tagada tsoin tsoin

decided that i'd worked enough on my constructs/questions. i have now 43 questions, plus about 10 questions about the students (age, language, etc.) so my questionnaire is now 54 questions long. that's too long, but that's only for the pilot. the final thing should be about 30 questions long. and none of the questions are open-ended, so it won't take too long, hopefully. i'm meeting with margie this afternoon (and with someone else too, to discuss the grant proposal that i want to send before i leave for france!).

i now have 36 prospective schools (need to add emich and monterey to my list)... hopefully, about 5 or 6 schools will agree to help. the fun thing that happened yesterday was that i was looking for places to do the pilot that would be at places where i know people, so i can go there and stay with the people while doing the pilot. i know this one person in monterey, california, and i was looking at the university of monterery and couldn't find any intensive english program. so i wrote them an email and asked. and i got a response saying that yes, they were opening a brand new program this summer and i could still register for it. i replied and said thanks, but i actually want to do research there, not study there, do you know who i should contact for that? and 15 minutes later, i got an email from the program director saying he'd love to help because he remembered being a phd student and needing places to do his research and could i send him a proposal and stuff! wouah! now this doesn't mean he'll accept, but that was just nice. plus they will be a 15-week long program, which is what i'm looking for, which means that i won't do my pilot there, but it's one more school for fall and that's good!

i know i make a lot of lists all the time, but i went back to old lists the other day and saw that i did do most of the things i said i had to do, so that's nice. it's a good feeling to see things move ahead... even if not as fast as i wished! for example i thought i would have piloted and translated the questionnaires by now. well... not really! but there's still hope for this fall. going to france was really a bad idea because i need these two weeks for work, desperatly, but oh well, what's done is done. and maybe a little vacation will help my wrist feel better... so here's not a lit but a schedule:

week 1 (next week): send the letters to all the schools for fall; work on the grant proposal; start the book review; send the caucus budget to TESOL; organize 2 presentations at least for next year's conference;

week 2: respond to the first responses; go talk to the psyc guys about my pilot questionnaire; finish the student/teacher/administrator questionnaires; send the letters to all the schools for the pilot; finish the grant proposal; work on the review; send the conference proposals to TESOL;

week 3-4: in france; try to have access to email at least every other day!

week 5: come back and recover; try to catch up with responses from ieps; finish the book review and send it; work on the iawe conference with margie; start thinking about the iawe and aila conference presentations;

week 6 or 7: do the pilot!

this is if for now. i know i'll keep adding stuff to this list... let's start right now on the book review.