Wow

Remember how I had resolved to slow down? Forty transcripts each week, no guilt no pressure? I did that for a bit and it was GREAT. Then the nudges started: finals are coming. You should speed up so you don't get behind while you're grading. If you just did one more transcript each day, you could get 46 done each week. That's more than 40, you know. More more more.

I am never sure how much detail to include about my dissertation, because I don't want to cause any glazed eyes or nodding-off-bashing-head injuries. So I'll try to be succinct. I'd been coding elaborated noun phrases. Kids start off saying "dog," and progress to "big dog," and eventually get to "the gigantic smelly dog that dug up my grandma's prize-winning tomato plants." A dearth of those more complex phrases is one of the things that distinguishes kids with weak language skills, especially when they're telling stories. I had also planned to do a syntax analysis on about half the transcripts. For about a third of them, one of my advisor's collaborators had already done the analysis, and a few dozen of them couldn't be analyzed because the kids didn't have enough to say. I would do the rest.

Oh, my.

Syntax is complicated. Kids can toss off a five-second utterance that takes me 10 minutes to sort out grammatically. (I hadn't used this approach since 1993, which is part of why it was so slow.) Even though I was picking up some speed as I went along, it was very very slow, painfully slow.

Yesterday I started thinking that maybe I should ask my advisor's former collaborator if he would consider helping me with this last analysis. She and I had discussed this possibility earlier in the process, but it just seemed like a crazy request. Hi! Want to do 50 hours' worth of work for me even though we hardly know each other? That's what it would take me: a bare bald minimum of 50 hours. Not just any 50 hours, either -- 50 hours of solid concentration. I find that I hit a wall with this kind of close analysis, too, so that even if I had no distractions whatsoever in my life, I couldn't possibly do it for more than four hours a day.

It seemed like a bold request, perhaps even a presumptuous request, but I felt this funny prompting to go ahead and make it. I asked for my advisor's input on the email I drafted to him, and I asked some friends to pray for me, and then I sent it off.

He said yes. YES!! He said he'd be GLAD to do it for me.

I am going to finish the year 3 syntax analyses, about another 30 of them, because I want to understand this approach. I still have to finish coding noun phrases for about 130 more transcripts. But! He is going to do the year 2 syntax analyses for me! Wow.

I feel like somebody just handed me a thousand dollars.