Upon entering my meeting with my professor this week, I was excited and hoped to start inputting data into our decoding software, only to find that my naivete was causing me to seriously jump the gun.
The professor filled me in that our next step was doing a final clean of all the data we’ve accumulated; “cleaning” in this case means going through every interview transcript, picture, document, and other information and make sure it’s as accurate as possible and is pertinent to the study. As dull as it sounds (and it usually is), I was actually quite excited at the prospect of getting to cuddle up with a transcript and pick apart every word the interviewee (the principal of the school we’re studying in this case) said.
The woman in the interview talked incredibly fast, coming from someone who does the same. Most of the time her sentences would run together without much pause, making my task a bit harder. The work was tedious, but I enjoyed it to an extent because I felt like I was being helpful and productive and actually being a research assistant, assisting in the research. I do realize this charm will probably wear off once I’m a dozen interviews and hundreds of minutes deep into transcripts, but for now I’ll hold on to the feeling.
In addition to this, we also discussed the interview I looked at the week before with the principal and another teacher. My professor was able to clarify a lot of the terms I wasn’t familiar with, but some of them she even had to look up, and I was somewhat surprised by that. While most of the time, yes, teachers do know more than the students and have more experience to draw from (that’s kind of the idea), it doesn’t mean they know the answer to every question.
We have to remember that they’re human too; they have to recall information from a long time ago, or refresh their memories with Google searches, much like their students, and that is to be said for every member of authority or any mentoring figure in our lives. Especially in such an intensive and extensive project like this, I definitely held a bit of that expectation within me, which I realize now I need to let go of, and remember that this process is a learning experience for both of us.