I really enjoyed the article we read for last class about the women feeling isolated after receiving an education. One of my classmates made an excellent point that even if we, in American, come from an area where education isn't necessarily valued, we have the opportunity to take our education and get out. We may have to return to some awkward Thanksgiving dinners, or deal with the occassional not seeing eye-to-eye with a family member, but we are not expected to live our daily lives the exact same way we did BEFORE we received our education. Our education is typically a springboard to bigger and better things. For these women, however, they are constantly being judged and feeling alone. And there's no where for them to go. Even their marriage prospects as affected since many men do not want to marry an educated woman. It made me really grateful to live in a country that values education for women.

Our research project has been, in a word, frustrating. It makes it especially difficult when we rarely have all of our members in class together. I know I have been sick a few nights, too, but I'm not sure if we've all been in more than 2 classes together. We know we want to research co-teaching, and the plethora of articles that we have read has provided us with an understanding that co-teaching has many benefits, but teachers seem to be lacking adequate training. We were originally going to read these articles and code them for key words and find overriding themes. Due to the lack of respectable research on co-teaching though, it has been difficult to find the statistics and an acceptable number of studies to use. In class last week we decided to switch gears and interview teachers at a school I am close to through e-mail questions. We are currently developing these questions on a 1-5 scale in order to easily assess the information.

Would it be appropriate to have questions on a 1-5 scale AND questions there were open-ended that we could code? How many teachers should we interview? We were thinking 10 would be a good number, would you agree? Since we are doing these interviews through e-mail how should I attain a signed IRB form?