Sleeping with other people´s epistemologies

Just got back to Madrid by train from Sevilla yesterday.  I fly to London later today for my research at IoE and my meeting with my supervisor.

Funny thing:  I woke up with a start yesterday due to some nightmare about my survey instruments, the details of which I had forgotten as soon as I opened my eyes.  It´s probably my first non-narrative, cerebral nightmare–or dream!  There was no story (at least, none that I can recall); only an insight or a question about the first section of my survey instrument concerning epistemological understandings across judgment domains.

Scholarship and a storm

I met with my supervisor yesterday morning at the library cafe, which never opened.  The library was virtually deserted, but that meant we were better able to discuss my research.  Our discussion focused on the instrument that I’m fine-tuning, and we agreed that I would stick to the original instruments as much as possible so as not to invite unnecessary questions.  Also, he encouraged “greed” in the data collection–i.e., get as much data as possible and just sort them out later.

So my formerly four-part survey has morphed into a monstrous five-part survey with about 85 questions.  Argh.  But here are the sections so far:

The problem with working students

It’s been a while since I blogged because it’s been a while since I thought about my research.

And that, I think, is precisely the problem with working students — which applies to most of the population of graduate students anyway.  We can’t just think about our studies and nothing else.   It takes an entirely different mode to think deeply about teacher beliefs compared to my day job of running a school.  True, the two can feed on each other — as I sure hope they will — but the stage in my life does not have enough room for both the scholar and the practitioner to share the limelight.

So what happens is that given the daily rush of things, the non-stop series of concerns and things that crop up the way they do in the real world, the scholar is elbowed back to the wings, waiting for his chance to be summoned on stage.  The practitioner does his thing, and only when there’s a lull — like a holiday like today — does he concede to bow out and give the floor to the scholar.

Having My Cake and/or Eating It Too

I woke up at 4 this morning with two things running through my head:  First, of all things, LSS of that Korean hit, “I Want Nobody (But You).”  Cute but after the 99th repeat, I wanted to stuff my pillows into my mouth–all four of them!

Second content in my head was a bit more scholarly:  My half-baked research proposal, which I should finish cooking up today as I need to DHL it to Singapore tomorrow.

Two Days to Go

No. of words required for the research proposal (for submission on Tuesday):  2,000

No. of words written thus far: 0.

Two thousand words with two days to go.