funny funny life!

for the last 3 weeks i've been trying to call mr. X, director of one school, to ask him to participate to my pilot. we'd talked about 8 weeks ago and he told me maybe... so i wanted to know. but couldn't reach him for the life of me! meetings, teaching, lunch, vacation, conference... there was always something. so this morning, as i opened my folder with all my addresses and phone numbers, i made the decision to give up on that school. after all, i wanted to do the pilot next week, and given the length of irb procedures, i'd never be able to do the pilot at that school anyway. so there, i crossed the school's name with my red pen! my pilot is going to suck, i'll have 5 participants, but oh well, at least i'll have tried! that was at 8 this morning.

at 9:30 this morning, i got a phone call from a certain mrs. Y from that school. she said she was the co-director and wanted to know what i was trying to do. i explained my study to her, the deadlines, the irb, all that stuff. she said how many students do you need? i said i'd be super happy with 20! she said ok, i'll help, send me 100 questionnaires for the students and 10 for the teachers! huh??? and then she gave me her phone number at her office and at home and said call me any time when you know more about the irb!

i thought, this is too good, the irb is never going to work, the last school said they needed EIGHT weeks to review my protocol! so i called, explained that it was for a pilot, that i was at purdue, and THANK GOODNESS, because that school is somehow related to IUPUI, which is somehow related to purdue, they said it'd take them only ONE WEEK to review the paperwork! Hah! I still need to sign the thing and have the co-director of the school sign it before i can send it to the irb, but i'm thinking i might just drive there, it's about 3-4 hours away, not too bad, and it'd make things go much faster.

haha, funny isn't it? now i don't think she'll get 100 students, except if their program has 300 students or something... which it might... but even if i get only FIFTY student questionnaires back, my life is saved, i will have a very decent pilot! the only trouble is, she'll do it in 2 weeks, and i don't think the other school is going to do it anytime sooner, since that one's irb hasn't been approved yet, so i won't have my results until the middle of july... and then there's the translations :( :( :( one month for 12 languages?? bets are open!

Chinese >26,000
Korean >10,000
Japanese >10,000
Taiwanese >4,000
Spanish >3,000
Portuguese >2,000
French (Quebec, Africa, Belgium, Switzerland) >1,000
Turkish >1,000
German (Germany, Austria, Switzerland) >1,000
Italian >1,000

If I have to stop at 10 I'll stop here.

Thai >900
Arabic <900

IRB mon amour

i am stuck with one school's irb. they won't accept something, legally, and i don't know what to do. for now, i spend hours on the phone trying to get things to work, but it looks rather bad, which is sad, since the school director is very nice and trying to help...

i was thinking about the questions i can be asked on a job interview: what is your greater strength? now i can say THE IRB! i could give entire classes or workshops on how to work with this thing, help faculty, students, be the contact person for anyone who's as stuck as me, the intermediary, the mediator... huhuh... seriously, at first it was hard to fill out all those forms, but now i know the vocabulary, i know what they want to hear, i know how to say what i want to say... i'm the QUEEN OF THE IRB! .... well except with this one school... what a pain!

other than that, i keep working on my chapter 2, which is getting pretty good. i make piles of articles: those i need to read, those i have read, those i should read again, those i'll use for section 2.3, those i'll use for section 2.4, those for section 2.5, those i need to add in chapter 1, those for chapter 3... piles and piles of articles all over the house, and then the cats play and fight and run everywhere and mess it all up!

yesterday i tried to get a break, because i'm so tired of being at home all day all night all week and just be in front of my computer 20 hours a day... so i took my garcia marquez book and went to panera, which was a bad idea. i hadn't been there in 3 months! bad sandwich, bad music, bad service, ... and they don't even have my favorite salad that they have every summer! won't go back. but it was nice to go out, see the world again!

back to work... let's fill out UW's irb protocol...

baaaad week

didn't do much this week. i worked maybe 3-4 hours per day only, which sucks. i couldn't do it. worries about my health, the family, the heat... and i also needed a break. i worked soooo much the two weeks after i came back from france! so this week i called a few more schools, found a few more participants, lost some too (in particular a good school i had for my pilot, that's dramatic!), got a few irb approvals, filled out a few new irb protocols, revised some old ones, finished my chapter 1 and turned it in. and watched a few movies, and started reading the autobiography of gabriel garcia marquez. wonderful book!

yesterday, i worked maybe 5-6 hours on my second and third chapters. have 20 pages for chapter 2 + 7 pages of references. i can't really write much for chapter 3 because it's all about the methods and procedures, and i'm barely starting my pilot. but i can write a lot about how i got here, how i created my questionnaires, how i pre-tested them and stuff like that. i'm very happy i wrote much of it on this blog, now i just have to go back and take notes. today i want to keep working on chapter 2 and add one section that i have never written anything about before and read very little about, so basically it's going to be detective work today!

i've decided to put my small computer on my desk in my living-room, where i don't have access to the internet, and i write my dissertation on that computer only. that way, i can't check my email every 5 minutes and respond to my other blog comments every 10 minutes. won't be able to do that during the week, though, since i get approximately 20 emails per hour and need to have access to irb and school webpages and old emails and stuff that's only on my big computer in my room all the time. but during the weekend, since all i do is write, it helps.

... back to work...

CHAPTER TWO

15 pages on chapter 2... it's going well so far.

yesterday morning i sent the questionnaires to one school which is participating in the pilot. they said they'll do this week! and pay for the photocopying + mail. nice! i also mailed 2 paper IRB protocols, talked to two directors about distributing the student questionnaires in class--they said they'd do it... one of them is this one school which is bothering me a lot, asking for incentives for the teachers, etc., and i still don't know what to do with this school. the only good thing about this school is that i called their irb and it looks like it won't be tooooo difficult to deal with that one. so we'll see. i also wrote a statement of "invitation to participate" in my project because some schools requested it.

so bascially i have about 25 schools i'm dealing with right now and doing their IRB stuff. + the pilot schools. that's not bad. and that's a LOT of work, but i realize that people call me and say "hi, it's such and such" and i know immediately from what school, who is the director, and what the situation with that school is, etc. it's nice. i'm really getting to know people!

yesterday i also wrote two emails to the director of graduate studies of the engl. dept or something and to mike brzezinski. i realized with horror that i took two higher ed classes in the spring, then margie said it'd be too much and i got one with pass/fail, and then margie said it'd still be too much and i dropped one... and kept the pass/fail one... without realizing that that would give me only 3 graded classes for my secondary area... and i need 4! so the law class i took in the spring doesn't count! and all this time i thought i was taking an "extra" class... i guess i was! but that means i need to find 3 other credits in administration before next summer!!! so i wrote to mike, who's a nice guy, and asked him if he'd give me some work at the international student office and pay me with credits. that way, i would get some experience in administration too. knock on wood!

in the afternoon and evening, i didn't do anything. i spent almost 3 hours in the molecular imaging something center and when i came out, i was shaking and really mad and crying... so i didn't do anything else after that. just watched the english patient. life really sucks sometimes! oh, and when i got back, a phone bill was waiting for me for $116... only $13 of that is international!

... ok, back to work... life goes on, for now...

CHAPTER ONE

i wrote my first chapter yesterday!!! haha!!! ok, not the whole thing, for example i didn't write the "scope and limitations" section because i don't know yet where i'll start and where i'll end. i know i'll have TONS of data and won't be able to analyze it all. so i'll write that section at the end. but i wrote a statement of the problem, the theoretical assumptions, the goals and research questions of the project, the significance of the project, and a list of definitions of terms and acronyms i'm often using. i used a lot of stuff i had already written for my prospectus and also the grant proposal i sent in may (which i am SURE i won't get), but i had to do a lot of rewriting and cutting and changing and adding details and references. 20 pages already (including 5 pages of references). but tomorrow i'll print the whole thing and spend 4-5 hours cutting things down a little, especially in the first section.

one thing that i like is that i introduce (not discuss yet!) a lot of references and i feel super familiar with all of them. i know most of the people i cite and i know their work quite well too. it's fun. it's also nice to realize how much i've read and learned.

today i'll start working on chapter 2 and then tonight i'll go out to the cajun connection with xiaoye, yeahhh :) i need to ask him 2000 questions about looking for jobs and all. he sent me some of his letters and his CV and wouah, i'm not even close to having half the work he has done in the publication area! this guy is a machine! yesterday i worked on my CV and manage to go from 2 to 5 pages, huhuh! mostly added details, lists of references, and a list of classes i've taken. it's pretty nice now. i just wish there were 4-5 more publications... actually, i really hope to hear from the three places where i sent those two articles and one book review last spring spring! come on, i need those publications!!!!!! G. seems to be confident we'll get the TQ article published but i know they can still refuse it even after the second review. i should hear about the ET article soon now, but it's summer so things must take longer than usual... and i am not sure how the book review will work. someone told me that book reviews are always accepted, but i doubt it. it was super mean, too, so i bet they hesitate to take it. .... big sigh....

... back to work....

alea jacta est

yesterday i sent some emails about the in-class issue. wasn't easy. one director wrote back right away and said it wasn't a problem, he'd distribute the questionnaires at the end of class and have the students fill them out at home or during the break. then i called byu and joyce, this wonderful friend, said she'd take care of it and get the questionnaires distributed in class too. thanks joyce!

i also wrote an email to the nnest caucus e-list and asked them for help. i only got two responses so far. one that told me about u of u, a program that i could use for my pilot and i have to call back on monday (but it's a little late now for the pilot since i want to do it in a couple of weeks!). the other number was from a grad student about a school in arkansas, and i called right away, got the director instantly, explained my project in 2 sentences and he said yes, he'd be very happy to help, PLUS i could just send him purdue's irb approval and i didn't need to do anything else! OMG! ok it's a small school, and i might have about 20 participating students and 4-5 teachers only, but that's GREAT and i couldn't believe my luck on that one! just like that, the guy was super nice!!! i wrote back to the grad student and said THANK YOU!

today, i filed two paper irb protocols that i will have to mail on monday (one with the first paper letter i got from an iep director saying she'll sponsor me and agrees to participate), finished my online questionnaires (they're SUPER NICE, thanks to the help i got from ljvd!), and also started thinking about finding a job! margie keeps telling me not to worry about it until october but i talked to other people who said i should have asked for letters of recommendation from my major professors to be written at the end of spring semester! i don't know who i can ask. dr. henrichsen, margie, T., B. (who said ok but he doesn't know me at all so he'll wait until i get some work done on my dissertation), and maybe i should ask dr. gappa, from the higher ed administration dept, since i had two classes with her. dr. A. wouldn't write anything nice about me, which is sad since he'd be the one who could write about my work at the elc... dr. T. maybe? he never replies to his emails. who was the previous director of the elc??? oh, dr. G.... nah.... haha, i just thought of Chantal Thompson! don't think she'd like that. chris? maybe. mmmm.... tough decisions!

big "oops" ...

today i realized something that i should have realized A MONTH AGO! DAMMIT! i am pathetic! when i first started looking for participating schools, people started to tell me that they couldn't take class time to distribute the questionnaires and so they would do it outside of class time. things went so quickly that i said ok... happy that they would still consider participating... and i forgot one BIG BIG BIG thing: half of my questionnaire is about ONE SPECIFIC ESL TEACHER! how would the students know which teacher i'm talking about if they are not doing this in a specific class???????

it's hard to evaluate the damage, right now, but i'd think that about 1/3 of the schools, maybe 1/2, told me they'd do it outside of class time. it's fine if they distribute the questionnaire at the end of one class and then collect them in that same class the following day, but being in the hallway and asking for people to participate if they want is just not going to work! so now i have to write 20 emails to people i have already bothered forever... and i am losing about 1/3 of my participants... DAMMIT!!!!! how could i not think of that earlier???

it hit me today while i was talking to someone. she kept telling me that they couldn't do it at the beginning of the semester because it was too busy but i told her it was the point of the study, then she told me they couldn't do it this, or that, and finally she told me they wouldn't do it in class... and it hit me: it's not going to work! i told her ok, because i hadn't realized the implication of the problem yet. then i started thinking and considered removing half of my questions, the section about specific teachers.... but a big hypothesis of my study is that time will make a difference in the students' answers, and another big hypothesis is that what the students BELIEVE and what they actually DO is different. they may THINK that they only want native english speakers but they might love their current nonnative teacher. so there, i can't erase half of my project. i will have to write to everyone and appologize and explain. all teachers can still participate. i guess i've just been wasting a lot of time with those irb proposals if students don't participate...

other bad news: i've spent $40 on stamps for 10 return envelops that can contain 10-15 questionnaires!

the good news of the day is that umbc, which i love even more now, has agreed to participate not only in the pilot but also in the real study in the fall! wouah! and i talked to the director and explained the problem to him and he understands, he'll do it in class with the students! and they have a pretty large program. that'll be maybe 80 students, which is good! thank goodness.

other good news: i've started the outline of the dissertation! yeah!!!! it's real, it's coming, it's here!

ok, tomorrow: call all those schools again and explain and argue and beg and pray and hope...

ups and downs

every day is full of good news and bad news, it's exhausting! today i spent 2 hours filling out the irb stuff for columbia and i was almost in tears at the end because it was so complicated and i kept calling the very nice lady over there and asking her for numbers, names, protocol details, explanations... it doesn't bother me too much to enter the same information over and over and over, but it bothers me A LOT to have to enter it in tons of different formats! and the worst is that every irb protocol is different so i have to learn the technology, if i'm lucky to find it online, and learn all the details required by that specific procedure. it's insane!

i have been calling this one guy for four weeks, now, and leaving voice messages over and over... and i finally called the iep director and told him i couldn't find his irb director. looks like the guy is gone for the summer! great! and he's the only one who can approve the project. makes me want to give up, sometimes.

the excellent news of the day is that the english dept. will help me with some of the photocopying (approximately 1/4 of the total, depending on how many people end up participating). i was driving karen to the airport on saturday morning (at 5am...), and she said why don't you just ask, maybe they'll help, and maybe they won't, but it doesn't cost much to ask! truth is, i hadn't even thought of asking! so today, i met with B. and gave him a number (which was wrong but better than nothing). and this afternoon, i got an email from him with the good news. that is excellent news! i'll still talk to margie tomorrow and ask her if we could talk to the dean of the liberal arts dept. and grad school and ask if they'd help with the translating costs.

... back to work...

sleepy

i won't write much because i am so sleepy i make stupid mistakes...

just wanted to say a few things:
- i have been so exhausted lately it's scary!
- got a few bad news today about one school saying no after all and one psycho irb thing i need to fill out
- got a few good news too, about positive irb reviews for a couple of schools
- am working like a mad woman on the two online questionnaires and ljvd is helping me a lot. i owe him big time!
- sent the two online questionnaires + the student questionnaire to my 4 committee members and of course, B. was the first one to respond after 10 minutes with good feedback
- i love umbc! they've accepted to help me with the pilot and have EIGHT teachers and FOUR administrators who agreed to participate! that's a LOT! in fact, i'd be fine with the pilot even if they were the only school for the pilot! + they said they'd made the photocopies and all.... VERY NICE PEOPLE! wish there were more administrators like them :) (there are a few, to be honest, but umbc has still been the coolest by far!)

going back to bed!

back to work

haha, not a good sign when i'm so busy that i can't even find a minute to write something here!
so i came back on tuesday and got back to work. didn't do much in paris but got a few emails from a few schools asking for IRB stuff, mostly. i also finished the grant proposal and sent it on 05/31... worked very hard on it but wished i had someone to proof-read it before i sent it. oh well...

work right now: to get irb approval from all the schools who agreed to participate in the project! this means i first have to find the schools' irb office phone number, then i call them, feel very lucky if i find someone who knows what the deal is and is able to explain to me what i should do, and then i try to do whatever that is they want me to do. it varies. sometimes i just need to send a letter of approval from the school director plus purdue's irb stuff. sometimes i need to fill out a whole new application and that sucks! sometimes i need to ask the school director to do the irb training before they can do the project with their school and that sucks a lot too! i thought i was almost done calling people, but in fact, now i call irb offices... about 20 every day, since people are not there, busy, not sure what to tell me, etc. don't even want to think about my phone bill...

so i call, write things down, fill out papers, have little envelops with different things in it, write emails, fill out online forms, ... and above all, i try to keep track of everything i do, but it's hard. one thing that i learn by doing this is: TAKE DETAILED NOTES of whatever people tell you, who, when, why, and what i need to do, when, why, and how. with so many people to deal with (now i have the school directors plus the irb people at each school, that's about 60 people), i don't remember names, places, or anything else! i should have recorded details about each conversation i had with the school directors because now i can't remember if they were nice, hesitant, hostile, what they said besides yes or no, and what the plan was! darnit! i need a secretary!

it's only 10:45am but i've been up and working for so long already that i need my lunch!