Over Christmas, I went back to my lovely homeland of Michigan where I was nestled in the comfort of holiday cheer and wedding planning (yes, I'm getting married in August). Like any good student, I brought my work home with me and managed to do much more than I usually do when I'm home, which is absolutely nothing. Sitting in the den with my family while they watched A Charlie Brown Christmas and other such films, my keyboard clacked away as I took advantage of the comfy chair and ottoman to continue transcribing the classes that we had recorded so far.
While I was home, I spent some time with my lovely friend Monica, who is doing a doctorate in Education Policy at the University of Michigan. She informed me that for their dissertations, there were two options for using data: one included making use of previously collected data and analyzing it for your own purposes, and the other meant collecting the data on your own. For the former method, a lot more depth was required in terms of analysis, since the data that you were working with had already been used and therefore you must work extra hard to make sure to do something original with what other had previously touched. The second method, collecting data on your own, was so time consuming in and of itself and yet more rewarding since you are creating sources of your own and could choose to extract whatever you wished.
My objective is the former, of course, collecting data on my own with my cohort, Irene. We are creating a corpus, which is a spoken or written collection of text or dialogue that will serve us in our research and also be made available to others down the road. As of right now, we have at least two full didactic units from the beginning of the year at five different schools. The length of the unit depends on the subject: science units, for example may be eight classes, whereas citizenship are only two. While I love going to record the different units and absorbing the classroom dynamic and the different teaching techniques and AfL techniques employed, the transcribing part is, in a word, horrendous. Forcing myself to sit down and transcribe is hard enough, and while I can read and write and pull sources for hours on end, I usually hit a brick wall with transcribing in about two hours. Let's do the math for how many hours Irene and I will spend with the transcriptions this year:
As of now, we have about 40 classroom hours of video. For me, because I am a fast typer, it takes about 30 minutes to transcribe five minutes of video. Since most lessons are 40-minutes to one hour, that's about 4-6 hours of transcription per classroom hour. Since we're dividing the hours up, 20 hours apiece at the beginning (and another 20 at the end of the year, but let's not talk about that right now) that's about 80 hours of transcription, give or take.
Let me give you an idea of how this looks, and while you are reading, take a guess as to how many minutes of class this equates to)
From Citizenship:
TCH: Ok, did you have a nice lunch?
STU: Yes!!!
TCH: Yes? Ok. Right, citizenship. Shut the door. ((shuts doord)) Now, it was only two days ago that we had the first part. Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already. What have we been doing in citizenship? ((puts the WALT and WILF cards up on blackboard)) Lucas?
STU: Lucas: Emotions
TCH: We were looking at emotions, right? We started looking at emotions. Who can tell me anything that we did in Wednesday’s lesson about emotions? Lucia?
STU: Lucia: Em, in Wednesday, we did, you give us a paper that we have to color,
TCH: And then?
STU: Lucia: And we had to color it with the color that we think that emotions ….the personality in the color.
TCH: Very good! You had to think of a color to match that emotion, didn’t you? And you all did a brilliant job of that, you all had some really good reasons for the colors that you’d chosen. Em, anything else we’ve done? What else did we do? Have you taken your guess? Let me give you the answer: this equate to one minute of classroom time, and it would have taken me about six minutes to transcribe. That is, if everyone was speaking clearly and the acoustics of the room were perfect. If not, you can find yourself rewinding time and time again and getting so frustrated that you bang your fists on the table and call it a day (like I did yesterday).
Speaking of frustrations, this past weekend, since the fiance is back from his four month stint away, we decided to make an Ikea run so that I could purchase a much needed desk and move my stuff away from his workspace in the office and make my own. I decided on this one:
From the looks of it, it would be the perfect place to keep my things and do my work. I've assembled a great deal of Ikea furniture in my time, and when looking at it in the store thought, "how hard can it be?" It wasn't until I arrived at home and splayed the 200+ screws and 80 wooden boards out on the floor at home that I realized I might've gotten in a little bit over my head. The real problem came when it was time to put the table top upon the desk, because it simply would not fit. There were about six screws sticking out of the bottom of the board, and when I asked the fiance to help me he berated me for using a hammer to try and get one of the pegs into the hole and making a dent on the top of the board.
After about two minutes of pushing, wedging, maneuvering and swearing, the poor guy got his thumb stuck in between the boards. Upon its removal was so filled with rage that he slammed both fists down, incredible hulk style, punching two matching holes in the top of the desk. We were about to jump back in the car and drive the piece of crap back to Ikea and dump it outside of the sliding doors as a reminder to all customers, "Beware all ye who enter here" but finally, and miraculously, we fixed the problem and the desk is as good as new minus the two massive dents in the shape of Alf's fists.
And even after this experience, let me tell you that I would still prefer building Ikea furniture to transcribing!!
