budding scholar

A digression into the personal stress of Ph.D. study. I should expect that this would happen, but it doesn’t stop being difficult to manage. The end of the year. The fact that I’ve felt behind on too many things for months. Having it all come to a head in the next three weeks. I don’t know how much I’m doing it to myself by being such a perfectionist, and how much is just the nature of what I’m up against. But it sure feels insurmountable right now…staring ahead to the next few weeks. Of course, it will all get done. It always does. But the stress is pretty high right now.

If you haven’t already visited www.phdcomics.com, it might be a good time. A great way of getting a laugh at ourselves over the kinds of things we routinely agonize over during our Ph.D. study!

Remember to take yourself lightly, no matter how serious it all feels most of the time!

Today I drove home with a friend from the program who also lives in San Francisco, and as is wont to happen, we talked about school. But rather than discussing the minutia of day-to-day life in classes and the GSE as we often do, we talked about our program, what we want to get out of it, how we want to shape our studies and coursework to be meaningful in the real world.

Clear blue sky, late-evening sun hanging low over the horizon as we drove across the Bay Bridge back into the city, we talked about what matters to us in this program. Where we’d like to go with it. What we want to have had by the time we finish. She thinks about working for a district. I think about being employable in Spain. We both want our Ph.D.s to be more than theoretical, to be applied to the real world, and relevant to the real-world problems surfacing in education each day. We want our Ph.D.s to be applied, and readily accessible in some ways to people beyond academics.

“I don’t want to be one of those people who comes out of the Ph.D. with a dissertation that doesn’t apply to anything in real life”, she said. “There are skills and expertise that I want to develop, to have mastered, that can be applied”. I soundly agreed. Statistics and research design. Sociological theory. The realities of policy-making and policy implementation. Teachers and real-world schools. These are pieces of the Ph.D. that are important to keep alive.

This is why we are in a school of education policy program–because we care about looking at the real world of education, how things are working or not working, and what action can be taken to improve what we do there. It can be so easy in the academic environment to get mired in interesting ideas and theories that have little practical application in the real world of schools and education policy. Who we choose as our advisers, the classes we decide to take, and the paper topics we choose to write will all steer us in one way or another toward a more theoretical or applied endzone. I’d like to keep aiming for the applied.

I came straight to the computer when I got home to post about the conversation, to keep its energy and bits of inspiration alive a few moments longer. I need to focus on the goal, what I want to get out of this program, what I want to do in the real world with what I’m learning in school.

…and while I did get some schoolwork done, not nearly enough. As if this were news! I just arrived home to the sound of the cricket that’s taken up residence in our apartment and am sitting down to dig into work. What comes first? Reading “The Failed Century of the Child” by Judith Sealander for History of Education? Or working on my statistics project, which is due Thursday but that I’ll turn in Tuesday since I’m headed to Spain Thursday. Or one of the other 15 things on the endless list….

The truth is, graduate school seems to be a constant game of prioritizing things like this. Reading, reading, and more reading. Writing, and more writing. And way beyond that which has been assigned. What should take precedence? How do you prioritize your work? How do you cull what’s important and let the rest go until tomorrow?

These are the thrilling moments of grad school (seriously!). You spend so much time thinking about interests, how to bring together what you’re interested with what’s feasible and smart to do. For me, this is some mix between my longstanding interest in language, immigration and schooling, the work I’ve done at SRI, and Spain, among other things. I’ve decided to use the “CILS” (http://cmd.princeton.edu/cils%20iii.shtml) dataset for my statistics project because I want to explore a question about immigrant groups and higher education, and browsing around on the Center for Migration and Development website, I came across a description of a new CILS in Europe, with the initial study happening in Spain! They have a working paper on the preliminary data they’ve found in Huelva, which I’ve started to read, and I immediately emailed Estrella Gualda, the author of the paper, asking for more information and expressing my interest in the work.

The really exciting thing is that this seems to be just getting started. The larger CILS, with 3 different points of data collection in Miami and San Diego, ended a couple years ago, and on the website, they describe this new study as taking the CILS to Europe. Who are the people working with Alejandro Portes and his group at Princeton? Where are they housed in Spanish and other European universities? What possibilities might there be to work with them? Richard Alba, a sociologist that I saw speak at Berkeley last week, also studies immigration in the U.S. and Europe. I think there could be a real place for me to study immigration and schooling in the U.S. and Europe.

How are the schools responding to the influx of immigrants in Spain? Does Gualda’s working paper discuss this? How is the immigrant second generation faring in Spanish schools? Are they transitioning to higher education at rates similar to native Spaniards? If it is too soon to tell, this could be something to study in 10 or 20 years when I’ve built my career in this area.

The possibilities all of a sudden feel much more open. Other people are interested in what I’m interested in studying, and they already have a project going. I’m thrilled to find out more about this effort.

Every Sunday is the same: an avalanche of reading for the next day. My three big reading classes are all on Mondays: History of Education from 9-12, Advance Policy Analalysis focusing on Policy and Pluralism from 12-3, and a Sociology class on Power and Inequality in Higher Education from 4-6. It’s now 11:28, and I’ve got a good chunk of it done, but as is often the case, not as much as I ‘d like to. Maybe sometime next year when I’m almost done with coursework I’ll reach a point where I can watch television or bury my head in a novel on Sunday nights.

The truth is, the reading is endless in graduate school. If it’s not the reading for class this week, it’s reading for upcoming papers or reading to study up on areas of the field. Or going back to readings from earlier classes. The stacks of books on my school bookshelves are growing. I’ve started buying books on Amazon that come up again and again in my work, and seem like works I should have, and as a result the books I’d like to read and haven’t yet keep staring at me daily. Like Annette Lareau’s “Unequal Childhoods”, which is a rich ethnographic portrait of class and its impact on how families interact with the institution of schools. Or Guadalupe Valdes’ “Con Respeto”, which is another ethnography of 10 Mexican families living near the U.S.-Mexican borders, and their experiences with schools. Or David Tyack and Larry Cuban’s “Tinkering Toward Utopia”, which is all about the past century of school reform and the lack of progress we’ve made.

Can’t get to these tonight. Instead, back to Historical Perspectives reading for tomorrow morning. Learning about how the modern debates we have about curriculum go back to the late 1890s. The question for my short history paper for tomorrow is “What legacy, if any, did the nineteenth century bequeath to contemporary American schools?”. Much of the structure of our modern schools in fact seems to go back to the 1800s. Dividing into grades with segmented curriculum at each level. Linking college to high school. Fighting over work-preparation goals and knowledge for knowledge’s sake goals for the curriculum.

Reading this history brings up an important question for me. To what extent was the schooling experience of kids around the country (immigrant, rural vs. urban, non-English speakers…) uniform? Was there a lot of variation in the kind of schooling experience kids had? Did school look different? At what point in our history did school start looking so much the same?