PR

that one thing i should have done this summer, instead of buying a plane ticket to go to delaware in october: go to all those schools that seemed pretty sure and whose irb didn't seem impossible and meet the people. i can tell, now, that the one director i have met at aila will not likely tell me that they can't do it after all. she was presenting at the same time i did and i left a message with someone i knew and who knew her, to say i was sorry i couldn't meet her, and then i ran after my presentation to see if she was still in the room where she presented and she was. she said she was touched that i really tried to meet her. i just said it was nice to be able to put a face to the name i saw on so many emails. which is true. i really didn't realize the impact of that 2-minute long meeting until now. i should have skimmed the program book and gone to madison earlier to meet other people, if any.

well there was for sure one other person... huhuh... the chair of aila... whom i didn't meet personally but i went to a presentation where she talked a little. i didn't make an effort to talk to her because she's been the meanest iep director i've talked to, so i didn't think saying "thanks for nothing" would help!

doing that kind of public relation work would be expensive. i have to think about it though, especially with that one program that is not too far from here so i could drive, and the person is not too sure about it yet, but she has a huge program, probably the biggest in michigan, so it'd be sad to lose it! yeah, i think i'll go up there next thursday or friday and spend the weekend in ann arbor with my sis. oh wait no i can't, i need to feed someone's cat that weekend, dammit! ok maybe i'll go on wednesday then, and not go visit my sister. it's stupid, it's about 30 minutes away from ann arbor. anyway... i'll think about it.

i've been reading the handbook of attitude and writing stuff in my lit review. i like that, i get the general meaning and i hope it'll fit nicely in my chapter 2. other than that, i've kept reading enric's book, and also tried to reformat the two articles that were rejected to send them somewhere else. one article is 8000 word long and needs to be 5000 if i want to submit it to that other journal. the other one is the opposite, too short, so i need to work on it to make it longer. totally unfun. i also started working on the rationale for the article enric and i are going to write. it's super tough because i need to include 100 references at least, since it's a state of the art article and the rationale needs to show that i know what we're going to talk about! plus i need to prove that i'm the right person to write this article with my conference presentations, publications, work, education, etc. ... which is why i asked enric to co-write it with me because i really don't have that much to show off yet! so basically they've ASKED me to write the article but they still want to make sure that i can do it. weird. didn't know that's how it works. (oh, remind me to write about my meeting with the TQ editor at AILA, just one week after he rejected my article...).

ok, back to the measurement of attitudes! very interesting stuff!

AILA mon amour

veeery nice conference! considering that i went to two presentations: one on thursday afternoon and then mine, on friday morning! huhuh. $700 for that... BUT, i loved madison, i loooooooved the convention center which is absolutely gorgeous, i loved to vedge in front of the tv for hours and not feel guilty, and... well that's about it, it was a nice conference. i met one of the iep directors who'se been exchanging emails with me for months now, and that was cool. she's a nice one too, so i told her thanks for her help and kindness.

talking about that, among the 28 emails that were waiting for me at home, two were from iep directors saying that they couldn't help me after all, one for whose school i had already fought for and received irb approval. damn! my list is shrinking by the day! what i'm doing now, is when those directors tell me they can't help me after all, i beg ask them to at least respond to the administrator questionnaire. so far, i've had 3 responses from 3 programs that have dropped out. better than nothing. and, oddly enough, i got 3 responses from teachers from one school i had given up about. don't know about their students. but at least i have 3 more teachers.... that's 11 responses from teachers so far.

iu's irb is getting out of control. i'm sorry to single them out like that, but this is beyond anything that any other irb has done so far! i BROUGHT them all the paperwork myself, the signature, etc. and they first complained about the sponsor not being able to be my sponsor, then they complained about details forever, and now, they wrote to purdue's irb to verify that the papers i had given them were real and not fake! i had given them a copy of purdue's irb approval, which didn't have a signature on it. and they wrote to purdue's irb saying that they couldn't verify that it was real because it didn't have a signature and LYING about the fact that it was not on purdue's letterhead. IT IS! iu might have the nicest campus on earth, but i must warn anyone who wants to do research with them... ... and so purdue has no clue what this is all about, they're all confused, they wrote a letter to margie saying what they heck??? and of course, margie was at aila... and she won't have a clue what this is either... haha... i'll spend another 3 hours on the phone on monday... before i go spend the rest of the day at the breast center that is... and it's the first of august, happy swiss national holiday!

on a happier note: my presentation this morning went absolutely marvelously well. it was a panel, and everyone did great... and i don't want to be prideful but honestly, the whole room woke up and laughed with me, smiled with me, asked me tons of great questions, made cool comments... and people even came at the end and asked me for my handout, my name, my address... even margie took my transparencies at the end. i simply LOVE to have the room for me, to be in front of people, to see them smile, be surprised, be interested, be curious, and listen to me without making a noise! i must have been jerry seinfeld or coluche in a past life ;) ok ok, that sounds super prideful, doesn't it? it's just that most of the time, i think very little of myself and don't think i'm good at anything... and when i present stuff like that, i just amaze myself. i just don't know where this talent comes from, especially when i see famous, experienced, and established people like margie present with a shaking voice...

note to self: don't ever attempt the drive lafayette-madison, it's a killer! SIX HOURS! NIGHTMARE! but it was good to go away a few days and to see something new. and it's good to be back to work. haha. tomorrow: i WRITE and i READ!

ok, i have to make an announcement, now: i am looking for speakers of arabic and japanese and maybe portuguese too, to help me with my questionnaire. what is needed is: translate a questionnaire from your language into English and/or help me make some changes to the questionnaire (like change a question, the order of the questions, the format, stuff like that). if you're a very good speaker of any of these languages and/or know one (or more) who is, please let me know and/or pass on the message. if you help me i'll cite you in my dissertation (and it'll be famous, i promise!) and .... something else but i'm not sure yet what :) and you can put that on your cv as translation assistant! thanks a bunch! oh, and it'd be sometime between now and the end of august (japanese is ready to go already).

why the blog?

i am not writing this blog to be read. at least not by a regular audience who will love and applaud and get addicted to my writing. far from it. i'm writing for myself, to remember because i never remember, to take notes of important facts, to see the progression of my work (or lack thereof), and to complain. i could write on paper or not publish all that, but the reason why i do publish it is because it might be useful for someone (don't be insane like me, don't try to be an overachiever, don't think YOU can do it, don't think you'll get irb approval where all others have failed!). i have four regular visitors: one from tamu.edu, one from unh.edu, one from purdue.edu, and of course, my mostest favoritest one from scotland. other people come and go, like now i have someone from japan coming regularly, and someone else from the east coast... and all i am hoping is that some of these people are teachers or phd students and that what they read here will help them make smarter choices and advise their students better. nobody told me that trying to get 30 irb approvals was like trying to make the americans love the french: no matter how hard you try, there is just no hope that it will ever happen.

so yeah, this place is for me. if you like it, fine. i wouldn't read it if i were someone else, because all i do is complain. it's ok with me. it's the point. no one listens to my complaints because no one knows what the hell i'm doing. my advisor doesn't know, and the rest of my committee doesn't have a clue what i'm doing either. except for the two psych guys, i'm entirely on my own. and it's not fun. maybe it's the point of doing a phd, trying to survive loneliness, but there's something i didn't realize before i chose my topic: no one in an english department can be expected to be an expert in psychology and in statistics!

on a scale from 0 to 10, 0 being "i don't know what the hell i'm doing, i don't know what i'm getting into, and i don't know the implications of what i want to do" and 10 being "i know VERY WELL what this all is," i started with a 3, last fall. this is normal, i think. my master's thesis really didn't teach me much, just the very basic ideas of doing research and using stats. then my advisor gave me fox' dissertation and that took me to a 4. fox gave me the first clue that i had to go farther for my dissertation than for my master's thesis. then i found that really excellent book about doing research in language programs, in april. that got me to a 5. i hope you noticed that i wasted an entire semester NOT KNOWING what i was doing or supposed to do! meeting with fox and then with the two psych guys took me to an easy 6. that's when i really started to know at least where to look for answers, and in what direction i had to go. working on my own all summer and then meeting with the psych guys again recently took me to a 7, and i think i'm almost at an 8 now that i'm reading this monster handbook of attitude. i finally understand the implications and the real psychological and statistical issues of what i'm doing/should be doing. what i should have been doing all that time. what people should have told me to read in january. what i didn't even know existed all that time! why my research project will suck because it's too late now but hey, i've done the best i could, it's frustrating but that's life. i'll do it better next time!

anyway, all that to say that i don't need stupid comments. i'm hesitant to cancel the "comments" function because i enjoy the encouraging and funny and smart comments too much. that's what i need. intelligent encouragements. and to laugh. and help. because i don't always know what i'm doing. for the depressing stuff, i can do it myself very well thank you, no need to add to it. oh, and another thing: a post on a blog is a moment in time. it doesn't represent a whole day, the 10000 emotions felt that day, the excellent pizza i had for lunch, the fun time i had playing with my cats, or the good movie i saw the night before. it just represents the way i feel at the moment i choose to write. it's not the whole me, it's maybe 1/10000th of me.

as for the people from tamu and unh, i'd love to know why you keep reading this, honestly. if it's because you're doing something similar, or if you need reasurance that you're not the only one who suffers through a phd, or if you've bet $500 that i'd never make it alive to the end ;) if that's so, sorry to disappoint you, i might complain a lot and go through hell every day, but i'll make it! it's the day i stop complaining that you should start worrying seriously about me.

ok, just for my favoritest person from scotland, i'll tell a potentially good news: i've sent an email to tons of groups of international students at purdue to ask them to help me with the back translations of my questionnaires... and as i'm getting a few responses back from people, i'm starting to realize that this might be a great opportunity to meet some really cool, cute, fun, sexy, interesting, smart, rich, single people :D

bad news?

yeah, that's more like it. let's stop pretending!

- ET article rejected
- just lost the biggest school of all
- am in such pain it's not even fun
- can't find a good editor
- can't make one of my online questionnaires work
- haven't received any data yet and still need to send the questionnaire for translation, such a waste of money!
- don't want to leave for madison tomorrow
- every email i get is bad news today
- am being screamed at by someone (by email, at least my ears are spared, but not my eyes)
- have absolutely nothing left to eat and no money whatsoever
- have zits all over my face (too much chocolate)
- just had a power failure so i need to reset my microwave, radio, alarm clock, printer, fax...
- hate conferences because i never know what to wear and my feet always hurt
- am not even halfway done with getting ready for my presentation
- will HAVE to come back on friday afternoon instead of going to canada or some crazy, last-minute thing i'd decide to do while in madison because i'm so mad at this world and NEED A BREAK!
- am mad against someone because she should know better and doesn't and i'm consequently fighting alone and feeling VERY ALONE!
- like to be on the plane because i can read but tomorrow i'll have to drive 5 hours by myself
- feel super stressed and annoyed and mad but brain dead at the same time.

good news?

ok, let's try the good news for once, that'll be a first on this blog ;)

- got $250 for a book review
- was able to borrow the handbook of attitude from the library for three months!
- copied a couple of new cool articles that i found from people i didn't know
- had pizza with tiffany for lunch
- cats are darlings
- got 3 letters of permission from 3 directors (whose irb permission i had already gotten)
- applied for a course in cyberculture and multi-culturalism or something like that through tesol
- worked on my cv which really looks nicer by the minute
- have one more day to start and finish getting ready for my aila presentation
- might be getting an undergraduate slave who'll be helping with my research next semester, thanks to one of the psych teachers
- goodness that's BIG news! he'd hire someone FOR ME! that person would do anything i'd ask him/her to do that relates to my research, like entering data and stuff, provided i "teach" him/her about the project and the process of doing research!
- brits are back for the first time in almost 4 months... almost feels nice. sure feels normal. love this new system!
- have decided to dye my hair again soon, which is always fun
- keep working on my second and/or third chapters regularly. have more than 80 pages of stuff now, not counting references
- still hurt from my thumb and neck... but the rest is fine now. must've sprained my thumb somehow. wish i had dinero to go see a chiropractor... wish there WAS a chiropractor that i could trust around here...
- am helping the swiss economy by eating half a pound of chocolate a day
- am going to bed!

smoke

today, i need to learn to breathe. or else, i'll end up in a mental hospital or a cemetery very soon. i am shaking and boiling and smoke is coming out of my nose and my ears because i'm so stressed out and angry and annoyed and not ready for AILA and mad at the whole world! not good.

resent duqu and wmich irb protocols, asked columbia's director to take an irb training thingy. have lost track of how many irb offices have never received my files, lost them, forwarded the files to someone who never received them, were taken care of by people who went on vacation without saying anything, got lost between offices, disappeared into the vast internet void, and god, had i known, i would have tracked down those people from the beginning! like wmich, i sent the stuff at the beginning of june!!!! it was received, forwarded to someone who took a leave of absence for two months and never did anything with it! so now i call and no one has ever seen the file... the first guy is on vacation, no one knows nada, and i have to redo it all! DAMMIT! iu's person is gone for the week... it's been 4 weeks now, and the poor director writes me desperate emails saying HAVE YOU GOTTEN PERMISSION YET???? every other day...

i need to breathe...

daily report from cornland

presentation went well but little audience because too early. i didn't care except for the handouts that i paid for, for nothing...

enric is a wonderful guy, we talked a lot about spain, life, the conference, publishing, and made an outline of our article. i met his family at khana khazana tonight. it was so cool to finally meet him. i think we've been corresponding through email for about 3 years.

met a very nice couple during the banquet last night, living in japan, he from england, she from canada. i drove her to the limo place because she had forgotten her passport in the limo from the airport, and they invited me for diner tonight. we talked almost 3 hours. the restaurant was full from conference people because i had gotten us a 10% discount for all attendees.

talked to a lot of people, kinsley bolton, braj kachru, marko modiano, gary french, larry smith, shingo moriyama, people from sweden, south africa, japan, russia, finland, india, costa rica... i love to be surrounded by such an international crowd. i especially like the group of american guys who work at the japanese university where IAWE is going to be next year, in nagoya. i met them in syracuse last year and they're tons of fun. i really hope i'll be able to go there but i doubt it.

this is a very nice conference because it's small, informal, and they feed you for two days! 120 participants only, so after 2 days you know everyone, almost. very much unlike tesol or any other conference i've been to. two and a half days is also a good length for a conference. this afternoon already i was a bit tired of it and exhausted physically.

IU has written me again, and i REALLY feel like driving down there RIGHT NOW and killing someone. good thing i'm too tired! i wanna cry with these guys, i can't believe what a pain they are. it's been FOUR weeks now and they're still taking a week every time to tell me that this word should be replaced by that word and asking me questions about stuff that i WROTE in the protocol and they just don't read it! someone, not sure who, maybe chris blake, was telling me he'd researched IRB procedures before he started his project and decided to rewrite his whole project so he wouldn't have to deal with it because it's such a pain! no kidding!!!!

i'm 3 days behind in answering my emails... i guess i'll do that tomorrow afternoon, before i start worrying about the AILA conference... for now i'm going to bed!

heat waves and brain deaths

spent a couple of hours this morning with one of the psych guy again... he gave me tons of excellent literature about attitudes and surveys and statistics. good good.

also spent 4 hours learning about excel, but i don't think i learned much because i was absolutely exhausted and bored. did 12 hours of excel training, not bad... makes it easier for me when i have to deal with monster quantities of data...

picked up a stats book from the library, got my little name tag and program for tomorrow-saturday's conference, copied the three chapters i already wrote (not finished writing, mind you): 90 pages altogether. llurda's book is excellent, too bad i don't have the time to read it much these days!

trying to write the stuff for my conference presentation on friday. i'll have to be at the conference all day tomorrow and friday because i'm a "local representative" and need to sit as session chair and in the publishers' exhibit room and take orders and make sure nothing disappears... so i won't have the time to do anything after tonight. but i can't do it! i am brain dead. i suck, i feel lazy, i am bored with this presentation, i have no inspiration, it's too hot and way too humid, the wind from the air conditionning gives me a headache.... can't even read other people's blogs or watch a movie, i'm just sick of being in front of a computer day and night! i should go knock at my neighbor's door and watch tv with him/her: hi, you don't know me but i'm your neighbor, would you mind if i watched tv with you?

god, what am i going to wear tomorrow? and friday????

ground zero

met with the two psych guys. three hours! first one who talks a lot about the meaning, the questions, the deep stuff. then the other one who's better at talking about format, sources, reasons, arguments. i love those guys, i wish they were on my committee! their kindness and generosity is amazing! and i should really meet with them more often. in fact, i've then spent about 10 hours reworking my student questionnaire and i'll show it to them before i send it for translations.

still no news from either pilot school...

got the translations back for the consent form in chinese and spanish and the questionnaire in spanish. too bad i'll have to rewrite half of it... also sent an email to a group of students called friends of europe to ask for people who could help me back translating the questionnaires and making all the changes and editing and all... it's going to be hard because it's summer and international students are either at home somewhere else in the world or working like mad men on their doctoral project, like me... so either way, not really available for doing some back translating for a slice of pizza...

blah

TQ article rejected. oh well... it was surprising they didn't reject it the first time. was an excellent learning process, now i know what to do if i ever want to publish something with them. and i know what i need to be careful about in my current project. it was funny though, because one of the reviewers was really upset in his comments, saying that i hadn't made any of the changes he had suggested the first time... stuff like "some of your questions are negative and others are positive. change that!" well.... i did the study 3 years ago so i can't really change it now... but i guess explaining this to him (can only be a man) didn't make a difference... seriously, i knew from the start that this project was fishy, it was for a master's thesis for goodness sake, what do you expect?? no one taught me about reliability and validity and factor analysis and crombach alpha and stuff like that when i was doing it. i did it all on my own and i don't care if i haven't published in TQ (a little, quand meme), because tons of people know about this research and it's been cited in two very famous and important books that just came out.

meeting tomorrow with two psych questionnaire specialists.

got NAFSA membership, that's big! they have a very nice job search section for jobs related to international students, international education, stuff like that, in the US and abroad too. will be useful soon! i also printed a list of references that have to do with being an intensive english program director. will have to start reading this soon too.... and i'll go to the regional conference in november, i mssed the national one in may (i was in france).

oh yeah, and and my sponsor at iu spent the morning on the phone and they finally realized that she COULD be my sponsor... so now they'll just have to review the protocol AGAIN ... another 10 days i bet... but i WILL do a pilot, even if i do it AFTER the real study, hehe! i WILL have the damn crombach alpha and i WILL publish in TQ this time!

and i'm feeling better thanks, i'm just horribly exhausted for some reason. and tonight i was driving and suddenly i didn't know where the break and where the accelerator were... ummmm.... but at least, i have an outline of my conference presentation! now i just need to write the damn paper...

falling

i fell down the stairs today, it was a really bad fall and i'm incredibly surprised i didn't break my neck! i hurt really bad from my back, neck, wrist, knee, and elbow, though. and head, i hit it on the metal railing... it's hard to move tonight, and i bet it'll get much worse tomorrow! it was just as dramatic a fall as in the movies, except that in the movies, the bad guy falls down the stairs and then dies...

haven't started working on my presentation for the iawe conference which is on friday... i'm a dead woman!

god save the queen

Procrastinator's Creed:

1. I believe that if anything is worth doing, it would have been done already.
2. I shall never move quickly, except to avoid more work or find excuses.
3. I will never rush into a job without a lifetime of consideration.
4. I shall meet all of my deadlines directly in proportion to the amount of bodily injury I could expect to receive from missing them.
5. I firmly believe that tomorrow holds the possibility for new technologies, astounding discoveries, and a reprieve from my obligations.
6. I truly believe that all deadlines are unreasonable regardless of the amount of time given.
7. I shall never forget that the probability of a miracle, though infinitesmally small, is not exactly zero.
8. If at first I don't succeed, there is always next year.
9. I shall always decide not to decide, unless of course I decide to change my mind.
10. I shall always begin, start, initiate, take the first step, and/or write the first word, when I get around to it.
11. I obey the law of inverse excuses which demands that the greater the task to be done, the more insignificant the work that must be done prior to beginning the greater task.
12. I know that the work cycle is not plan/start/finish, but is wait/plan/plan.
13. I will never put off until tomorrow, what I can forget about forever.
14. I will become a member of the ancient Order of Two-Headed Turtles (the Procrastinator's Society) if they ever get it organized.

trouvé dans les commentaires chez mimile.

fuck!

it took TWO WEEKS for iu to tell me that the person who is my sponsor for the project doesn't have the right rank. i KNOW she has the right rank, they did the same thing with the guy at columbia, she's the director of the program, for pete's sake, what higher rank could she have??? this is NOT going to work. plus that director is leaving on tuesday.... plus i can't do it online... so what? should i go to bloomington again on monday just for a damn signature and then it'd take them two more weeks to tell me that something else is not working with my protocol???? no pilot? i don't know. what's the point of it all anyway?

and of course they send me the email on friday at 4:52pm so there's nothing i can do until monday except CRY AND SCREAM AND HATE MY LIFE!!!!

once upon a time in the midwest...

so, i'm redoing ONE of the protocols, the easier one. can't afford to lose so many programs.

am going to indy today to buy a plane ticket for baltimore, in october. kinda dumb to go there in october, but that's the only time off that i'll have during the semester. oh well. i'll see bequi there, who's just accepted a job there. and will go visit umbc, those guys are cool.

i have 7 teachers and 2 admins already. iu still hasn't given me their approval and umbc is overwhelmed with work and already doing all they can to help, so... i'm breathing deep... in.... out.... and making the decision to start working on the final questionnaire WITHOUT having had the results of the second pilot. i MUST send the stuff to be translated by the end of next week so i have no choice. my project will suck, but oh well, what can i do? i'll meet with the stats consultat next tuesday or wednesday, and i also want to meet with one of the psych guys to make sure everything's ok before i go with the final stuff.

i'm working on my cv these days. it's very nice now, 7 pages, huhuh. i'm annoyed because i haven't heard back from ET even thoug they said 6 weeks (it's been 11) and i wrote them an email to enquire too, on monday... i wish i could write that article as forthcoming, at least...

yesterday i got enric's book from the library. OMG, this book is exactly what i need!!!! except that it's $129 at amazon... i have it for one week in interlibrary loan, i guess it's better than nothing for now, i'll just have to read super quickly and take good notes. it's kinda cool that i'll meet him next week and that we'll write that article together, i'm excited.

talking about next week, this weekend will be super intensive preparation of the iawe and aila conferences, one next friday and then the other one the following friday in madison! holly cow, i am NOT ready for these presentations!!!! (kinda excited to go to madison for the first time, though).

ok, i'm off to indy. good thing it's not raining, i hate to drive in the rain!

f'ing life...

ok, now temple and georgetown have lost my files. i am NOT redoing it all, which means i've just lost two more programs...

i swear, one of these days i'll just give up and work for mcdonald's.

i've decided not to pilot test the teacher and admnistrator questionnaires a second time. once was enough. i'm keeping the stuff i get now!

dammit

i just lost TWO big programs, utah and georgia!! this is not dramatic yet, but it's only the begining of july and if people drop out at this rate, i'll end up with 2 schools!

one of the pilot schools has just asked me to put the student questionnaire online... which i did, only took an hour to do, and it's possible since it's only in english still. won't be able to do it in other languages for the fall study.

met with the statistics consultant and she was very helpful. i should have met her before sending my pilot out, but oh well, what's done is done. i've made so many mistakes on this pilot that i'm glad it's ONLY a pilot! for example i didn't ask students' AGES! hello?????? the consultant pointed out something interesting: i thought i could match pre and post questionnaires using students' languages, schools, classes, ages, and gender... and she said: what is there are twins in the same class? my response at this point is: too bad!

she also told me to have two people entering the data for the final project and then to compare the two entries to verify there are no mistakes. haha. i guess if i end up having only 2 participating schools that'll be very easy!

i am at the end of my rope right now, ready to snap at anyone and anything... not eating enough so i'm sleepy all the time... several irbs are bothering me a lot, sending stuff back and forth and asking for changes, additions, deletions, blah blah... i'm at the point where i think i'll drop those schools if they bother me too much! i've been a secretary for the last three months and i'm really tired of playing with those things. one school also lost my entire file so i have to start all over again, and that's one of the few irb protocols that can't be emailed. so now i'm calling EVERY SINGLE IRB office again and verifying that they've recieved the damn things!!!! one school wants me to ask the director to send me ORIGINAL PAPER from the university with the LETTERHEAD things on it so i can print the consent form on that. WTF??????? do they think i'm going to go there, ask for 3 pieces of paper, and print my damn thing on it???? I AM SO SICK OF IT!!!

it's never going to work, what am i thinking????

oh yeah, plus i hurt my shoulder badly... which is way worse than if i had broken a leg, in my case!

my cats are scared when i cry.

good...

Enric and I are going to do the commissioned article. crazy!

the book review i sent to tesol quarterly was accepted. that's good.

signed a contract for the translations on friday: consent form in all languages plus questionnaire in four languages (the cheapest ones). i'm cancelling taiwanese from the list though. heard that all taiwanese read chinese, dammit!

goal of the week: call all irbs (that's about 20) and verify that they're reviewing my protocols!

today: iawe meeting... i REALLY need to get ready for that conference, this is a nightmare, it's in 10 days and i still don't have a clue what i'll present about! and then there's aila, right after!! nightmare!!!

TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED SEVENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS AND FOURTY CENTS!

i could buy myself a really nice new apple computer with that much... or repay my credit cards.... or go for a week to the bahamas.... or a month in europe...

... and that's not counting the hundreds i'll have to pay in stamps and photocopies...

... there's something REALLY wrong with me...

mars attack

$2778.40 is the price I will need to pay for the translations of my questionnaires. TWO THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED SEVENTY-EIGHT DOLLARS AND FOURTY CENTS! ALMOST THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS!!! OMG!!!!! hopefully they take the American Express card... i decided to start even if i haven't done the pilot. i can't wait. it takes 3 weeks to get the first draft in other languages... which reminds me that I should translate the damn thing in French myself, one of these days. Oh goodness, this is the end of me. and I KNOW that i won't get the grant i applied for in may, because it SUCKED! i re-read it a few weeks after i had sent it and it looked like a 5-year old kid had written it!

wrote another section in my chapter 1, called "personal experience" or something like that... don't know if my committee will like it. anyway... i also added stuff in chapters 2 and 3... it's getting there. other than that, i've been working on the IAWE stuff since the conference is coming soon, and i need to start preparing my presentation... haven't a clue what i'll talk about. have also had many email exchanges with the person i want to write that Language Teaching article with, and it looks like we're going to do it. he'll come to IAWE in a couple of weeks, so we'll chat some more about the article then.

i'm kinda bored actually. i can't write more than 3-4 hours a day, and well, there is really nothing else i can do! i made an appointment with the statistics consultant for next week so she'll tell me what to do with the data i'll hopefully get some day from the pilot. other than that... nada... i watch movies, sneeze constantly, read blogs, and sleep. i should start getting ready for the two classes i'll teach in the fall...

ps. i was surprised to see that arabic is an orthographic language... not complaining, hey, it's cheaper that way :) but i would have put it together with chinese, japanese, thai, korean and taiwanese. not with spanish. does orthographic mean that it's one letter = one sound? orthographic = non-pictographic? (dumb question for a linguist, i agree)

little trip...

i went to bloomington today, first time of my life. nice little city, very much like lafayette but a bit smaller and a lot more liberal, obviously. and gorgeous campus! saw the iep director there, she was very nice and she signed my form, which i then took to the irb office on the other side of town. i should have something from there in about 10 days :( i'll never make it! i'll go to bloomington again when she's collected about 50 questionnaires, because that'll be enough to get an idea about the statistics. and hopefully umbc will also send me something next week, but by mail, so it might take forever to get here. i'm almost tempted to fly there, really, it'd be faster! bloomington isn't too far, only 2 hours one way, spent 2 hours there, and then 2 hours back. i'm still very tired tonight.

i called the translation people yesterday, and the guy's been in china for 3 weeks and promised to call today but didn't, so i'm going to call tomorrow again. i MUST start those translations even if i'm not done with the pilot (haven't started would be more appropriate, really), and it's going to cost me a lot of money for nothing, but otherwise i'll never be ready by august! dammit, this is really stressful. can't sleep at night. my cuticules are practically entirely gone. my hair's turned grey and i bought some color yesterday. i eat non-stop, chocolate and chips, mostly. i've had to force myself to rent movies and have to force myself to watch them, now, so i think about something else for a couple of hours every night. with a bag of chips, of course. plus i need to get another ones of these ultrasounds in august, and i can tell it's not going to look good, already. plus i worry about the bill for the first ultrasound, i'm sure it's going to be like $2000 and the insurence will cover 10% of it, or maybe 15% if i'm lucky. bastards.

got the keyboard i ordered on friday, so i'll be able to enter all the statistics and data and tables and junk on a normal keybord and not on a laptop keybord that doesn't have the number pad. that'll be nice. $20. i've put a mouse in my wishlist because it's a little annoying now to work with a normal keyboard without having a normal mouse and only the touchpad thingy.

oh and yesterday, i got a total of 3 additional IEPs! hehe. but i'm going to eliminate one just because they're on a quarter system plus the lady was being picky about my research questions, but i'm keeping two excellent ieps, one in nevada and one in california, with very nice directors who were very enthusiastic and kind. one of the programs has only 30 students, but oh well, diversity is more important than quantity! plus both of their irbs are super easy. in fact, i called their offices and one lady said i didn't need to do anything... and the other lady only wanted me to send her purdue's stuff. NOTE TO SELF or anyone else who wants to work with this kind of stuff: there are about 500 ieps in the US, so if one irb is too hard, drop that school and find another!!! when i think of the time i wasted (and i am still wasting) with some of those irb protocols...

i can't find my cigarettes tonight. smoked one about 2-3 months ago and i don't remember where i put the pack :( dammit, i really need a smoke!

why oh why?

so i found 5 new schools that could participate and tried to call their directors today. not sure why. especially since i can't seem to get my pilot started. (plus my phone's out of battery and my internet connection dies every two minutes!) anyway, i got one director on the phone, and we had an interesting discussion. she said that what bothers her in this kind of research is that the distinction between nonnative teachers IN THE US and nonnative teachers IN OTHER COUNTRIES is never made. i told her i did ask a few questions about that to the students, but i couldn't do it all in one project, and i believed the strength of my project was about the effects of time on students' attitudes. she said yes... but... but in the end she told me to send her the questionnaires and rationale and she'd look at it and let me know what she thinks. i'd love to call the other directors but MY PHONE IS DEAD!

i think i'll do that state-of-the-art article, even though Tony said it's not the most prestigious journal ever. i think it's probably more prestigious outside of linguistics, in other language teaching departments and not necessarily english. that would confirm why the editor told me he'd like me to compare native and nonnative LANGUAGE teachers and not ENGLISH teachers. i said i couldn't do that because that's not my area or research, so he said ok with english only. however, he wants both second and foreign language teachers, so i said i didn't know much about foreign language teachers. then i asked my friend in spain if he'd be interested in working on that article with me and he said yes. we'll get £250 (which I don't know what it is in dollars) for the article. and it's nice to have a commissioned article on my CV. so the proposal is due in september, the first draft in march, and the final draft in june. not sure if i'm making a big mistake or not...

veeeeeeery impressed!

wouah, Language Teaching, from Cambridge University Press, has written me to ask if i'd be interested in writing a state-of-the-art, 20-page long article for them. every issue of language teaching offers 700 abstracts and a "specially commissioned, authoritative state-of-the-art article on a topic important to language learning and/or language teaching." and they've asked me! not sure i can do it, though, but it feels nice. i almost threw the message away as junk, this morning, because the title of the message looked odd, but i'm glad i didn't! the editor even said he'd seen my master's thesis and wanted something like that. and i think they pay for that article, from what i understood. makes me feel the same way i felt when i read the letter from TQ saying that my first article, unlike 93% of the articles they receive, hadn't been rejected!

i'm done with all i could write for chapter 3. i wrote about how i created the instruments, how i decided on the participants, how i found participating schools, the irb procedures, etc. and also about the first pilot. since i'm just barely starting the second pilot, i can't write more. i got my first chapter back from margie with very few comments on it... which i hope is a good thing. and i'm going to start working on my chapter 2 again, which should be easier after this little break. i need to concentrate on the holes in other people's research and how i'll do with my project what others have not done.

i hate weekends, because i can't call anyone and can't make things move. and this weekend is a long weekend because of the 4th of july, which is extremely frustrating! oh, and i've decided to find an editor and pay him/her to work on my dissertation. i feel it'll be worth it. if things work out, i'll be making history with my insanely complex project!

le temps des cerises

i swear i am not making this up! this morning, i woke up and decided that i'd been waiting long enough to hear from that one school's irb. the director, who's really nice, took care of everything so i was wondering if he'd heard back from the irb, if i could call them, if the school was going to do the pilot one day... because it's JULY!!! i'm seriously starting to panic!!! so at like 8:49am, i try to call the director. not there. i try again at 9:10, not there. i hang up, really stressed out, and write on my files, under that school's name: CALL URGENTLY ABOUT IRB! i close the file and at that precise moment, hear the little click that means i got an email message in my mailbox! since most of what i get is bad news, lately, i didn't want to open it but i thought whatever, i might as well know right away... and it was an email from that school's IRB, with two letters of approval!!!! YEEEEEHAAAAAAA!!! so ok, i might get 30 students from that school in the next couple of weeks, and then 50 from that other school too.... that'll be enough for a good pilot!

i'm going to go to that second school next tuesday. monday is the 4th, so no one's working. i'll drive down there to take all the paperwork to the director, have her sign the protocol, and then i'll bring it to the irb office directly. hopefully, it'll be approved by the following week. i think i'll drive back down there to pick up the questionnaires when they're filled out, then, just to get things done quickly and also because i don't want to pay millions in stamps. ok, driving is not cheaper, especially when gas is at $2.35 per gallon... but it'll be faster!

i've been working on my chapter 2. oddly enough, i copied and pasted tons of stuff from my prospectus and then added, removed, changed, and worked with it a lot... and with all the different sections of chapter 2... except the last one. i'm stuck. so i keep working on the other sections... have 30 pages now... but i'll need to work on that last section one day! i've requested a book that just came out ($129 if i want to buy it at amazon!!!) about nonnative teachers, edited by a good friend from the caucus, which will really be a nice addition to my second section of chapter 2. have also started working seriously on chapter 3. it's going to be tougher than i expected. i'm not so good at explaining research methods and stuff... i need to read fox' dissertation again to see how she did it.

oh, and i just realized: the school that just granted me irb approval is the one that will also let me use their teachers/students for both the pilot AND the big project in the fall! this is GOOOOOOD!!!