'fitted education' or not..

A 'nice' news article that shows how the part of ''fitting education'' (in where every child, also with extra needs and care must be able to participate at secondary education, although there's no extra money facing the schools) has it problems now already. The ''project''  of fitting education (passend onderwijs in Dutch) that will be initiated in the school year 2013-2014, shows it ugly face now already. Students with autism are not allowed to go to the school of their (first) choice. Read it  here, only in Dutch.

Codingcodingcoding writingwritingwriting

It's going fast now! Last week, I've coded my 20 interviews and looked at the program Atlas.ti in which you can process interview results in a more scientific way. The program connects codes which you apply to certain (pieces of) texts, and gives overall view of what you're doing. Easy to use!
Besides that, other results are useful for me.
- what the websites of the schools say about guidance and placement policy on their sites,
- the additional data some people gave me about their school
- the percentages of throughput, ranged on: grade retention, etc.

I need to combine those 3, and then say something about it.
The structure of my thesis, and the layout is ready. Now I have to fill it!

My goal? Hand in a quite good first thesis on August 6...
How to? Lock myself in till that time and having no contact at all.

So maybe there will be no update next week! Well, I will be going on with the same stuff as described above, so I will be repeating myself then.

oh! and my research proposal is also finished. I made the final changes a couple of days ago. The teacher was so kind to let me finish my interviews first!

Going with the flow

I'm glad to tell you that I've got a clear view on the rest of the process, and that I've got the feeling that the end is near (or, better said: is clear).
While planning isn't my strongest point, and certainly is something I need to look into, I have a feeling this will work out. My pace is steady now, and every day is exactly the same (lol), except for the weekend, then my main thoughts are with doing nice stress releasing things. Yep, I've come to the point that I also work in the weekends, but it's kind of necessary I think.

Next week, I'm off to Barcelona, on a trip with my youth orchestra (no update then). Not much time for working there. With now working in the weekends, I hope I can get this time off. :)

I've got 5 weeks from now (actually 6, but one ' useless'') to write my thesis.. Must be possible :) within 7 weeks I've got to request my colloquium, because that takes 3 weeks to organize..

Today: 1 more interview, a talk with my mentor, working on the plans and actions that come forward from that the rest of the week till Saturday.

Interviews!

Sorry for the delay: I've been on a one day tour yesterday and it was fun!

Finally things are happening. The last week I've been busy mainly with mailing schools and persons who can be interviewed. One school told me they only took requests from former students, so I could cancel that one.  It got me a bit nervous.. the first school I approached said 'no'. Luckily, I found another school in the area that fulfilled all necessary preconditions. A school that indeed wanted to help out! I have had one interview yet, and planned 2. My goal is to speak to four or six employees per school location. 

Another school also want to help out, so I've planned 2 interviews there also. Besides that, it is really time consuming to wait for a reaction, when you don't have a telephone number. Or, when people misread their own appointments and have to change the schedule. 

There is a lot to do actually: I need to type out the interviews I had, and that is really time consuming. I think I can upgrade my notes a bit more than I do now, that will save me time... 

For the research proposal: no reactions yet. I send another mail to the teacher asking him if the mail was sent right. Within 10 minutes I got his reaction that he will look into it soon.. Well, my interview appointments are more fixed than this promise.. I shall see, until then I will be busy with performing my research!