a fish called wanda

nah i'm kidding. i met with wanda fox and she's wonderful! we talked for an hour about my research and hers, and i loved that she had an "education" perspective and not a linguistic one. she gave me a lot of good ideas, tips, encouragements, and different ways to look at things. i should have talked to her way sooner!! i'll try to see her again a few times this summer.

so basically, i'm starting almost all over again, by rewriting constructs (from students' perspectives this time, not from teachers') and reworking my questions. i REALLY had it easy for my master's, it was a joke, i can't believe people let me do it the way i did! i guess that's the difference between a master's and a phd. the sad thing is that no one is asking me to do it so "carefully" in the english department, but it's because of the TQ article, it scared me, and made me realize that i needed to verify what i was doing way more carefully, and that i needed NUMBERS, statistics, alphas and p-values, correlation coefficients, reliability scores, validity contructs, and blah blah blah, all that junk for 30 questions!

one interesting thing that wanda said was that she created her questionnaire and did a small pilot but then her results allowed other people to work from there and do replication studies with her instrument with all the changes she'd suggested in her discussion. so basically, since i can't express myself tonight, her study was a "pilot" for better studies that were later done by other people. and since no one has ever done what i want to do, i guess i need to remember that i CANNOT have all the reliability and validity stuff perfect, since to have those, you need to have large-scale results, already! so my study will be a pilot, and then i'll tell everything that didn't work and what should be changed to make my instruments better to replicate my study elsewhere. that makes me feel better, and that i shouldn't feel bad if things are not "perfect" with a vague pilot study with 40 participants... except that it increases the pressure, also, because my instrument must be somehow decent if i want other people to use it again.

on a more abnoxious note, the irb is a pain! i had to give up the interviews for them, send them copies of everything i was going to send, even letters of intro to the iep directors, and now they're telling me i won't be allowed to ask for 20 minutes of class time for the students to fill out the questionnaires but instead i have to "ask the teacher to finish early" and if they agree to do so, then i can go in... don't see the difference... but anyway. it seems to be their last battle with me, and i've won with the translations, so let's not complain too much.

i think i slept 4 hours last night! the law presentation went well though, i think...