Delayed Gratification

I got this message from a former student today. Just when I think about leaving teaching permanently, I get something like this that makes me want to return to the classroom immediately. Anyway, here is the email (identifying marks removed, of course):

Hi Ms. Broome. How are you? It is so strange, Elliot and I were just talking about you a couple of weeks ago before exams. We were discussing how great we felt that we had you as our teacher. He was saying how you and Mr. R. were the reason why he was a History major and I was stating that I find myself being my worst critic when it comes to correcting my own papers, proposals and briefs. I am so glad I found you. I hope that we keep in touch. My cell is [xxx-xxx-xxxx] maybe we can text sometime if you do that type of thing! LOL ;-) Anyways, I Love ya gotta go.

...and while I'm complaining...

* I lost my NYU ID card and had to pay $15 for a new one today...

*The community college where I applied to teach remedial writing has yet to send me any word that they received my application...

Reasons Why I Suck...

So, I am here in NYC for another (incredibly expensive) week of meeting with my committee. I had a red-eye flight from Ohio yesterday, followed by a 4 hour meeting with two of my committee members (I meet with the third tomorrow). I came away from the meeting feeling like a complete and utter failure. To be fair, that is not at all what my committee intended. In fact, they made a point of telling me I am still on schedule to submit the dissertation in January and schedule oral examinations in the spring. So why am I so upset? In brief...

1. Chapter 2 of the dissertation is titled, "Review of Theory and Research." My committee chair gently pointed out to me yesterday that I have neglected to include any research in the literature review- it's all just theory. I now need to go back and review 51 years of research (starting after the launch of Sputnik, which is a vital date in the development of gifted education in America), read the research, summarize it in notes for myself, and weave it into the chapter. This also means I have to re-familiarize myself with SPSS, ANOVA, regression analysis, etc., etc.

2. Also related to Chapter 2: I have to throw out the section I wrote on Bakhtin (which took me the better part of a year to research and write) and start over with another theoretical paradigm for my data analysis.

3. I included way too much raw data in Chapter 5 (I totally agree with this, my decision to do so is long and complicated and I am happy I can rewrite it), so I have to scrap about 70% of that chapter and replace it.

4. All of Chapter 6 is worthless. I was instructed to delete the entire thing and start from scratch. I agree with this as well, but I am not looking forward to rewriting it, especially since it was written at the explicit instruction of the third committee member (with whom I meet tomorrow and who will tell me something completely different re: revisions of this chapter).

5. My tone is completely wrong according to my advisers. I have to go back and radically alter my syntax. I estimate this will take about 30 hours (and that's without including time consulting the OED for guidance).

6. Worst of all...my writing has failed to adequately capture my participants' personalities and intentions. One of my committee members said my writing makes them sound "precious, egotistical, full of themselves ," and sound like they have a distinct "superiority complex." This is the comment that completely broke me. I can take all the criticism directed at me- I expect it and that is what editing is about, after all. However, the thought that my lack of skill and inability to write well caused these participants--whom I respect deeply--to appear as caricatures of mad scientists or evil geniuses is more upsetting that I can even describe. I feel like I should trash this entire project rather than libel my participants in this way. I cannot stand the thoughts of misrepresenting them, especially when there are so many pernicious stereotypes of gifted individuals that already exist.

I just want to pull up the file and hit "delete." I just want to not feel like I've betrayed the school or its teachers.

Stupid Bald Headed Technologist Be Insane!

I cannot believe it.

Or rather, I can believe it but I am so disgusted that I have to negate my willingness to believe. The object of my inchoate rage? Burger King's new advertising campaign (http://www.whoppervirgins.com/). They have ostensibly traveled to remote regions of the world to find populations that do not consume the fecal-laced flesh of industrially slaughtered cattle on the dollar menu. They then ask these people to taste their burger and compare it to a competitor's.

So what's so wrong with this? Everything. McDonaldization, global hegemony, an an attitude towards cultural anthropology that dates to the days when the sun never set on the British Empire. Not to mention the implied superiority of American viewers (i.e., "Oh, look at those silly natives who don't even have a word in their language for burger. How uncivilized and backwards they must be!") AAAAARGH!

I am not the only one who is angry about this neo-colonialist advertisement. A routine Google search of "whopper virgins offensive" turns up plenty of coverage, most of it overseas. (Why don't more Americans read European newspapers and news websites?) Two I thought were particularly interesting are:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/3546969/Burger-King-under-fire-for-Whopper-Virgins-taste-test-challenge.html

http://adweek.blogs.com/adfreak/2008/12/crispin-brings-bk-food-to-the-unenlightened-.html

Totally Unrelated to the Dissertation

One of the good things about NYU is Ticket Central. One visit to their website (and today to the booth in person) has netted me:

1. Last night's (ORCHESTRA SEATING) ticket to Dr. Atomic at the Met

2. Today's cheap ticket to MoMA (so I could visit the Pollocks)

3. Tonight's ($30) ticket to see Equus (stage seating, which sucks, but NYU has a special deal with the theater...regular tickets in the nosebleeds are $116! That's what happens when you say the words "Harry Potter" and "full frontal" in the same sentence)

3. Tomorrow's cheap ticket to Avenue Q

All for a little over $50...not bad at all.

Okay, off to meet with my second chair committee member...keep your fingers crossed for me.

Delayed Gratification

I just wrote an email to a former student who is now an English teacher. It ended with the line, "every day that you bang your head on your desk in frustration, know that years from now you'll get an email from a student saying that you've changed his or her life." It is comforting to remember how true that statement is. Teaching is a profession based on delayed gratification. It takes years for students to realize how much you care about them. I've been out of the public schools for three years now, and I still get facebook notes and emails from students. Two of my former students are English teachers(!), two more are gearing up for graduate school, and one who is still in high school wrote me to let me know that his reading skills have really developed, in part from being in my class. It really makes me miss being in a classroom. Somehow, I'm not sure being an adjunct professor, textbook author, or administrator can compete with battling in the trenches of a public high school classroom.

Or maybe I'm just a masochist. Whatever it is, I hope that at this time next year, the words "Dr. Broome" are stenciled above a classroom door (or, much more realistically, on the side of a traveling cart).

Besides, I love handing out stickers. I miss stickers.

Disgruntled

Note to all of you who are planning on writing a dissertation when living in wedded or cohabitated bliss: invest in earplugs and blinders. Since Nick is currently working night shift, he sleeps from 9 a.m.- 2 p.m. Today, I was in the middle of a writing binge, and I had the phrasing of a tricky passage down in my head--I mean I had nailed it, the phrasing was elegant, precise, and said exactly what I wanted it to say. I was just about to type it when...

Nick's alarms go off.
Nick turns on the television at top volume.
I lose my beautiful paragraph forever.

It's totally not his fault, and I sympathize with him (working swing shift in college was difficult enough for me). However, I have come to the firm conclusion I simply cannot write when he is in the house. He likes background noise too much, and it drives me batty.

In other news, I finished a very, very, very rough draft of my findings chapter. I'm not happy with it right now, but am too frustrated and tired to edit. I hope I'll see things a little more clearly in the morning...that is, assuming Nick's alarms don't cause me to have a seizure.

Progress (I think) and a gendered travel issue...

I spent today working on Chapter 5 ("Findings"). I've written about 1/3 of the first half of the chapter (yes, that's 1/6 of the total chapter, or about 45 notecards). I'm pleased with it for the most part, but that is because I don't have anything to compare it to, genre-wise. I would feel better if I could see another dissertation with similar methodology, just to see if I am including everything I should. I'm also concerned that the writing is kind of clunky. I am trying to let my participants do most of the talking in this chapter, so that they speak through me instead of me speaking for them. However, that currently translates to something that looks like this:

[one line of my writing that introduces the subject under discussion]
[10-25 line quote from participant]
[one line of summation]
[repeat]

I don't like the looks of it. Oh, well; I'm meeting with my committee head in a couple of weeks, and if she doesn't like it she will tell me how to fix it.

The writing was uninterrupted for the most part. I organized and wrote from 11-3, then took a break to find my APA Manual. After half an hour of searching, I realized I have somehow managed to lose my 3rd manual in 4 years. Sigh. So I went to the bookstore down the street and plopped down another $30, only to realize when I got it home that it doesn't contain the answer to my question (about citation of interviews). Double sigh. I then just gave up and wrote for another four hours. Time flies when you're drowning in notecards.

I also realized today that I have a very gender-specific problem. In two weeks, I am flying from Ohio to New York, from New York to North Carolina, then from North Carolina to Tampa. In the 13 days that I am gone, I have to dress professionally for two days in New York (I'll be seeing the same people, and it is a huge faux pas for a woman to wear the same suit two days in a row) and for three days in Tampa (presenting at the conference one day, scouting out jobs the other two, seeing the same people all three days). I also have to attend a meeting with my Mom in North Carolina, which necessitates an all-weather professional outfit (suitable for 90 degree heat or 60 degree tropical storms). Because the airlines are charging obscene fees for checking baggage, I am going to be living out of one carry-on suitcase and a bookbag (filled with my dissertation work and presentation stuff). New York is supposed to be in the 50-60F range, while Tampa is expected to be in the 80-90F range. North Carolina, of course, is anybody's guess. So, at an absolute minimum, I need to pack:

2 cool-weather professional suits
3 warm-weather, non-wrinkling [i.e., no linen] professional suits
dress shoes that coordinate
jeans, a t-shirt, and sweater for days off in NC
stockings, camisoles, etc.
comfortable walking shoes
(2) 3 oz. bottles each of shampoo, face soap, lotion, body wash, hair gunk
wind, sun, and sweat-proof makeup (argh- hate it, but it's a necessary evil)
A coat for New York

Now, I do not consider myself high-maintenance. True, I do have that Momma-instilled Southern Guilt Complex where I live in fear of being called "tacky," but really...I'm not exactly a heavy packer, if you exclude the suitcase of books I usually take when I travel (I haven't even decided how to address my fear of being stuck somewhere with nothing to read). Still, I am blamed if I can see how I am going to manage to get all this stuff into a carry-on, even if I do pull the "pack two pairs of slacks and have them dry-cleaned at the hotel on alternate days" trick. If only I could get away with just changing my shirt and tie (as I have seen men do at conferences--don't think we don't notice you can get away with the same suit for a week!)

Arrgh.

Foaming at the Mouth...

First, a little note on my progress. I have a seven-chapter dissertation to write. Here is the breakdown of how much time I anticipate spending on each chapter:

Chapter/ Description/ Percentage of time spent writing and revising
Chapter 1 Introduction 2.5% (draft and first revision finished)
Chapter 2 Lit. Review 30% (it's gonna suck, which is why I'm doing it last)
Chapter 3 Methodology 5% (draft finished and sent off for revisions)
Chapter 4 Participants 2.5% (draft finished and sent off for revisions
Chapter 5 Findings 50% ("this is what I found")
Chapter 6 Interpretations 5% ("um, this is what I think Chapter 5 means")
Chapter 7 Significance 5% (piece of cake)

I am about to begin work on Chapter 5. This chapter is gonna take up most of the dissertation, and it's going to involve a lot of organizational labor. The way I write all my big papers is to record my info on index cards, lay the cards out on the floor, then group and order them like puzzle pieces. Yes, it's old-fashioned (I learned this method in high school) and takes a lot of space and time. However, once everything is ordered, writing is a snap. It's just like I used to tell my students: good writing is 70% planning, 20% revision, and 10% word processing. I made the index cards for research question one (I haven't even started the "recursive process of theme extraction and hierarchical categorization" for Research Question Two...) this Friday night (a little over 200 cards, if you're interested, and yes, that was my exciting Friday night).

To be honest, I am more than a little intimidated by this chapter. I don't have a model for how to write it, and I am totally at sea. I need to see models to get an idea of how this genre works and how to adapt it to my own needs. I've been really anxious about writing this chapter for a while now. Even though it's not the most difficult chapter (that would be the Lit Review), it is a type of writing that I have never practiced before.

To allay some of my anxiety, I decided to look for online dissertation support groups. I figured that everything is on the In-tar-web these days, and so I could find a group of virtual ABDs working with qualitative methods. One would think...but no. I trolled the Internet for hours and couldn't find one that was (a) free, (b) for the humanities/social sciences, and (c) qualitative. Arrgh! What I DID manage to find made me sick:

http://www.ma-dissertations.com/
http://www.customwritings.com/buy-dissertation.html
http://www.masterpapers.com/purchase_dissertation.htm

Apparently, you can BUY a dissertation. I am not naive. I realize that there are lots of companies out there who will ghostwrite papers. I have seen more than a few in my tenure as a high school teacher. I was always able to recognize them and fail the student, no problem (thanks, www.turnitin.com!) I expect some slothful high school students to try and cheat the system. However, it boggles the mind that someone who is ABD would think they could get away with submitting a purchased dissertation! Don't they realize that their diss would be submitted to UMI and made publically available? That whenever someone else stumbled onto it and realized it was plagiarized, their degree would be revoked? We're talking felenious academic conduct, people! How on earth would you expect to get away with that? More to the point, if you don't want to write your own dissertation, why the hell did you go to grad school in the first place?!

Sigh. It makes me weep.

On another note: I got an email from Committee Member 3 this week. He's agreed to meet with me when I go to NYC next week to meet with my advisor. However, the tone of his email was noncommital. I wasn't expecting a detailed critique, but something along the lines of "it look good" or "get ready to scrap 90% of what you've written" or "your methods section is vague" would at least prepare me somewhat. Now I'm stuck worrying that he is going to hate everything I sent. I won't be able to stop worrying about this until I see him.

One final note: I may not have a virtual support group, but I do have people who rock. I call them in a state of panic/frustration/fury/helplessness and they always manage to get me back on track. I love my friends...I just hope they can put up with my whining for another few months...

The Happiest Place on Earth Saves the Day

I was playing on Facebook today, wasting yet more time, when the summer program that is the topic of the diss. came to the rescue...again. My mind has been in hibernation for the past six days, which rendered productivity on the diss. useless. As I was poking around the Facebook, I found a note written by a former student and current counselor at the program. The note itself discusses epistemic necessity with what I thought was an interesting approach to the topic. However, I disagreed with the first premise of the argument. So, taking a deconstructivist perspective, I wrote a post to the colleague to argue the issue.

This incident may not seem like a big deal, but it is. The posting forced me to think about an issue in a systematic, logical manner using major theorists as a base for my original argument. Hey, sounds suspiciously like what I'm supposed to be doing for a dissertation. I feel like my brain has been jolted awake all of a sudden. I am now thinking more clearly and feel ready to tackle that reading I have to do in order to write Chapter 3. All it took was a little (virtual) intellectual argument to force me to use the little grey cells.

So, once again, the summer program and its staff manages to support me even when it is not in session. Is there anything this place can't do?

Type A Deadline Gadget

Well, I think I found an answer to my procrastination problem. I found and installed a countdown clock on my computer desktop. I have one for the dissertation deadline (108 days, if you're interested) and a separate one for my current chapter deadline (a measly 9 days). They count down by the hour, minute, and second as well, so every time I look at the computer I can see time ticking away. It should make me paranoid enough to get some work done. Let's hope...

Kvetch, Kvetch, and Feel No Pity

Sigh. Today makes a grand total of five days spent not working on the dissertation. I need some incentive. It's just so easy, with the library half a block from my house, to check out mystery novels and read six in a day. I need someone to remind me that I have deadlines to meet! I was warned that my ludic reading would be a huge procrastination/dodge when I went into grad school. I scoffed, but I should have listened. It's just so nice to be able to curl up in a quilt and figure out the solution of a mystery in the first 50 pages of a novel. It makes me feel much smarter than working on this frustrating part of Chapter 3 in the diss. In fact, Chapter 3 makes me feel like a simpleton. I know so little about methodology.

Actually, that's not true. The problem is that I view these methods as common sense. However, since I am a lowly grad student, I must find "real" scholars to back me up when I defend my thematic sorting analysis. This takes time and means I have to read really, really, really awkwardly written books by a professor who hates me (I'll tell that story sometime later). I try to read her work, but it literally puts me to sleep. Seriously, I've tried to read this one chapter six times now, and each time I fall asleep and wake up several hours later with the book imprinted on my face. Sigh.

Tomorrow is another day. Perhaps I'll make a dress out of this book when I've finished it. Better than green curtains, surely.

The English Teacher is Vindicated!

Just more proof that cool people know their Shakespeare:

http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/186547/october-02-2008/shakespearean-candidates---stephen-greenblatt

Kvetching and Sleep Deprivation

Nick is on night call for the next six weeks. Basically, this means that he works from 5 p.m.-7 a.m., comes home and sleeps from 8 a.m.-2 p.m., then does some reading and goes back in to the hospital. What's frustrating is that this schedule change is wreaking havoc with my own dissertation writing. It took me almost a month to get into a routine writing schedule, and now that he is here during the day I can't seem to make myself stick to it.

A large part of my reluctance to write when he is here has to do with the two of us sharing his computer. He needs to download patient records and professional reading before he goes into work, and I don't want to get on a writing binge and have him interrupt it (nothing annoys me more than having a great idea, then being unable to work with it immediately. When that happens, I just drop the idea entirely--it leaves my head and disappears into the ether before I can get it down on paper). The other part concerns his alarms. They are several in number. They are ear-piercingly loud--we're talking nuclear drill loud, should-be-illegal-because-they-will-permanently-damage-your-hearing loud. I still get an adrenaline shock whenever I hear one (my body thinks the end is nigh or something). When the alarms go off, whatever thoughts I was transferring from my brain onto paper run for the hills of my subconscious. (Don't you love mixing metaphors? I prefer the muffin method, as per Alton Brown). I get so angry at the loss that I give up writing.

I know these are just normal things that any resident's wife must deal with, and these are not actually insurmountable problems. However, I can't seem to get over my mental block and write while Nick is asleep. Arrrgh...

So True, So True...

Just For Fun...

It pays to be in the Family...

Kevin, the future husband of my close friend Ca, is a computer programmer. After one of my phone calls to Ca, he took pity on me and sent an article about retrieving files from my old hard drive. Nick read the article and made out a simple step-by-step list. And guess what?

IT WORKED!

I spent all day today (actually, only about 6 hours) recovering my files. They are now sitting on Nick's computer. Woo-hoo!

Geek Squad also called today to inform me that they sent my laptop back to Best Buy...without (a) fixing it or (b) explaining what was wrong with it. Sigh. It is on its way back to Geek Squad HQ for another month. Nick thinks it would be a waste of money to repair it and wants me to just get a new one. He sees my 3-year-old laptop as an antique, which I think is ridiculous. I have no patience with planned obsolescence, and when I bought that laptop I expected it to last five years at the minimum. Sigh. Apparently I am in the minority.

At any rate, I told Nick that I would go to a Mac rather than have to deal with Vista. He was furious about that (since he builds computers for fun, he is all about the PC- apparently you can't build your own Mac). I ended up purchasing another copy of XP before they are out of stock and no longer exist. I will worry about changing to Vista when (a) this dissertation is over (b) all the bugs are worked out or (c) I learn to work Linux.

Whew. I have also made progress on the chapter drafts. I have drafted and completed the first round of edits to Chapter 1, drafted all of Chapter 4, and drafted 90% of Chapter 3. If I can avoid going into Chapter 13 this year (still unemployed), I might actually become Dr. Broome. Perish the thought.

Off to read a book that is due to the library tomorrow.

Barista?

I had my first major dissertation breakdown (i.e. "I'm just gonna quit and get a job at Starbucks") yesterday. It's been a week since my laptop died. In that time:

1) Geek Squad hasn't called yet to tell me if the laptop can be saved
2) the file recovery software I bought won't recover my Endnote files
3) I can't access any of my files because I have somehow locked myself out of my hard drive (my husband Frankensteined it to his desktop)
4) I hate, hate, hate using my husband's desktop, which he built himself and runs every program known to mankind (i.e. it's slow as a Tandy 2000). His desktop also hates me, as it capriciously eats my data, shuts off for no reason, and mangles my files beyond recognition. It's like feeding data into a shredder and hoping that you can put together some of the pieces.
5) My husband is addicted to his computer, and so I have to beg for time at night to work. This annoys me to no end...and I am sure it annoys him as well.

To top everything off, Sunday as I was doing some work on the data analysis, a windstorm hit Cincinnati and knocked out power in half the city--including our apartment. Yup, more data lost to the ravages of the Computer Age, since my husband doesn't have a battery backup on his desktop.

Last evening I broached the subject of purchasing a cheap laptop to get me through my dissertation (newegg.com has some Linux based systems for $350) and we got into a huge discussion about how it's just not financially feasible right now. I understand, but it is still immensely frustrating.

By 8 p.m. last night, I was angry, tired, frustrated, fried, and generally ready to begin filling out applications to become a barista (and I don't even drink coffee). Luckily, Tom (a fellow ABD and friend of long standing) was at home. He talked me off the metaphorical ledge and reassured me that all would be well. He is also a dab hand at computers, and told me to ship him my hard drive so that he can try and recover my files.

I leave tomorrow for New York. In addition to meeting with my committee chair, I have to wrangle some forms for the Office of Graduate Studies, pay a visit to Financial Aid, and figure out how I am going to pay my tuition bill since my Financial Aid won't be coming until December.
Ah, the joys of being unemployed.

Computer woes and Chapter 1

Still no answers on the computer front. The part Nick needs to see if my hard drive can function on his desktop arrived today, so hopefully I will have an answer tonight. If it works, all is well and I can begin the arduous process of outlining my literature review. If the hard drive itself is defunct, all my Endnote (bibliographic software) entries for the past three years have gone away. It is at that point that we pay someone a ridiculous amount of money to use a scanning electron microscope on all the drive's plates to retrieve as much information as possible. Sigh.

On the bright side, my advisor liked Chapter 1 for the most part and is suggesting only cosmetic changes. Unfortunately, the other two committee members are going to be unavailable when I am in New York next week, which means I wasted a lot of money on a hotel that I didn't have to (prepaid Internet rates do have their downside). This whole commuting thing is not for the faint of heart of the weak of pocketbook. I don't understand how NYLONs do it.

So yeah. That's about all that's going on as far as the dissertation goes. I am now focusing on (a) creating preliminary typologies for my data set, (b) praying for the safe return of my hard drive, (c) working on a presentation I have to give at the National Association of Gifted Children annual conference, and (d) figuring out how to reconcile the data I have with the data my proposal assumed I would get. (Lesson number one for the qual. researcher: NEVER expect or anticipate findings. Especially do not allow those assumptions to shape your dissertation proposal).

Disaster!

Computer is dead.

Computer with all dissertation data stored on it is dead.

Computer with all the work I have done over the last three years of my life is dead.

I am crying.

Status Update

I have finished all the transcriptions (yay!). Plus, when I sent them to participants for triangulation, all the feedback I got was positive--the participants found the transcriptions accurate and were excited to be helping me with my project (so they said in their emails). I have spent the past few days reading qual. methods articles and books. Uggh--there is so much I feel I don't know. I am also worried that I am putting off the actual writing of chapter 1, which I was warned about by several postdocs.

I am also worried about the quality of information I am getting from these texts. Two of the texts I just picked up at my local library (city, not university). There were several great articles in each, but one book is copyright 1975 and the other one copyright 1990. So, a tad bit out of date. The other two major books I am reading on the subject were recommended to me by my committee chair. They are more recent, but I find the writing style aesthetically awkward and so am having trouble getting the information with an unbiased frame of mind. I just can't seem to keep from groaning at the style, and I am afraid I will discount very useful information because I can't see past the aesthetics of the prose. It's a problem.

Other than that, I intend to spend the day updating my Endnote program with all the qual. methods stuff. Exciting. no?

Transcription Worries

I have been rechecking my earlier transcriptions for errors before I send them to participants for triangulation. As I re-read them, I am worried about something. I tried to stay as faithful to the audio record as possible; this meant including all the natural hiccoughs of spoken language—filler words (“like,” “um,” “uh,” “and,” etc); run on sentences; fragments, etc, in order to get as close a record as possible to the participants’ natural speech patterns. However, I have several problems with this method. First, (and I didn’t think about this until I had emailed the interview transcription to each participant), I am worried that the participants will be upset that I included these things, even though I transcribed my own speech issues as well (apparently I say “um” or “okay” before every single sentence I speak!). I don’t want them to think that they sound silly or stupid, because they don’t—their speech is much more fluent than normal, due I think to their extended experiences in the academy. I am worried, however, that a participant will want me to not use their words or let their voice on the page out of an antipathy for their speech patterns. If that happens, I don’t know what I will do.

I also am not sure about whether or not I should record these speech quirks in my actual dissertation. Do I eliminate them so that all the participants sound polished? If I do this, I will take away their voice, the thousand ways that their idiosyncratic speech makes them unique. If I don’t, however, I risk alienating my participants, since they will see the dissertation drafts, and I also risk having my readers not understand how incredibly intelligent these teachers are. It is a conundrum that I haven’t decided yet how to solve.

ValidityThreats?

Something I never anticipated is happening. I knew going in to this project that I loved the GS deeply and profoundly. I knew I had an emotional connection to this school and therefore to this project. However, I did not think that transcribing interviews would involve any emotional attachment. I actually thought the transcriptions would be the most boring part of the research. But with each transcription, I get more and more emotional. Hearing the voices of people I have come to consider my family makes me want to break down and just bawl. I know it’s silly—it’s not like they’ve died, I can always call or email them—but it’s just not the same. Being together, living on a hall together, is an experience that can’t be replicated when we’re flung all over the United States and Europe. I miss those seven weeks of camaraderie and family the entire rest of the year, but for some reason it’s tougher this time around. I can usually get over missing GS so much by putting it away in a corner of my mind for several months. I can’t do that now. Every day that I work on this project I am reminded of how happy this place makes me, how dear my colleagues are to me, and how it will be another year before the magic can happen again. I know it’s maudlin and not my usually cynical self, but it’s there. I’ve got to figure out how to deal with this feeling, if it is a validity threat, but I don’t know where to begin.

Exhaustion

First, an explanation as to the relative lack of entries for the past two weeks. The last week of the summer program where I’m researching and teaching is emotionally exhausting. It takes everything I’ve got to deal with leaving this place behind. This program is a huge part of my life. It’s not a summer job. It’s a family reunion, it’s spending time with people you care about more than anything, it’s a time of joy and laughter. I'm not over the sadness that comes with leaving, and I am sure it is affecting my research. I'm not sure what to do...

Luddites Unite!

AAARGH! Stupid bald-headed technologist be insane! (that’s a Rollins reference, btw)

I switched email accounts a couple of years ago, from hotmail to gmail. I like gmail so much better— their spam filters are awesome, whereas the spam in the hotmail inbox was getting out of control. However (and there is always a however), the emails that the previous director sent re: the program document that is the subject of my dissertation were sent to my hotmail account. I still have the hotmail account, I just haven’t used it in forever. So, I thought, I’ll just log into the hotmail account, retrieve all the files I need, and be done.

Wrong. So, so wrong.

Hotmail has deleted EVERY EMAIL I EVER SAVED. They’ve actually deleted all my email from that account. True, most people don’t need access to email they haven’t seen in three or more years, BUT COME ON! Some of us DO need that email (say, because it is dissertation data). I know, I know, it’s my fault for not sticking to one email account. But just because I’ve broken up with hotmail doesn’t give it the right to throw away my stuff without so much as a courtesy phone call or email. Really, I’ve had ex-boyfriends who were more mature than this account. Gmail would never have done this to me.

Sigh. Off to see if the old director saves his 3-year old emails…

(8/1//8/22)

The point of being here...

Last night and tonight I spent on the Quad (grassy area where students gather at night to socialize. Last night I had a 3.5 hour conversation with two students. The topics included gender theory, anarcho-primitivism (which I sincerely hope the students will grow out of), why the one who wants to drop out of school shouldn't, and sundry other things. Today after class, another student asked me if she could talk to me tonight. I met her on the Quad and spent 1.5 hours with her, helping her work through some issues that no child should have to think about.

I am consistently amazed at these students' trials. Sure, many of them are well-adjusted and come from lovely homes, but too many are just psychological wrecks because of how adults have treated them. I get so upset and frustrated at the fact that I have to send these kids home, away from this program, which they have come to see as a refuge. I know that I should strive to maintain some perspective, be an outsider looking in so that I don't miss important data. However, all that logic goes out the window when I am dealing with a child. For me, completing research will always be a lesser priority than my students. If helping them survive and cope means I have to contend with tainted data, that is a risk I am willing to take.

Of course, my current project has nothing to do with students, but hopefully my future investigations will. I need to figure out how to balance the interests of the students with studying a phenomenon critically...but I know that in my heart I will never strike that balance if it is not in the child's best interest. Does this mean I shouldn't be a researcher? I honestly don't know. I am so emotionally involved with this program, with the students in the program...there are some students (usually the ones with the biggest emotional problems) that I follow informally for years after they leave this program. I have students that I regularly email, that I hired to work at this program, that I recommend to my old college program so that they will be in good hands and will be taken care of when I can't anymore. It seems irrational to think that after all these years of emotional investment in this program and its graduates that I will be able to study it as critically as I need to. This saddens me to no end...I am just at a loss and am not sure what to do.

Ethics Conundrum

Long day today (actually, technically it should read "long day yesterday," since it is 1 a.m., but I'm not worried about technicalities at this point. So much has happened--there was a faculty meeting with our boss' boss, which did not go well and went an hour over time, then my focus group, which was so wound up from the faculty meeting that I am not sure we got much accomplished, then a GSA meeting to attend so I could take fieldnotes, then a guy who used to work for me as a TAC came to visit, so we all went to the bar across the street, and there were several interesting conversations there for me to mentally record as a source of data. Then of course I had to come back and make fieldnotes immediately since I didn't write anything down while the conversations were going on...if I had gone to bed I would not have remembered the conversations as well in the morning.

I am kind of worried that I might have done something--not unethical, exactly, more like atypical. There were about 10 faculty at the bar, hanging out and chatting. I asked two faculty members across from me how they felt the first time they came to campus. Neither of them had attended the program and so really didn't know what to expect. I got some excellent data from them, but I also feel like I led the conversation in a way to get data without telling them that is why I asked the question. Should I be able to use this data? I'm simply not sure. Neither of the faculty is a participant in my interviews/focus groups, so it's not like I have their implied consent or anything. I'll do some research on the issue tomorrow, I suppose.

Fieldnotes: Reflection 1

I've decided against posting my fieldnotes here, for several reasons. First, I want to keep this blog public and accessible to everyone. Even if I remove all identifiers from my fieldnotes, I think that anyone who is reasonably familiar with me or the program could accurately attribute statements that I have recorded. In the interests of protecting anonymity, I can't post the fieldnotes.

Second, though the lines among data types are fuzzy (at least to me) in qualitative research, I still am making a differentiation between fieldnotes and this research journal. I have conceptualized this journal as a tool for reflection on the research process, on my struggles, and as a way to realize what my biases are in this research project. This journal will eventually be a data source unto itself, but I do not want to muddy the waters with other types of data. Frankly, doing so would make me lazy...I could just cut and paste my notes or transcriptions into this blog without actually sitting down and thinking about them. The way I have set up this blog requires me to reflect on my data gathering and to actually write down those reflections for later analysis. Posting other data seems to be "cheating."

I will, however, begin to post entries I typed into my Word files before I thought to start this blog. I'm trying to decide if it is ethical to backdate these entries. By "backdate" I mean post them now but date the posts for the day that I originally wrote down the content and saved it in a word file. I have an uneasy feeling that this would be cheating...I think I should just put the date of original writing in the body of the post and leave the HTML dating as-is. I know it doesn't sound like a huge deal, but it makes me feel more honest. Really, that is what this blog is all about--it's a way to keep me honest and thinking about the ethics of research in general as well as my study in particular.

Data Storage Paranoia

One thing that sounds silly but is actually a great source of anxiety for me right now is storing my data. Last semester, one of my professors exhorted us to have the data, a backup file, a backup to the backup, and a backup to the backup to the backup. Why the extreme nature of precautions? Because, he explained, field notes and audio files are not like experimental variables. If you lose data in a replicable experiment, it sucks to be sure, but you can also run the experiment again. If your fieldnotes, et cetera, are destroyed, there is no way to ever recover that data. They’re just gone forever. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it.

I was thinking about this yesterday, because the fire alarm went off at 10 a.m. I neglected to grab my laptop on the way out the door, and could have killed myself for not doing so. Of course, no dissertation is worth dying over, and I did store my audio files in cyberspace, so that is some consolation (yes, it was a real fire, and no, my computer didn’t burn to a crisp). However, I still can’t believe how stupid I was to not think to grab the laptop.

In light of these events, I have come up with a plan. I have the audio files and transcriptions on my laptop’s hard drive. I also have them stored in a separate email account. I intend to purchase an external hard drive and leave it in North Carolina with my parents. Finally, I am going to print out everything I type each day and store it in my refrigerator. Yes, this last one sounds stupid, but think about it—have you ever seen a refrigerator burn in a house fire? It’s usually the only thing left standing—way more fireproof than our “fireproof for 15 minutes” document box. If I have any other ideas regarding clever storage options, I’ll be sure and post them.

Qual/Quant Wars

I’ve been reading Ely’s (1991) Circles Within Circles to help me firm up my data analysis paradigm, and I keep thinking about the following quote from Pollan’s (2006) The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals. The quote in question is:

The problem is that once science has reduced a complex phenomenon to a couple of variables, however important they may be, the natural tendency is to overlook everything else, to assume that what you can measure is all there is, or at least all that really matters. When we mistake what we can know for all there is to know, a healthy appreciation of one’s ignorance in the face of a mystery…gives way to the hubris that we can treat nature as a machine” (147-8)

I find this passage a pithy and elegant summary of how I feel about research. I am not inexorably opposed to mixed methods or quantitative work by any means. However, the type of questions I am interested in simply cannot be answered by reducing a phenomenon like curricula to an input/output paradigm. People are not machines, and it bothers me to no end that we (Ed. researchers) treat them as such.

I know this topic was also the subject of my last post, but it’s what has been consuming most of my mental energy for the past few days. In fact, this issue seems to concern the entire staff of the summer program where I am a participant-researcher. A few days ago (Thursday night), one of my peers (I’ll call her P.) was sitting in our faculty lounge (on the faculty floor of our dorm) reviewing Judith Butler’s work. This peer is a participant in my study. She and I attended the same undergraduate program and M.Ed program, taught in the same county, and taught the same subjects in public school and in this summer program. In fact, I was the one who told her to apply for a position at this summer program. While P. and I disagree on a good deal in regards to gender theory (she’s a womanist, and I’m more of a postmodern feminist), we’re very sympathetic to each other’s views. At any rate, another teacher—a white, heterosexual male who teaches Math—asked P. what the book was about. P. began to explain performative gender theory…and then it was like a bomb exploded. The Math teacher began to vehemently disagree with P. He claimed that biology was destiny and that women were simply different (read: inferior) to men in certain ways, and that gender was an innate disposition, not a social construct.

Other faculty who were hanging out began to jump in, including another white male teacher who is very supportive of Butler’s theory. More and more faculty came into the lounge to see what was so interesting. At the peak of the discussion, there were 14 faculty members crowded onto sofas, sitting on the floor, or jumping up and down, contributing their voices to the discussion. It lasted from 10:15 p.m. until almost 3 a.m.

The discussion was interesting in large part because of how the sides were divided. The Butler camp had its strongest voices in:

Me (Gender studies/English degrees)
P. (Gender studies/English degrees)
Both Theatre teachers (MFAs and performance studies)
Dance teacher (MFA in Dance)
Music teacher (BA in Music Education)
Two English teachers (one of whom specializes in gender theory)

The opposing camp, which I’ll call the Essentialists, was largely composed of:
Two Math teachers
Natural Science teacher

What was so interesting to me is how the discussion ended. The Butler group was trying to explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Derrida’s theory of texts, and how words are intrinsically loaded—i.e., that this discussion cannot be conducted in neutral terms, because words like “mother” or “baby” or “pro-choice” were so wrapped up in cultural contexts. The Essentialist group flatly denied this view of the world and insisted that “mother” was the same thing as “a female homo sapien who gives birth.”

It was a fascinating moment for several reasons. It seems to me that researchers and intellectuals on both sides of this divide need to come together and begin to talk to one another about basic premises of their disciplinary worldviews. There is simply no way I can come to a consensus or have a productive discussion with, say, an extreme positivist, unless we define terms very carefully beforehand. We need to understand very deeply where the other camp is positioned, how they view their research, what types of questions they think are important, and what are the best methods for answering these questions.

In this case, the bonds of collegiality remained intact at the end of the discussion. I attribute this to several things. First, we live together, and thus the pressure to maintain friendly relations keeps us from ad hominem attacks or just walking out. Secondly, many of us have built strong friendships with one another throughout our years here. We are more inclined to listen to each other and genuinely respect the ability and integrity of one another, even when we are on opposite sides of a discussion. However, I think that this ability to disagree and walk away friends is rare. If we all happened to be strangers at a conference, I think a few punches would have been thrown before the night was over. We as researchers have got to stop behaving as if we were opposing armies. We need to begin to find ways to work together to communicate. I do not expect that we will come to a consensus—in fact, I sincerely doubt it. However, we can’t just keep yelling across the aisles at one another and hope that something productive will get done in the meantime.

Ontological Objectivity, Research Methodology, and the Utility of Bias

I just finished having a conversation with B., a science teacher at the summer program where I am currently working. B. is actually an anomaly among scientists; he’s a firm believer in complex systems and taking a more subjective, imaginative view of scientific phenomena (e.g. studying protein folding patterns in an effort to design buildings that increase E.R. rapidity). Our discussion basically centered on whether or not ontological objectivity is possible, and if so, of how much use is it?

Let me begin by stating that I am in no way an absolute relativist (talk about an oxymoron). I do believe that absolute truths exist. To paraphrase Terry Eagleton, either there is a tiger in the bathroom or there is not; the tiger cannot be both there and not there simultaneously (sorry, Schrödinger). However, the number of these absolute truths is relatively small, and they are not extremely helpful in solving problems. When we begin to think about how to apply such knowledge, subjectivity inevitably begins to creep into our calculations, and with subjectivity comes bias.

An example: I am a researcher in a university lab. I discover that compound A affects the shape of the protein coat on virus B, which is directly responsible for Disease X. Okay, fine. Now what? Well, I probably want to design experiments to see if manipulating the protein coat of virus B with compound A makes the virus unable to survive in the human body, thus curing or preventing disease X. How do I go about investigating it? Here is where the biases and subjectivities come into play. Some subjective issues that directly impact my ability to solve this problem include:

1. if any funding body thinks Disease X is important enough to try to cure
2. if enough people contract Disease X to make a drug to treat X profitable
3. if Disease X presents differently in people of different genders, races, or geographic origins
4. whether or not I think it is appropriate to engage in clinical trials on animals (if I don’t, I’m not going to be curing Disease X, because the FDA won’t approve my clinical trial design)
5. if I can recruit a large enough patient pool to run Stage III clinical trials
6. if I believe the scientific method is the best way to solve this problem (if not, my drug is never going to make it onto shelves)

I could go on, and there are certainly counter-arguments that can be presented for each one of these issues, but you (hopefully) get my point.

I must note that I am not in any way saying that bias is necessarily a negative thing. Our biases may prompt us to look for new and creative ways to solve problems, to transcend disciplines to find solutions, et cetera. However, as human beings, ontological objectivity is almost impossible to attain. We can study things in a more objective or less objective fashion, but I just don’t think that humans can ever be entirely objective—we’re too enmeshed in context (personal, disciplinary, academic, religious, et cetera) to not have some sort of bias.

One bias that particularly galls me, however, is the bias towards the scientific method in non-scientific disciplines—particularly my own. Human beings are complex creatures and cannot be studied the way genomes can be sequenced. I think one of the most pernicious aspects of No Child Left Behind/ESEA is the limits it places on research. ESEA legislation states that to receive federal funding, schools must implement programs that have been proven to be effective. Sounds reasonable, right? Well, it depends on how you define the term “proven.” ESEA tends toward a restrictive definition of “proven” that includes only double-blind trials that have a significant sample size and use quantitative or mixed methods.

There are incredible problems with this definition

1. The issue of variation and generalizability. Human beings are not like drugs or chemical compounds—they are going to respond in wildly different ways to interventions.
2. One must take into account classroom context when trying to implement any sort of intervention. What may work well in one class may be a disaster in another—just ask any teacher who’s tried to teach the same lesson plan to two different classes in one day. Whether my students speak English as a first language, whether they are academically gifted, whether they have the requisite prior knowledge for a lesson, what their learning styles are—all these variables will impact the success rate of the intervention, and no clinical trial or quantitative study can possibly account for so much variation.
3. What may work in one community or school is only successful in that educational context. It is difficult if not impossible to extrapolate the intervention’s results to other schools or communities. Generalizability is just not something one can expect from most educational research. To pretend otherwise is specious at best and foolish at worst.
4. Restricting the definition of acceptable research also eliminates the use of any research that has developed from qualitative methods. This idea is doubly foolish if one considers that qualitative methods are particularly well suited to investigating complex systems that aren’t generalizable (like a classroom).
5. Education is not necessarily a scientific field of inquiry. For too long, schools of education have been attempting to gain status by pretending to be scientific. Whether or not scientific methods are the best ways of investigating the problems at hand has rarely been addressed.

If anyone is actually interested in this conundrum, and wants to read a much better analysis of the problem, I highly recommend the following article:

Eisner, E. (1992). Objectivity in Educational Research. Curriculum Inquiry, 22(1), 9-15.

Eisner explains pithily and with great elegance how the infatuation with objectivity is itself a bias and impossible in the world of Ed. Research.

Okay, off to complete lesson plans for tomorrow’s class (funnily enough, on ontological objectivity!)

I thought I was the Brain...then realized I was Pinky

I thought that today, for your elucidation and entertainment, that I would post the statement of purpose I wrote for NYU. Luckily (for me) I reread it before posting--and realized how unintentionally hilarious it is. Though it will never see the light of day, let me assure you, it's bombastic, solipsistic, and at this stage of my life, highly embarrassing.

It's also kind of interesting that my current research topic has only the barest resemblance to what I enthused about in the statement of purpose. I knew then that I wanted to focus on curriculum models, and that is in part what my dissertation is about. However, everything else is completely different:

Statement of Purpose	Actual Dissertation
Goal: To design curriculum	Studies currently used curriculum
Focus on issues of race and class	No such focus present
Investigate curriculum's impact on students	Investigate curriculum's impact on teachers
Based on theoretical work by James Banks, Ruby Payne, and Paulo Freire	Based on theoretical work by M.M. Bakhtin, William Pinar, and Elliot Eisner
Research design would involve the design and testing of a curriculum	Research design involves teachers talking about their current curriculum
Extensive, multi-year study	Research period is seven weeks
Curriculum of concern is that used in Title I schools	Curriculum of concern is that used in a summer residential program
To design and complete a study worthy of a Research I institution	To design and complete a study without humiliating myself
Delusions of Grandeur	Nightmares of never finishing

Though this be madness, yet there is method in't...

Greetings and Salutations.

My name is Jenn Broome (but if you're reading this blog, you probably already knew that). I am starting my third year of my PhD program as an ABD. This blog is my attempt to chronicle this process, and hopefully communicate the trials, tribulations, small victories, and occasional joys of writing a dissertation.

Let the games begin.