80000 Words in an Inbox

 

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well.

It is done.

*Just* the viva now.

I feel strangely numb.

Intention to Submit: Clock ticking

 I look back and see that I haven't posted anything since February - but it seems that spirits were quite high, and, apart from the financial impact, there was the sense that 'progress' was being made with the writing. I can go a little further today: six and a half years after I began the doctorate, I have just completed my 'intention to submit' form. 

That means that the clock is now ticking and I have just eight weeks left before submission.  Eight weeks!

I wonder sometimes how I have got to this stage. I know that there have been many, many moments when I thought that I wouldn't. 

But somehow, now, I have a thesis that is probably in its sixth draft, and I have passed the 80,000 word mark that seemed impossible even a few months ago. I am left reworking only the Conclusions chapter. Those 'original contributions to knowledge' are little beasts.

The plan (though there have been so many plans along the way that I'm reluctant to even call it that with any degree of confidence) but the plan is to submit before Christmas and give myself the Christmas holiday writing-free before the viva sometime next spring. 

Giant Waves

December 2020 and I need another metaphor for 'rollercoaster' because that doesn't really cover the highs and lows of this thing. 

It is more like being tossed around on giant waves that make you violently seasick at the same time as feeling that you have no hope of making it to shore in your tiny, insubstantial boat, to which you are clinging on for dear life. 

After all last month's bravado and excitement, I was cut down once again by what felt like brutal feedback on my (fourth revision) of my data chapters.

I have had to be very systematic about picking myself back up and addressing what is required, remembering not to take it personally and not giving up.

But - with all but the conclusions chapter in some sort of draft form, I will move to 'pre-submission' status at the end of March. (Where I am hoping for calmer waters.)

The Time Is Out of Joint

I officially became a fully paid-up doctoral student again on the 1st February, but it has taken until today to become fully re-enrolled with access to all the modules and course information that I need.

It hasn't helped that the university updated their VLE to the end of last year, and their email system at the start of this year, meaning that I struggled to access either. I'd actually been deleted from the entire doctoral programme on one platform.

And then there was a virus that shut everything down.
The time is out of joint.

My first official supervision session for sixth months will take place tomorrow afternoon via Zoom.

In preparation I have to send my revised data chapters, and the other writing that I have been doing in the intervening period. Unfortunately, all my old anxieties about academic writing have returned. I feel unable to send 'chapters', and have requested that we return to calling them 'vignettes' and 'writing in progress' instead, which feels less threatening.

And I don't feel much further forward than the 15,000 words that were written by last October. In fact, it feels messier than it ever has - in spite of delivering three different conference presentations relating to my research during my period of intermission. They should have enabled me to clarify my thinking - and felt at the time as though they were doing so. That feeling is yet to translate itself into my writing.

On the upside, isolation and quarantine give the gift of time. It has taken a while for me to settle to the new rhythms of my family being at home, and having to deliver online lessons, but study time has expanded.

I have also discovered (now that I have access to the handbooks again!) that I may be able to apply for pre-submission status, involving a reduction in fees next term.

The Sisyphean Routine of Summer

Supervisor, commend me for I have worked. It is four months since my last post. And how I have worked. The time between posts a measure, really, of the 'grind' that I now feel.

Two summers ago I skipped through my summer reading list, confident that each tome was contributing clearly to my knowledge and understanding of my substantive topic. I look back fondly at an early post like Summer Holiday Versus Term Time, and whilst I clearly felt overwhelmed as term began, there was so much fun in those first forays into the literature. Today I wade through the ever-increasing pile, knowing in my heart of hearts that I can never read or do enough to complete this Sisyphean task because the pile grows more quickly than I can deal with it. (Would people just stop researching and publishing stuff so that I can keep up?!) Reading also seems to take longer than it did because I need to join everything up; whereas in the beginning it was all fresh and new and exciting and differentiated in its own right.

There have, of course, been some breakthroughs; a few more of those milestones (I remember the first, vividly) which are so important in keeping going:

• I successfully completed the requirements for the second year and will move into my third year of doctoral study.
• I completed the Introduction to Qualitative Methods course and an essay on a 'research method'. I have called this the 'study group research interview'. It shares some characteristics with a focus group interview, but it is also very different in lots of ways.
• I participated in the first five of the study group research interviews and have transcribed four fifths of the recordings.
• I have begun (very tentatively) coding.
• I found a book which has unified lots of my reading. I wish I'd read it near the start, but it wasn't published then. Still - happy days.
• I was (fortuitously) invited to review another journal paper which has helped me to consolidate all sorts of theoretical ideas in relation to the classroom.

So, I have my first sets of data. I have a date with 'NVivo'. And I have some of the feelings associated with a first date: the nerves, the great expectations, the overwhelming inadequacy, the restlessness...
But coupled with this is the mundane of the routine, the drudgery, the predictability of a marriage - in for the long haul.

My routine for the summer amounts to between five and ten minutes of transcription daily (which is still taking me up to an hour) followed by at least one hour of reading, note-making and reflection and a crossing of something else from the 'to do' list. So it amounts to about two hours per day, but probably equates to fifteen or so hours a week. It should be more, but there are these small things called children that require entertaining over the summer. Even so, that is more than double my term-time work-rate. There are four and a half more weeks of the summer holidays remaining, so another sixty hours or so to go. It is strange to think that when I go back to school I shall be sixty hours further ahead.

Full Steam Ahead

Ethical approval for my research was finally granted on the 11th January. It was a strangely muted moment; after all the fuss and fight through November and December perhaps there ought to have been fanfares and popping corks. Alas, there was nothing more than the funny buzzing vibration that signals an email notification to mark it.

So I now have the green light to go ahead and my first two 'declarable' sessions with teachers take place in the next fortnight. The data collection therefore begins in earnest from this point, and it is, perhaps, somewhat fortuitous that these two professional learning meetings fall so close together: a happy accident of the mock exam marking period just before Christmas which meant that December's session had to be postponed until now.

I have also applied to undertake a fifteen hour introduction to qualitative methods course which runs, ordinarily, as part of the MSc. If nothing else it may help me get back into the right frame of mind to immerse myself in my studies once more. (From which comment the keen reader might infer that I am not, currently, in such a frame of mind.)

And a further step in the right direction may occur as I prepare for a presentation this Friday to PGCE students at another south coast university on developing a reading culture in school: it will require a revision of material and thinking and I am looking forward to it.

Hard Times

I have called this post 'Hard Times', but in truth it is from another of Dickens' novels that I find the quotation to capture my mood... 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way...'

I have, for the last week or so, considered giving up, known that was definitely not an option, decided to do it anyway, convinced myself not to. Been elated by what I have done so far, and nearly destroyed by the thought of what has to come. I have written some difficult emails to important people and spent hours and hours and hours making what I hope might be final revisions to my proposal.

I am caught between the timetables of the university and of my institution. I have been encouraged to reach for the stars by one of my supervisors, dragged back down to earth and devastated by the other, patronised by the attempted consolation in relation to 'the difficulties of doing a PhD while working full time in a school!'

Right now, I don't know quite what will happen. This could be my last blog post.

No one said it would be easy...

On Your Marks, Get Set...

...But not quite 'go'.

It is a week since my induction and I don't feel entirely inducted, as yet.

The start of my course has been less of an academic dream and more of an administrative nightmare. Registration, passwords, logging on to a new system; all have been problematic, tiresome and frustrating. The uncollected emails have been piling up as I busy myself with the mundane chores of adjusting once more to distance learning.  With the patient support of the university IT department I have finally managed to access much of what I need today, but I've missed the first forum readings, haven't quite got myself going in the way that I had imagined, and feel generally not part of things - not least because I am one of only two part-time students beginning at the same time as a much larger group of full-time researchers.

Am I disheartened? Not yet. Because as soon as I talk to anyone (and I mean, anyone) who will listen on the subject of my research, I'm off. Passionate, enthusiastic, driven - as perhaps only the naive, wide-eyed beginner can be. Galloping off on my hobby horse with the potential to be a party bore (assuming I am not already, which, frankly, is something of a hypothetical leap. It's already a long time since I've been to a party - how would I know?)

The summer was reading, reading, reading and then a little more - but with the benefit of hindsight - all of one week of it, I would have got more 'administratively' prepared than I am currently, would have sorted the registration hiccups, would have already invested in some software to support my writing. I have also spent an eye-watering amount of money on books, and as the costs mount up I realise that the other thing I should have done is save a little more.

And all this has taken place during the whirlwind that is the first three weeks of a new school year, alongside the open evenings, twilight INSET, Year 11 tracking demands, November exam entries and everything else that as an English HOD I need to do. Somehow I have to read and write and think amidst all this. What have I done?

I'm not entirely sure. And so it seems like a good idea to launch a new blog at the same time.