I have come to the realization that I am not an academican. I thought it would be fun to get published someday; wriiting books or journal articles. However I have come to the realization that I truly dislike the rigidity of academic prose especially the need to write in overly wordy, pedantic sentences when there are much clearer easier ways to express your thoughts. But of course if you write like that no-one takes you seriously. The more cryptic and enigmatic your style the better a writer or researcher you are. I don’t buy it.

Additionally spending all this time writing essays has taken the pleasure out of reading authors l like such as, David Nunan, Joy M. Reid, & H. Douglas Brown to name but a few. Additionally this semester I feel that the quality of my teaching and lesson planning is suffering due ot a severe case of burn-out. I know that my writing is not up to the quality that it should be either, in fact it feels to me like this entire semester has been one academic and professional disaster.  It even got to the point where I considered quitting the M.A. altogether, but I decided against that.

At this point I am debating about whether to do the dissertation option, which will take one more year, or take two more courses and be done with everything next June. I know the coursework is the easy road out - something I generally abhor taking, but I’m just so tired of studying and full-time work and a family. Everything suffers and doesn’t get the attention it deservers especially my daughter who is only 33 months old.

Doing the dissertation has many advantages including being the more traditional route of completing masters level study. I also feel that having done the degree by distance, doing the dissertation will add value since some employers may look down on distance education (Taiwan does not recognize distance degrees) though I think that is a foolish attitude. Distance study is by far more difficult than attending class. There is a lot of self-discipline and motivation involved and also the difficulty of getting help with hard to understand concepts and terminology.

Another advantage of doing the dissertation is that I do find the ideas behind my research proposal genuinely interesting and of value to the teaching community at whole. I"m sure the experience of collecting, collating, and analyzing the data will bring a new dimension of understanding to further reading I do in the field.

Perhaps this semester has been difficult because it’s the end 2.5 years of course work and far too much of the readings have had little practicle usage in the classroom. Research methods is all about doing research and has no practical implications in my day to day teaching - though of course it is incredibly important and useful with regards to the dissertation option. Pragmatics on the other hand had far less practicle usage than one would expect (Sorry David - I know pragmatics is your specialty) and was very different from what I expected both on the part of the course summary and my understanding of what pragmatics entails. In the end this course was more about discourse analysis than pragmatics - a disappointment to say the least.

On friday I submit my essays and then I have some time before I must decide whether to take course work or do the dissertation. Who knows maybe I’ll feel better about it after I get some rest and can start studying Korean in December - and spend a little less time staring at this bloody computer screen.