Light at the end of the tunnel may actually be a fast approaching train

I got through IRB.  It was ugly, but I did it.  I mostly struggled with the interview questions I had for students, of how to ask questions that really got at the core of what I want to research. Since my topic is fairly esoteric -- how teachers use self-disclosure and how it is perceived by students, explicitly asking the students didn’t really seem like an option.  I kept asking myself, what does teacher self-disclosure look like in real life so that I can ask questions about it?  So I hope my questions were general enough that I can refine them later with a bit more reflection and some really rough starts.

So the struggle now is beating the lit review into submission.  I have a pretty good idea of how I want it all structured, but am having trouble fleshing out the skeleton.  The temptation to explain every single paper I’ve read is pretty great, as a simple citation like (Hillman, 2013) quite often doesn’t seem to do the nuance of the paper justice.  It’s a constant balancing act between letting the document grow and then mercilessly pruning out quotes and verbose explanations, merging papers with similar findings together.  I hope tomorrow’s mini-lesson helps in this regard.

Also I totally neglected this blog for quite a while.  Oops.  These posts are fantastic to read and really helped boost my morale.  So now Dory’s mantra from Finding Nemo, “Just keep swimming, just keep swimming”, seems a little more doable.