haaaahahahahah again

the monster colloquium that i organized ALL BY MYSELF with five participants from all over the world has been accepted by TESOL. this is sweet! now i just need to get the two grants i've applied to, the one big one for my research, and the other one for the november nafsa conference, and get that job at... well you know where... and my life will be perfect :)

oh, and the INTESOL colloquium i'm in has also been accepted, and INTESOL is paying the conference and the yearly membership fee... sweet!

haaaahahahahah

a few days ago i said that hearing from someone would mean the world to me... well i did! no, no interview or job yet, but just a proof that my letters of recommendation are excellent! :) feels nice to know that! i can only hope that the rest will be just as good...

cross your fingers for... you know who :)

i want YOU to want ME!

i need you to need me
i'd love you to love me
i'm begging you to beg me

huhuh, i love this song... they must've written it when they were looking for a job....

getting someone to translate some responses from korean today and arabic tomorrow... got an officemate who speaks turkish and someone who's helping me with chinese too, so that's good. the only serious problem now is JAPANESE, because i just don't know any japanese person in our department. and i have a LOT of japanese responses, it's the number 2 most spoken language so far. korean first.

sent 6 applications so far. it was funny because we had our ESL happy hour on monday... and a lot of people are looking for jobs... and we're all applying to the same jobs so it's kind of competitive, i could feel it, we didn't want to discuss which positions we had applied to, in case the others had not found them yet.... it was a sad, weird, funny situation.

still alive

557 questionnaires entered so far...

sent applications to japan and canada, want to send one to switzerland tomorrow.
still hard to find positions in canada, especially in french-speaking universities. don't know the titles of positions, the names of departments, etc. plus some want my cv in french. not going to happen in this life time :( i am sending stuff to all the wrong schools. i want small liberal arts colleges. i mean, if i got mcgill or ubc i woudln't say no, of course, but i don't think i can get them for now, they are too prestigeous, they are jobs older and more experienced people will get. and i like research, but not if it's more important than teaching.

there are so few positions in tesol/esl it's scary!

here, if you're ever looking for a job in the us/uk/australia/canada, THIS is by far the very best website i've ever found!! check their geographical listing!!! just unbelievable!

sometimes i want to scream...

the largest of all participating programs, the second hardest one for irb permission (actually, iu was more annoying but not even close to being as tough as that one school's irb protocol), is now bowing out because their teachers have this special "right" to see student evaluations, so they couldn't tell students that the teachers wouldn't see their answers. so basically the students wouldn't tell the truth. 300 students. i know i'm overwhelmed with other questionnaires already, but i've fought SO HARD ALL SUMMER for this stupid irb!!!!! aaaaaaaaagggggggghhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!!!!!!

cross your fingers for mcgill!

the way we're going to be:

BUSY! i went to chicago and got 40 questionnaires. also got 267 new questionnaires in the mail today, from 3 different schools. not sure exactly how i'm going to enter all this. it's crazy, i have more than 500 now. it takes SO LONG to enter those things! plus now i'm going to have to order the questionnaire by language (they're by school now) and ask speakers of the languages i don't speak to translate the questions i didn't understand... chinese, arabic, korean, japanese, turkish, thai, and taiwanese, and some portuguese/german/italian.

starting to think SERIOUSLY that i won't make it by next year, because even when i've gotten say 800 questionnaires and entered them all, i'll have to do it all over in november/december/january... PLUS the matching, which is going to take ages... so i won't have any definitive results until february or march or something. which makes it hard to write it all up and graduate by august.

for the final questionnaire, i need to add: tell about the second section (personal info) and explain (matching) so the students actually fill it out + send the questionnaires in the same order you did before (eg by class, by teacher, etc.). + NO NEW STUDENT! only those who did it the first time!

i have such a headache... i can't believe that i still have to grade my students' papers + homework, help 2 people with some stuff they've asked me, prepare my lessons for tomorrow, get the letter + cv ready for tomorrow's workshop, and i'm sure i'm forgetting something. oh yeah, i also need to eat, haven't eaten anything today except a small bag of chips.

fingers crossed for mcgill...

OMG!

i love my students this semester! not only do they actually DO their homework, but they also do it WELL! every time i collect homework from them, i think "what is wrong with these kids???" because i'm so used to working with "normal" freshmen who rarely did their homework, and when they did, it was soooo bad, 99% of the time... it's amazing to see that my new students actually understand what i say, do the readings, understand and follow directions, and work hard!!

other than that, i just had my letters of recommendations sent to mcgill et ubc, and i'll send the letters + cv on thursday morning, after the jobsearch meeting. knock on wood, cross your fingers, and say a lil' prayer for me!! those are my two dream jobs! getting a word from them, even if it's just to request more materials or something like that would mean the world to me! especially mcgill, which has always been the place i wanted to go to!

since there are VERY FEW tesol job offers in the MLA job list, and even fewer offers in canada (in fact, i don't think there is any!), i am trying to figure out where to find jobs adds from canadian universities. i wish i knew an insider... i got a few lists, like the canadian association of university teachers, but i need a lot more than that if i want to apply for 40 jobs! anyone from canada??

#$@&^@#$*&^@!#!!!

60 questionnaires that i can throw in the trash!! that hurts! i find it ironic, though, that it's iu's responses. in july, when i still throught we could do a pilot, i brought 100 copies of the student questionnaire to that school. later, it became impossible to use them because of their !@#*&@#!! irb, and i had to revise the questionnaire for the real study. i made a LOT of revisions: cut 1/3 of the questionnaire, changed the order of the questions and the sections, changed the negatively worded questions to word them all positively, etc. then iu's program director said she'd still help me. it was very fishy, though, for me to use them again, because they are on a quarter system instead of a semester system and consequently couldn't participate in the second stage of the project and a few other things too. but oh well. i sent them the new questionnaires with all the translations... and then the director wrote me an email asking if she could use the english version only, since her students were advanced english learners and i said of course (makes it easy for me when i enter the data).

got 60 responses yesterday... and you've probably guessed what the problem was. they used the old version of the questionnaires, the copies i had brought in july for the pilot! yep. darn! i thought of entering the questions that were exactly the same in both versions of the questionnaire, but statistically, that's a really bad thing to do, because it's been proven that the order of the questions will influence the answers. also, responses to negatively worded questions are not the same as when the items are worded positively (it's not just a matter of changing a 5 to a 1 and a 2 to a 4; it's been proven that students would not have responded the same way to negatively or positively worded questions because they would be influence by the negativity or positivity of the question; plus negatively worded questions are a mess for international students. if you say "my teacher doesn't make a lot of grammar mistakes when she speaks," some students will answer "no, i agree, she doesn't" and others will say "yes, i agree, she doesn't"). so there, completely useless! i guess it's probably better, given the above-mentionned problems, but still... it hurts! i REALLY hope umbc doesn't do the same thing...

other than that, i got an interesting email from one very kind program administrator (one of the first schools to enthusiastically say they'd participate in the project) who told me that she and her teachers had some comments about the teacher and administrator questionnaires. they said my questions implied that there WAS a difference between native and nonnative english speakers. i guess it's true, because i never imagined that there could be NO difference... but it's an interesting perspective and i should have thought about it when writing those questionnaires. oh well, i must remember that this study is A PILOT in a sense, and CAN'T BE PERFECT! i have 173 useable questionnaires as of today, and already noticed so many problems with the questionnaires and other things that i am scared of what i'll discover when i get more responses...

... i have to admit one thing, though: i'm still kind of having fun with this project! it's REALLY cool to get new envelopes every day, to take note of all the problems and all the things i want to remember to write about, to get comments and questions from some participants, to see the list of participants getting longer, to receive emails from schools saying that they just put 150 questionnaires in the mail...

ps. got another 44 questionnaires tonight and one of my articles was accepted by the INTESOL Journal. yeay :)

the age of innocence is over

the MLA job list is out. i found 37 offers that could fit my qualifications, more or less...

why do people trust that i can make it, when even i don't think so???

keeping track

4 schools, 133 questionnaires, 8 administrators, 38 teachers, 1 lost school, 200 questionnaires in the mail, 32 student papers to grade, no money, no food in the last 5 days.

i'm going to go get a massage once a week, i destroyed my back so badly on monday and tuesday, while entering the 133 questionnaire, that it's been hard to walk ever since, and very hard to stay in the same position for more than 3 minutes (even when i sleep). so there, $40/week for the cleaning lady, $28/week for the massage. going to ask the united banks of switzerland (mom and pop) for a raise!

haven't heard from: TESOL (4 conference proposals), TIRF ($5000 grant), and system (article). am getting anxious to hear from them. tomorrow, the MLA job list comes out! the real job hunt starts! are you ready??? nooooo, haven't even finished my letter of application... nor my dissertation summary... nor my teaching philosophy... ... my cv looks nice though.

going to bed, hasta manana amigos!

worst of the worst

ok, the worst questionnaire to enter is the arabic one: not only it is in odd characters, but even the multiple choice answers are hard to find because it's written FROM RIGHT TO LEFT! thank goodness, 25 questionnaires i got from one school were filled out entirely in english by advanced students! haha! which makes me realize that i should keep track of that so at the end i know where the students came from but also if they filled out a questionnaire in their native language or not. damn!

i have 107 returned questionnaires from 3 schools, so far. 3 other schools have already done it and sent the stuff, i'm impatient to get it! and i'm going to chicago on tuesday to bring 50 english questionnaires. and this one school has called me this morning: they will ask every single one of their 322 students to do it! yeah!!!! fun times ahead, entering all those questionnaires, huhuh! if two schools do that (which is still possible, i have a couple of other huge schools), then i'll end up with more than the 300-500 expected questionnaires! that's GOOD! i also have 33 teacher and 8 administrator responses so far. a funny thing happened yesterday when i got an email from a certain Lucie who had just filled out my questionnaire and was asking about where i had found the program i used to put the online questionnaires. i am so ready to help ANYONE who helps me at this point that i wrote her a huge email with all the details about the program... huhuh...

on a less happy note, michigan state teachers don't want to do it, after all the work i did to get the director and irb's permissions, and the u of pittsburgh is not going to work, i am afraid: the friend who said she'd help me did it too late and the director is gone to south america now. that's a loss of 80 to 150 questionnaires.

yesterday: registered to the NAFSA and MLA conferences and sent a request for a travel grant to NAFSA. i also talked to Bud about the fears i have regarding job interviews. he wasn't sure what to tell me but contacted the dean of graduate school and also human resources @ purdue and got some interesting responses. he's so nice!!!

the classes i teach are going well but are quite time consuming (ok, 002 is not that bad, really, but 108 is!). i wish i could concentrate on my research/dissertation writing/job search! it's hard to do it all at the same time.

sometimes i hate myself

i am so LAZY it's scary!!! drives me insane!!! and i am COMPLETELY UNABLE to write this stupid letter of application. can't say anything good about myself, can't sell myself, can't explain why what i'm doing is important, can't show people why they should hire me... maybe because i don't see why they should in the first place...

this weekend has been a constant fight with myself... and i think i've just lost!

boooooooring!

so i met with my undergraduate little helper. she's nice. enthusiastic and all. we talked about the research, the goals, the plans, stuff like that. then i gave her 30 questionnaires filled out by some students... and said sorry, this is going to be boring and tough, and we'll probably get around 400-500 of them! she was all excited... and came back two days later already bored to death after 30 questionnaires... huhuh...

i have to admit that it IS horribly annoying to enter these things into a spreadsheet. especially since those that are in non-orthographic languages (chinese, korean, japanese...) because WE CAN'T UNDERSTAND 1/3 OF THE ANSWERS! question: what class are you taking right now? answer: tching tchong thung! ah. ok. that's helpful. thank you! so we enter the multiple choice questions, the numbers, the letters... and then tons of blanks!

if i ever do this again, i'll have to find out a better way to do it so i can match the pre and the post questionnaires. many students did not want to give their birth date, where they were born, stuff like that, so it'll be hell to match these answers with those at the end of the semester. i wonder if i couldn't create a numerical code with multiple choice questions that are not too personal like: you were born in 1988, 1987, 1986 (circle one), your father was born in january, february (circle one), have you ever had a dog (yes, no, circle one), the color of your first car was red, yellow, white (circle one), the initial of your first name is A, B, C (circle one), you like root beer (yes, no, circle one), you like cats, etc. of course, it's a big waste of space and time (and translation money), but maybe it'd work better than what i did. although, if i saw such random questions on a questionnaire, i would certainly guess that someone's trying to trick me and i would lie on most of the answers...

i'm trying to keep working on my chapter 3... but i can't do much until i have all the data entered and analyzed...

i'm taking this class for 2 credits, higher ed administration, but i'm just auditing so it shows on my transcript, i'm not really doing anything else than reading, for this class. it's very interesting so far.

i've reworked the LT article proposal this morning and it was a big rush and a big mess because i hadn't worked on it for a while and it was due... today... and THEN the guy told me that he was going to ask the two biggest names in our field to review our proposal... so i asked him if i could revise it one last time during the weekend and he said ok. the pressure's on!

G. is going to write me a letter of recommendation. i don't think i could get a better name on my cv... i hate it that i can't read those letters, just to make sure that they say nice things about me! aggghhh i am so insecure! i have to revise my cv and my letter of application... and finish the dissertation summary and stuff.... damn... no time, no time!!!!!

goals

this semester, i will:

- take extra good care of my face to avoid zits
- not eat chocolate or potato chips to avoir zits (ok maybe one little piece of dark chocolate once a week)
- get a massage once every other week
- try to get to bed before midnight every night
- go see a shrink regularly
- think about today, not tomorrow
- remember that i still have an extra year of funding so it's no big deal if i don't get a job
- concentrate on my research
- concentrate on teaching and be happy with what i'm doing for my students
- go walk outside for 30 minutes every sunday
- breathe... at least once a day.


ps. i already got 40 student questionnaires from syracuse! and brought some to wmich today.

too tired

too tired to do much these days. going to kalamazoo tomorrow, to hand-deliver some questionnaires and then spend the long weekend with my sister... got nominated for some nice teaching award but i might not get it, it's a tough one... haven't written a sentence on my dissertation... am not teaching tomorrow... got one letter of recommendation in my file already, that's good.

blah blah blah... i need to sleep...