Framing Device

Today has been a good dissertation day. I made my first attempt at writing up a finding, and I felt pretty good about it. And it helped me think of more things to write about tomorrow. I am still solidly in the analysis phase, but I think I am now able to say I am in the writing phase as well.

But one of the problems with dissertations is that they're not all that interesting to other people. That is, I feel like I can talk in layman's terms about the things I'm interested in and the things I'm finding and not lose the attention of the family or friends I'm talking to, but once I write it all up, you're probably not going to want to read it. Actually, I'm probably not going to want to read it. Not necessarily because the subject matter itself is boring, or because the implications are unimportant, but because dissertations by their very nature are not that fun to read. You don't just say the interesting stuff, you say everything. Down to the most nit-picky of details. A lot of grad students will show up to their dissertation defense knowing full well that certain members of their committee have not read it in full, and have just skipped to the "good parts."

And I can guarantee you that not one of you will read my dissertation in full. Even my relatively short (110-page) masters thesis is just gathering (literal) dust on my bookshelf, and probably gathering (figurative) dust on the online databases where it can be accessed throughout the world.

Last weekend at my brother's wedding luncheon, my uncle Jonathan decided that it might be nice if I tried to shake up the system a bit by making my dissertation more readable. And for the next ten minutes a table full of my family members became deeply engaged in a discussion of my research. I never expected that would happen. As a group, we decided my dissertation needed a narrative. And a love interest. And probably a vampire. Or a vampire love interest. A glossy cover. A surprise twist. One of my cousins suggested that I make it a Choose Your Own Adventure book. Choose Your Own Findings, I guess. The purpose of all this would be to make dissertation history by acquiring a readership of greater than five.

Since that discussion, I've spent some time¹ thinking about this. I've made a careful study² of readership and popularity trends in the world of contemporary fiction, and I have some ideas I'd like to run by my readers. The current title of my dissertation (which I only feel comfortable saying because my settings don't allow text from my blog to show up in search engines - I don't want to have any of my ideas stolen by rogue math education researchers) is "Community College Instructors' Choice and Use of Mathematics Curriculum for Elementary Teachers." And I currently frame my findings in a gripping narrative of prior research on mathematics curriculum use and my heartwrenching journey into the realm of open coding of qualitative interview data.

That's not going to fly for the New York Times Bestsellers List. I have some other ideas.

Idea #1: The Secret Lives of Part-Time Faculty

Melodie³ is a young, naive aspiring teacher with a love of children and a fear of the math she will be teaching to them. Sharon, an embittered adjunct instructor nearing retirement, has lost faith in the effectiveness of her activity-based teaching philosophy. In this tender and heartwarming coming of age story that will resonate with anyone who has ever hated mathematics, and anyone who has ever learned to love the subject, Melodie and Sharon come together and find empowerment through fractions, healing through practical applications of functions, and hope through problem solving and conceptual understanding. It is a hope that Melodie will carry with her to the very end of her kindergarten teaching career.

Idea #2: Twilight Section

When Bellinda's university makes cuts, she is forced to find work at a small, isolated community college on the dreary Washington coast. Soon after beginning her new career, she meets Edgar, a quiet but striking young part-time instructor of math for elementary teachers who (it is rumored) never stays at a college for more than four years. She finds herself inexplicably drawn to his intense gaze, his socioconstructivist teaching style, and his hypnotic effect on students. Pulled together by the magnetic force of their love of learning, they gradually learn to love. But when Edgar is assigned to mentor Bellinda as she teaches the evening section of Number Concepts for Elementary Teachers, she begins to suspect that he has a terrible secret. A secret that has the power to change her life. Soon Bellinda must make a choice between her secure life as a tenured community college professor, and an exciting but volatile life as a transient part-time instructor. But the change may require more sacrifice than she is willing to make...or than Edgar is willing to let her.

Idea #3: The Division Code

When Sofia Nova, a new instructor at West Coast Community College, stumbles across an old textbook written in the Cyrillic alphabet, she is at first thrilled to find a new resource for her mathematics course for future elementary teachers. Draw in by the depth and rigor of the problems in the book, she soon realizes that this is no ordinary mathematics tract. Could this be the famous Vinogradov text? The first mathematics textbook for elementary teachers ever written and rumored to have been authored in 1947 by a secret Moscow society? The textbook that launched Sputnik and a nuclear arms race that threatened to destroy human civilization as we know it? As it becomes more and more clear that Sofia did not find the book by accident, she finds herself at the center of a terrifying plot that spans decades, and continents. In a race against time, Sofia must discover the secret behind a terrifying truth that could destroy the very foundations of American education. She may already be too late.


There you have it. What do you think?

¹ Or at least as much time as it takes me to write this blog entry.
² By googling "top ten books decade" and briefly perusing one of the results on barnesandnoble.com.
³ I have changed all sorts of names, places, circumstances, and actual facts to avoid any run-in with the Institutional Research Board.