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!!!