particularly pleased to talk with one student who mentioned  how proud she was that her school, IVC, had created a response to this tragic event.  The student explained that she had talked her friend who goes to another Orange County college and that school, she said with some disdain, "hadn't done nothing."

It was the student's first semester here at IVC and she clearly sees us as school that does "something."

Late afternoon scene.

Meanwhile, in Flagstaff, Arizona...

Suspect identified in fatal shooting at Northern Arizona University

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Thursday October 7: Stand with Umpqua Community College

Photo by Linda Thomas.

Please join us in the A quad for a moment of silence - and more - on Thursday, October 8th.

At 10:27 a.m. last Thursday, on October 1, on an ordinary day, on an ordinary community college campus, learning stopped and lives were destroyed.

Join us as we gather around the nine empty chairs and reflect upon this. We will begin at 10:27 and remain through 11:00 AM, the national time of mourning.

"We are not — are we? — at the mercy of our political institutions. If we created them, we are responsible for them. We have the right and the duty to overhaul them, to change them. We are not — are we? — so helpless, to say that the [inaudible] has to stay there forever. Who said so?… It is inconceivable that a sovereign people should continue, as we do so abjectly, to say, “I can’t do anything about it. It’s the government.” The government is the creation of the people. It is responsible to the people. And the people are responsible for it. No American has the right to allow the present government to say, when Negro children are being bombed and hosed and shot and beaten all over the Deep South, that there is nothing we can do about it. There must have been a day in this country’s life when the bombing of the children in Sunday School would have created a public uproar … It happened here and there was no public uproar.” 

– James Baldwin, from his speech “After the Murder of Four Children” Sept. 25, 1963, ten days after Birmingham church bombing that killed four little girls

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