Jaime Castillo

May 11, 2012 11:45pm Location: Somewhere over the Atlantic I'm on my way to Saudi Arabia. We are a couple hours into our 12 hour direct flight from New York to Riyadh and as I boarded the plane a few hours ago I was experiencing excitement, anxiety, and fear. My colleagues and I are the keynote presenters at a conference for clinicians, administrators, and direct care staff who work with individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities (ID/DD). Over the last two years, our agency has developed a growing number of partnerships with small organizations within Jordan and Saudi Arabia to provide education and training to staff within the ID/DD field.

“Let’s try this from a different perspective. Michelle, let’s say Barack answers all of your questions to your full satisfaction and he’s got an answer for every one of them.

Yesterday I finished a very interesting book titled 19 minutes, by Jodi Picoult. It is a story (fiction) about a small town in New Hampshire that experiences a school shooting at the hands of a young boy. The story follows the life of several characters before, during, and after the event, offering the reader an interesting perspective into the minds of parents, teachers, and students during a truly traumatic time. The focus, however, surrounds a young boy named Peter (the shooter) and his experiences with bullying from Kindergarten through High School, ultimately leading to the shooting. Picoult offers an accurate portrayal of the various forms of bullying, direct/indirect, as well as cyber-bullying, and the psychological effects experienced by the victim. This is a great book to read and use to facilitate group discussions as well as issues of bullying, depression, PTSD, teen violence, pregnancy and suicide are all discussed.

Monday morning I woke up to get ready for work, and reached for my phone on the nightstand. I hit the “mail” button, glanced over the emails that were sent throughout the night, nothing too urgent thankfully. My final step in my “before getting out of bed” waking process is to check Twitter. I primarily use Twitter to receive news updates from CNN, ABC, BBC, TIME, Wall Street Journal, etc… Each morning I get a blast of brief updates on my feed that just let me know what’s going on in the world. Monday morning all I read was, “OBL confirmed dead.” At first I wasn’t sure what it meant, then it hit me. “Wow, Osama Bin Laden is dead.” As I ate breakfast I was thinking, “Ok, so what does this mean now?” “Is it over?” “Is the world safer now?” “How is my life going to change now that OBL is dead?”

The YouTube video “Friday” by Rebecca Black went viral this week and hit an incredible 14 million views in six days. If you haven’t seen it, ask your kids or coworkers, chances are one of them has. The song was written by Ark Music Factory, a the California based company that writes and produces pop songs and corresponding videos for inspiring youngsters, then promotes them via the web. Black, who is 13 years old, picked “Friday” out of a number of pre-written songs to sing, but is she now the Internets lasted viral star, or the latest victim of cyber-bullying?