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.