sufficient

a few months in

I've been in school for a couple months now, so I figure it's time for an update.

Things are going pretty well. I'm really enjoying all of my classes and I'm pretty sure I've learned more in the last 2 months than in any 2 month period in my life before. At some point this afternoon, I realized that I would prefer to be working on my practicum assignment than reading. This is astonishing for a couple reasons. #1, because I do love to read. Still, even with the amount of reading I have to do. More importantly, however, is because practicum assignments involve using STATA, a statistics program. STATA, together with R, the other statistics package I am learning, has ofttimes over the last 2 months made me want to alternate between crying and banging my head against a wall. But while I do not feel confident in either, I think that I have (hopefully!) crested the steep learning curve.

A sample of the things I'm working on this semester: a research proposal for my methods class, that will most be a descriptive study of a number of traditional and alternative certification programs. I'm also writing a paper for my politics of ed class that is going to look at the policy issues surrounding teacher certification through a number of theoretical lenses. And, for practicum, for the whole year, I'm using the Education Longitudinal Study of 2002 to look at the effects of teacher academic expectations for students on their own expectations for themselves, and hoping to break it down by teacher and student race, student gender and SES, and teacher age and years of experience.

I'm working on a couple of things for my advisor as well, which includes conducting interviews with a few local principals and teachers and coding a bunch of data related to that project.

I'm playing ultimate on a league team and having fun playing for the first time in years. There are 4 other people from my program on my team, and my roommate. And, we throw almost everyday at school on the quad. My roommate is awesome, but she's only here till Thanksgiving. Currently, she is impersonating the Sheriff of Notthingham from the Robin Hood cartoon.

I've joined the church here- City Church East Nashville. I really really like it and have gotten involved in a neighborhood group, which I also enjoy.

That's about all I can come up with for now. Saturday night, I had some Woodchuck Fall Cider and it was soooooo tasty. Nice and sweet and sharp and pumpkin-y.

posted by CP @ 10:15 PM 1 thoughts