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.

A Treadle! A Treadle! My Kingdom for a Treadle!

Newly ethics-approved and now officially 'in the field', I have undertaken my first group interviews with the teachers in my department.

I have about an hour and a half's worth of audio split across two sessions, so far, and have now begun the process of transcription. I've been trying to use a well know transcription app (one that sounds like St George may have tried to fight it at one stage) and, it would be fair to say that has not been terribly successful.

The first ten minutes of audio took me nearly four hours to transcribe that way.

Then I remembered that in a past life I was an audio typist (those long summer holidays had to be spent somehow) and so I just ditched the technology and got on with the transcription manually. Oh for a treadle like in the good old days at the insurance firm...

I have got faster and faster and I am up to approximately an hour's labour for twenty minutes of talk. 1:3. I don't know if this is a good ratio or not. What I do know is that I feel thoroughly familiar with these discussions - I know them inside out. They are fascinating, incredibly rich; dialogue which felt pretty ordinary as it happened is absolutely loaded with ideas and suggestions for reading teaching - ideas which might easily get lost if such careful attention were not being paid to them. Which makes me wonder what gems might get passed by, acknowledged but then not acted upon, in an ordinary department meeting when pedagogy is under discussion.

At least through the collaborative action research model that I am using participating teachers will be able to review exactly what has been said at each stage as we shape our project more fully.

Now, on to coding...shudder.