Monday Ramblings

I think disliking Monday is one of those fundamental rights, I just can't seem to ever dislike it though. I kind of like Mondays most of the time, in fact I would say I like or dislike Mondays just as often as I like or dislike any other day of the working week. When I hit I day that just seems to simultaneously drag, not have enough hours in the day and keeps throwing up problem after problem to fix, those days that have what I think is the feel of the traditional Monday Blues kind of Monday that TV loves to tell us about, then I think of that day as a Monday sort of day.

I'm thinking about my research a lot at the moment, when the room is quiet and nobody is talking to me directly my thoughts become filled with all sort of ideas, mostly right now to do with literature reviews and philosophies of research. My lit review has to cover two key areas definitely in the form of Digital Education (specifically online learning, virtual learning environments and webinar type things) and Gifted & Talented education, I probably have to cover Assessment and Evaluation as well, but I'll see how that pans out. Each of these areas is pretty damn big and there are some seminal works that I really need to bone up on.

There's also my leadership assignment as well to think about, I have to pull together an interview schedule, read a few more books on leadership and get some data together for this assignment. I feel, personally, that this will be the weakest of my assignments for this year. Leadership as a field of study is so unbelievably subjective, there are as many theories as there are researchers in the field, plus som researchers have different theories dependent upon the context of the leaders position. It's all very confusing, it's the only area of my Ed. Doc. that makes me pine for the simpler days of physics, with fairly definitive methods to approaching a given problem.

See I've made a shift of sorts in taking up both my current position in work and indeed in taking up my Ed. Doc. studies. I came from a very much empirical background, grounded in Experimental Physics, I went all the way to the masters level in the field. Something felt missing though, I was casting around for ideas for a Ph.D. or even to become a post-primary teacher, but research in science and teaching in the mainstream education system didn't feel right. I had a couple of sputtering runs at getting myself into a couple of different Ph.D. positions, one in Climate Science another in Nanotechnology, but I called off at the last minute.

The financial collapse and start of the recession here left me with a lot of time on my hands as I only had occasional employment as a tutor in the Centre for Talented Youth. This lead me eventually to an admin job there as well as teaching and now I'm sort of a self-taught IT support guy for them, as well as all the other hats I wear. My views now have changed somewhat from the simplistic "Science is King" approach I had always had, I still think that in the fields of medicine, physical sciences and some others that the scientific method is the way to go absolutely, but in the fields of education and social studies I've taken a more pragmatic "right tool for the job" approach, people and their feelings are messy, their interactions are messy too, numbers will only tell me so much, a pointer to what questions I need to ask and if I want to ask questions of people I need to ask them, face to face to get their voice. That's important.

Funny how life works out.