Week 3 Summary

This has been a quiet week; students are reading about gerontology and qualitative research and are doing a practice interview with a friend. They are finally getting the hang of the article review form, and are starting to add in the relationship of the article with our study- wonderful practice for writing a dissertation or a journal article!

I would like to follow up on Dr. Sickel’s comments for the week. I totally agree with her that teaching the lab is a difficult form of multi-tasking! It rather feels like being a juggler – trying to keep all of the balls in the air at the same time. For me, the issue is that I tend to want to focus on the research aspect more and training the students in the methodology. But also important is the class portion and making sure the “experience” of the lab works and that students have the information and support that they need. Dr. S and I were talking about this yesterday and considering ways around the multitasking portion. One alternative we may try in the future is to have one person in charge of the classroom part and one person in charge of the research. Hard to always divide it up that neatly though.

I am also always planning ahead for lab meetings, such as next week we will do another conference call. The logistic issues are tricky, we tried using skype last time but it was hard to hear everyone and we ended up switching to the phone. Next week we are going to try skype again and if that does not work go to Yahoo Messenger, which has a call function. We need to avoid the phone if we can, because one of our students lives in Europe, and I do not want her to have to pay ridiculous amounts in phone charges.

Also in planning stages is preparing for the data collection that will be starting soon. I still need to set up a SPSS file for the quantitative data. We also need to make sure the syllabus for next quarter is ready and start working on the 3^rd quarter’s syllabus. I will be traveling for the next week, I am visiting family in Portland OR, and so we will see how good I am at juggling on the road.

Lee Stadtlander