Well, after a lot of work, frustration, learning, and redoing things many, many times, my website is done. Well actually, there are still some pages I need to fix to get rid of code that shouldn’t be there, but after all I have been through completing this page, those remaining things are minor! It is significant that the page is on the Waseda server. That means that I can now maneuver through that process and am prepared to teach my students this coming term. Remember I don’t speak Japanese, so communicating with the IT Center technicians who speak about as much English as I speak Japanese was not easy. I have also learned to use Nvu, a new, free program (at least for me) for web page making. You can see the site at http://www.f.waseda.jp/kgourd/
What did Karen do on break? In addition to a lot of time on trains and planes, I developed the new course I will be teaching next semester. You can see my course page at http://www.f.waseda.jp/kgourd/Courses/Philosophies/home.html. I am looking forward to the course. The page for my fall semester course is http://www.f.waseda.jp/kgourd/Courses/EducationAndSocialJustice/SocialJusticeandEducationalReformsSyllabus.html . I enjoyed the course and hope I get to teach it again. It was a great experience and is part of what makes me excited about the new course! I developed it with a little bit more knowledge about the context in which I will teach it than I had for the fall course. Our semester this spring will be much, much shorter than fall semester, so it will be more intense.
I have also been interviewing and reviewing interviews for our research project. I have created a page for the project, but there is not much on it yet. The address is http://www.f.waseda.jp/kgourd/SILSResearch/silsresearch.html. I completed 36 interviews. All of them have been transcribed. I am reviewing and correcting the interview transcriptions, a process that takes from 2 to 4 hours for each interview. I have finished 14, so I am not even half finished. The pressure is on because we wrote a proposal for the Power of Language Conference in Bangkok, Thailand, and it was accepted. The conference is only 6 weeks away, so we have to write the paper, which is dependent on my finishing the interviews. Actually, we are focusing on the 24 interviews that are Japanese, so I have only 11 more to do to finish the Japanese students.
Although it has been a long break from classes, I have worked many hours every day. I enjoyed the work and have gotten energy and increased enthusiasm from the work. The semester starts tomorrow, and my first day of class will be Friday. My syllabus is done AND my web page is up! I might actually be able to pull this off yet—teaching web page making and philosophy of education to students in Japan!
Congratulations on everything you’ve gotten accomplished, Mom! Sounds like you are well prepared for your semester to start. Hope your first day of classes went well today!
Love,
Lisa