frying pan -> fire

Eight days after I found out that I passed my portfolio exam and I'm as busy as ever. And from what I hear, it's only going to get worse...

My students have been oh-so-patient waiting for their grades. Some of them, I discovered, had a good reason for this: they never turned in the assignment (it was due a month ago). I've been averaging forty-five minutes to an hour per student this time around, but since I am grading between three and four items per student and giving them summaries of their grades for the entire semester, I don't think that's too bad. It just takes a lot of time. They've grown accustomed to getting their grades a few days after I promise them. I even got a great compliment from one of my students--he said I give very helpful comments on their papers and do much more than any other teacher he ever had. Another one of them also realized that I spend a lot of time and effort on their papers, and I think their "thanks" and compliments make it worth it (despite the 4 am hours). I'm getting close to being caught up on the grading, but it's taken a lot of my time this past week.

I also had my meeting with my advisor and Dr. R, the other professor who helped me on my portfolio, to go over the portfolio exam committee's comments. Basically, when I turned in my portfolio exam, five of the faculty got copies of my papers and had to read them, comment on them, and then meet and vote as either pass/fail. That meeting was on March 28, and it only lasted half an hour, which is good--no debate, all unanimous, all loved my research and want me to pursue it. I'm going to use the topic of my long paper as my dissertation topic. Basically, I'm studying how using wikis in the classroom (Wikipedia in particular, but I'm not going to hold myself to that narrow of a scope at this point) can assist students in writing for an audience. It looks like my dissertation will probably be a three-article dissertation, meaning I write three publishable articles and tie them together with an introduction, conclusion, and transitions instead of writing the traditional book-like dissertation.

My passing meant I need to try to get a ton of stuff done for the coming year within the next four weeks (before I go home for the summer). I need to put together my POS committee--five faculty members who will help me with my next set of exams (next year) and my dissertation, and who will ultimately vote and decide whether I get a PhD. I met with Dr. R. yesterday, hoping he would agree to be my chair, and he was enthusiastic about it until he found out that I may not want to pursue research, research, research for a living (I'm more interested in teaching, so any research I do will be for the purpose of furthering my own teaching abilities and helping others think about it, too). He'll let me know for sure tomorrow. If he says yes, we'll just have to figure out who the rest of them would be, and we have a pretty good idea about that now. If he says no, I'll have to find someone else to chair it--I have two ideas, but neither seem as good to me as him. I could understand if he said no, though; the reputation I build reflects on the chair of my committee, and he is known for high-quality research and publishing (a lot).

I'm also working on getting approval to actually do my research starting next semester. I have to fill out all of these forms and get approval from the Institutional Research Board (IRB) to do it, and since my one volunteer (so far) works at another institution, I'll have to get IRB approval from two different schools. IRB approval is required because of all of these psychological and medical tests done on people in the 1960s (?) without their knowledge or approval. In order to get the forms filled out, though, I have to write a plan out and go over it with Dr. R tomorrow, and then make sure it's okay with my research participant on Monday. I also need to try to recruit more participants. This type of research actually is exciting to me, and I wouldn't mind doing this and teaching as a career--hopefully, that got across to Dr. R and he will work with me. (Please? I know he won't read this, though, since I have all of two-three steady readers as of late.)

I'm also working on my project(s) for my two classes. I've been following a guy around while he works and taking notes on what he does, and I have to somehow turn this into a paper that (hopefully) I can publish someday. While I have to be vague about my research here because of confidentiality, I think I know how I'm going to structure/write the paper and what I'm going to write about. But the topic requires researching a new area of theory (us rhetoricians always have to use some type of theory to talk about our work), so for one of my classes I am going to write analytic reading logs to help familiarize myself with that theory. When I'm done with my blog, I have to prepare for my last time seeing my research participant--I'm interviewing him tomorrow, and I have to write up a list of interview questions so that I can get some input from my classmates. I want to know if I'm asking the right things. And this weekend is going to be writing, writing, writing parts of the paper (as well as reading the theory for it, too).

Tomorrow has yet a third appointment (one was with Dr. R, and two was the interview) because a prospective PhD student is visiting the university and three of us are taking him out for an early lunch. And there's my regularly-scheduled workout before that. I'm not used to Fridays being packed! Monday's the same way--some Mondays I don't even shower, but this Monday I'll be meeting to make sure I have enough classes to be able to be done with them next spring, as well as that meeting about this fall's research. I'm glad that tomorrow is full, though, because it will keep my mind off of Sadie. Tomorrow is the second anniversary of her death.

Okay, gotta write up those interview questions. Have a happy Thursday!