As if the plate wasn't full enough...

When I told one of my dissertation members that I was pregnant (while also preparing a cross-country move, teaching 5 courses, and writing my dissertation), she responded: As if your plate wasn't full enough - you had to add more.
Even though her comment is three years old, I still think about is some times and smile. It's crazy time right now. I am revising two revise & resubmit papers, finishing one for submission, preparing 5 conference presentation, trying to stay on top of my teaching and my committee/meeting responsibilities, and of course stay on top of my physical therapy, mommy shuttle service duties, and spending at least a little time with my husband and my son. I had already decided yesterday that life is just too insane right now, and then this morning my husband calls me and says: The police are at our house. I think the worst of course. He did, too, when they knocked, because he thought that I had driven to campus and so when the police-officer knocked and told him: "We have bad news for you. Your white car got hit." He assumed I was in it and pronounced dead at the scene. While the situation is not at all as scary as each of us thought, it still means that our car got hit and we have to deal with insurance companies, police reports, and repair shops all the while staying on top of everything else and getting ready for a trip. Oh and then day-care told me that they did not have empty spots even though I requested them a month ago. Now the plate is really overflowing.

Revise and resubmit

When I was still in graduate school, I considered a publication decision of "revise and resubmit" a rejection. Now, I get excited about such decisions. First of all the reviewer comments usually help you make a better product. Second, sometimes the reviewer comments give you ideas for new research projects. Third, if you address the reviewer comments and put in the work, you can have a publication at the end. That all is exciting.
What excited me most about the revise and resubmit decision I recieved today was that it is an article I co-authored with two students as a result of a class I taught last year. It makes me feel like the course actually accomplished something. A class project that a colleague did with his grad course just got published in MLJ. I think that is just awesome and would love to be able to provide that experience to my students one day, too.

Research subjects

We work so hard to protect the identity of our subjects and yet very often it is still impossible. For example, I am the teacher-participant in a study, and there are probably a great number of people who knew that I was the only one teaching the course described during the time the researcher completed her degree. It doesn't matter to me really, but it goes to show that you cannot hide the identity all the time. When Elaine collected her data, I always thought, I would read her dissertation one day. But then I felt so uncomfortable when she gave a talk at a conference about her dissertation. I felt like my presence in the room was compromising how honest she could be. So, I decided I wasn't going to read her dissertation. It might also be why I still have not published from my dissertation. There are many people who know who the teachers in my study were, and one of them is in our field, so I feel weird writing about them in a really public forum (beyond the dissertation that noone reads). Yesterday evening, one of my students stopped by and asked me if I ever published about their projects and I said, as a matter of fact I am just now completing the final revisions on the paper. He was very excited and asked me if he could have a copy of the paper when it is done, because he would like to share it with his family. That was a first for me. And it made me feel good about publishing about people, because in a way we make them famous (very little famous, but still...). And also a subject might learn something about himself/herself by reading about what we have to say about them. So, may be, it is not all bad that some participants can be traced or trace themselves in a publication.

SWBAT, COW, ....

You learn something new each day. While I will never be able to "speak" texting, I feel somewhat in control of the acronyms used in my field. From AAAL to ZOPD I am covered. But once in a while I encounter another one. At a workshop I was leading I learned that the teachers were hesitant to implement technology because of a lack of cows. After 4 hours of such argumentations, I had to finally ask, what these milk-makers had to do with CALL. Turns out, COWs are Computers On Wheels. Since then I like using "COW." Well, today I learned a new one!!! I am grading Plan T's first annotated activities. Many of the MATESOL students kept writing SWBAT. Of course I read it as SWAT for the first few times, and really did not see a connection between SWAT and learning goals for a lesson on Valentine's Day. By the third student I had discovered the additional "B" and had figured out that I must be missing some crucial point that appears to be universal to my students. Dazed and confused I asked my colleague, a MATESOL Alumna, and in a split second she said "Students will be able to." I am glad it wasn't another age thing, but rather, being trained at a different institution. Now TWBAT understand students' assignments much better.

Graduate School....

When people ask me, whether they should go to graduate school, I usually answer: if you can't live without a Ph.D., then do it. This year is another very sad example why grad school just does not pay off. Here two stories from the Chronicle: http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009013001c.htm
http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i24/24b01201.htm?utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

Die Theorie und die Praxis....

In German we say: theoretisch moeglich, praktisch dann aber nicht umsetzbar. This means that while things might theoretically be possible, in reality they might not really work out. I got here at 8 in the morning with a theoretically possible to-do-list. But then, a colleague from another university called and needed feedback on a research project proposal. Then an email dropped into my inbox from the editor of a book in which I will have a chapter. Initially they said no revisions, but now they have revisions. It's nothing major, but enough to get me distracted for a while. On the positive I did manage to finish preparing class and setting everything up for tomorrow. I just feel like I am barely keeping my head above water again. The idealistic view of mine to have two weeks of classes prepared out, to have my presentations for AAAL and CALICO ready and to have all the revisions on the article and the two book chapters completed are turning out to be theoretically possible dreams but not really close to reality. Theoretically possible, because if I were to work 80 hours a week these things would be possible. But then my son would have to say on more days "Mama arbeiten. Benni traurig." And that just breaks my heart. My realization that my goals were not feasible brought me back to a meeting I went to on Thursday. In the meeting we (faculty members of various units) were told that we (our time and thoughts) are owned by the university. This means whatever great thoughts we might have and whatever great developments come out of it, belong to the university. This is not so much an issue to me, because there is no pharmaceutical company waiting to buy my research results. But the time thing does apply to me, not in the way that it came up, but as a general principle. One person in the audience mentioned that he had several grants secured for the summer. On each grant you have to indicate how much percentage of your time you will devote to that activity - note: percentage not hours!!! So, this 'poor' man had now received so many grants that he was above 100% which is not possible. He argued that he would just work more, but the discussion leader said that regardless of whether you work 30 hours or 100 hours you still only have 100%. Seems fuzzy math to me, but it's the way the game works. In contrast to the 'poor' gentleman at the session, I am not out of percentages, but I am out of hours.

Local hero

On Monday when I drove my son to day-care I saw an ambulance and a fire-truck. The paramedics were carrying out a little girl. Immediately it made me think of last year in May when Benni had his first febrile seizure. It was terrifying and I certainly don’t want to experience anything like that ever again (though we got pretty close again Monday night). The paramedics, police, fire fighters, nurses, doctors, etc were all awesome and responded so quickly and calmly. That day, they were the heroes that they are always claimed to be. But as I was driving past the fire-truck and being terrified, I thought, they were the heroes that day, but everyday there is a different hero for my family. She is no fire-fighter, no paramedic, no medical doctor, just a Ph.D. But over the last three years, she has rescued me and my family on so many occasions in so many ways: emergency baby-sitting; taking care of the dogs while I gave birth in a new town; fighting her way through a snow-storm to pick up my son who got kicked out of day-care for being sick but neither I nor my husband could make it to day-care; excusing me at an important meeting that I totally forgot about and calling me immediately after to tell me what my excuse was; taking turns rocking my son or typing while we were stuck at the Chicago airport and had to finish a paper due the next day; bringing me lunch on days where I can’t get lunch; proof-reading and giving feedback on paper drafts any time or day; reminding me of deadlines; offering to take Benni to the doctor after he fell down the stairs and I had to go to DTW to pick up my parents; offering feedback and advice no matter what the topic; supporting the German language maintenance of my entire family; sharing hotel rooms at conferences with me and my son and helping take care of him; … and she does it all with a smile. I would not be able to stay sane, let alone do my job without her. She deserves a special entry into the blog – could be our inspiration to finally finishing that co-authored paper on blogging.
And she is not just a hero in our lives, but also a great resource. On Monday alone, I sent three students to her because I thought she had more information than I did. More amazingly, she actually takes the time and helps people who are not related to her job responsibilities. All the while, she seems to work around the clock to actually keep up with her job responsibilities.
How do you thank a person like that? No gift seems big enough and no gesture grant enough to express how much we appreciate everything that she does.

A 30 hour day

I am in desperate need of 30 hour days. Not for everyone, just for me. Because if everyone gets 30 hours, than it doesn't help me at all.... I am always jealous of my graduate school friend KMB. She only needs 4 hours of sleep a night and she is super productive and happy from the second she gets up until the second before she falls asleep. I want to be like her. The things I could accomplish, if I had not inherited my maternal grandfather’s genes. We need at least 8 hours of sleep per night and we are dysfunctional the last two hours and really grumpy the first two of hours of our waking time. For example, last night I wanted to give feedback to my students in the discussion forum, but I noticed that I had to read each entry five times before it made sense – no fault of the students, but rather my tired brain.
On the bright side I did finally send off that article and the editor indicated that he was happy with it now. YEAH. I also went to the USCIS office in Detroit and actually dealt with a very friendly yet extremely confused Immigration Officer. While I should feel relieved that now my greencard is being created, I was rather freaked out that she took my old greencard all my original documents and stuck them in an envelope to send them to a mysterious office. When I told her that I would have to travel to Germany in May, she put a stamp in my passport and said: “I would suggest you avoid travelling with this, it usually sparks a lot of questions.” How comforting!!!! But this little adventure ate up 5 hours of my Thursday. But again there is a bright side: I got to try out my husband’s GPS system and had fun messing ‘her’ up. I kept taking different routes than ‘she’ suggested. And she kept saying patiently “recalculating.” Unfortunately, the drive pushed my back over the edge again. I saw the doctor on Wednesday and will now have physical therapy three times a week. We shall see how I hold up teaching for 6 hours today.
Most importantly all absolutely must-do-s on my to-do-list are done, but all the should-really-get-to-them items are still to be completed. Oh well…. 30 hour days and good health is what I need.