June is Busting Out All Over

Busting at the seams even. In the month of June I am:

• Teaching every day. It’s the child development class that I love. Five week course starting next week.
• Taking an education class at the community college about SEI (Structured English Immersion) so I can get a permanent Arizona teaching certificate. Five week course starting yesterday.
• Taking a US and AZ constitution class at the community college also related to getting the permanent Arizona teaching certificate. Five week course starting yesterday. And the teacher seems a bit full of himself insisting it will take at least 35 hours a week to do the class and will require working seven days a week. Um, no.
• Taking a full day of pedagogy tests on Saturday. Also related to getting the Arizona teaching certificate.
• Analyzing the data I collected last month. At which point a 10% return, while dismally miserable, will make analysis go real fast (I hope, since I faked my way through two statistics classes).
• Writing the paper associated with the data so that hopefully the first of July I can get approval from my committee to use the survey to gather data with this fall and I can start getting district and ethics board approval to run my dissertation research this fall. (This depends on coordinating four professors’ summer schedules, which will take a serious alignment of the stars to happen, but that’s exactly what I need.)
• Getting the instrument I need for my teacher education research project.
• Getting all necessary approvals for the teacher education research project so I can do that in the fall.

All of this is so that in the fall I can gather all the data I need to graduate.

So that in the spring I can pass my “outcome assessments” (some colleges call them orals or comps, in our department you have to do three “outcome assessment” research projects that must be submitted to a peer review something, either a conference or a journal).

So that I can then officially propose my dissertation research to my committee (the stars aligning meeting in July will be a preliminary proposal).

So that I can spend next spring and summer writing my dissertation.

So that I can defend my dissertation in the fall.

So that for Christmas next year I get a diploma and Brett gets a wife out of graduate school.

And all of that starts with a monstrous to-do list this month.

And that’s just the school/work related stuff I’m doing.

In short, in the month of June I am going absolutely crazy bonkers.