Prompt: What is so far the most challenging thing about doing your thesis? Explain.

I can’t reinforce enough how much I like having this space for reflection. This time, instead of using my bi-weekly blog post to think about the thesis project itself, I will try and discuss the challenges I am currently facing, just like Nissa did in his brilliant Thesis: Restart post.

Time: taking two courses besides thesis is not easy. On the one hand, in thesis I am doing exactly what I want to do, the deadlines are flexible, the results will be all mine. This is what I consider an ideal context for my own learning: freedom, interest, motivation. But on the other hand, this makes me prioritize the strict project deadlines and group work in my other two courses, which are more specific, shorter, and I force myself to finish within a few hours. Since the flow of assignments from these other courses is constant, I basically haven’t invested much time in thesis in the past weeks.

A set of possible solutions must include (1) breaking down the broad notion of a thesis project into smaller tasks with fixed deadlines; (2) forcing myself to work routinely on my thesis, no matter the workload from other classes; (3) doing my best to catch-up in the other courses; (4) waking up a little earlier and extending my schoolwork hours. I have tried to do that over the past week, so I’m thinking and hoping that this issue is going to be solved in the near future.

Another issue that has impacted my productivity in thesis is what Nissa called “fear of realization”:

My particular thesis project is based on an idea that’s been taking shape in the back (and sometimes front) of my mind for the better part of a decade now. There’s something daunting about finally doing focused work to actually bring it into being. And also to make it public.

Language learning and teaching is pretty much everything I have studied and thought about from the moment I started teaching to now. As a result, I can now discuss language learning for hours, strongly support my opinions and beliefs in a conversation, but creating a consistent project out of all these messy thoughts scares me - and not being able to do so frightens me.

Another challenge: being on top of the academic research. If I am doing a thesis design project in language learning, I am expecting to become an expert in language learning. As an expert, I feel like it would be my obligation to know by heart the most important controversies, discussions, and accomplishments of scientific research in the field. Rather than that, I feel like I know so little about it all, which shrinks the credibility (even to myself) of what I’m proposing.

My biggest challenge, however, comes from my background as a language teacher for a relatively brief period (only 6 months) at an incredibly alternative language school in Brazil. Most of what I know and believe in language learning comes from that experience, but the method and activities we used there are so unconventional that it’s hard to convince people they could be effective. In sum, it’s a ton of work to translate all that true experience I had into a solid design project, backed up by research. This, once again, brings me back to fear of realization.

My last challenge is to not get so excited about programming, tangibles, and graphic design, which are my newest interests. I guess I might be using these things as escapes from working on thesis, but what really feels like is that I want to invest a lot of time into learning these valuable skills.

In my ideal world, I need to start living my thesis. I need to breath language learning, to practice a lot different languages everyday and get more experience as a learner, to know all the apps and services ever created to promote language learning, to read all the TESOL journals daily. In order to shape myself into that person, I will need a lot more time and many other blog posts as this one.