crazy? did you say crazy??

maybe what i want to do is too ambitious? maybe i'm dreaming of a perfect world? anyway, things are ... not exactly happening the way they should. i gave up on one school because of their IRB requirements, the other school thinks 15 minutes of class time is too much, but at least the lady did not give up on me and is trying to find a way to do it since she says they have a lot of nonnative english-speaking teachers. one school is asking for incentives... and it's not exactly the kind of money i have... i mean, what do people think? one school asked me to do it myself and at a "special session" outside of class time so that the students wouldn't be mad because of class time spent on other stuff, and yet another school asked me to give the questionnaires to the students and ask them to fill them out at home. someone also asked me to put the translated student questionnaires online too, which i'm reluctant to do since it'll have some odd characters which may not look good on all computers plus you never know who's answering the questions when it's online. and the problem is not only with class time, it's also that teachers are too busy to spend 30 minutes to fill out an online questionnaire and so on... the list of complaints and requests is endless.

i understand all that, i guess. one remarque that someone made was interesting. he said that his university is not a research university and that students pay thousands to get an english education and don't want to waste it for something that is not valued by the university and an integral part of the program. he said that IEPs are more like businesses than universities. maybe so. but so what am i going to do?

i am already considering asking students to fill out the questionnaires at home, doing the pilot this summer AND this fall, and doing the real study next year, which means staying here for an extra year... or i could go with one school for the pilot and maybe 3-4 for the real thing in the fall. the sad thing is that i can't tell how everything is going to go, and that i'd like it to be a nice, replicable, and reliable study with meaningful and generalizable results... but i see it's going to be more like a case study. i do hope i have more than 100 participating students though, to make it a little better than my MA research, otherwise i'll be too ashamed and discouraged.

OK, today i'm going to call more schools. let's say i call 10 schools...
yesterday i worked about 8 hours on my new teaching portfolio pages and i like it, it's not amazing or anything but it's MUCH better than before!