The Methods to My Madness

I’ve been slaving away for the past couple days trying to make sense of research I did almost 2 years ago. It didn’t make sense then, and it still doesn’t. Measuring attitudes is a lot harder than you might think. And trying to make a thesis out of it is even harder.

I’m not much of a social scientist. And let me tell you how much I hate APA. Who decided that it would be a good idea to tell somebody exactly how their data should look? I like things to be pretty and visually stimulating, and tables full of numbers are just plain ugly. I want some colorful charts and graphs. My brain is full of Ns and ns and variables and descriptive statistics and validity and reliability and treatments and a bunch of other mutha fuckin’ nonsense. And this is just stuff for my methods section of my paper. Not to mention my craphole of a lit review.

The funniest part of my writing a thesis about this bullshit is that it’s a thesis on how different people learn differently. Duh. We all know that. So I’m measuring attitudes of how college students feel about learning about a specific theory that says, hey, if you learn best this way, this is the way you ought to be taught. Isn’t that only fair? My hypothesis is that students who are traditionally (people who are best at math and reading and that stuff) intelligent would be less open to this idea, while non-traditionally intelligent learners (artistic people, like myself) will be all for it. So what’s funny is that my lowest intelligence is mathematical-logical (my highest being musical and visual) and here I am, doing research that involves tons of numbers. Have I mentioned that I have a type of number dyslexia? I see them all ass backwards most of the time. So this is by no means fun for me. It’s been such a struggle to even try to learn what all these numbers MEAN. And it’s neat how they paint a pretty picture and form into a concrete kind of pattern, but holy hell, is it tough for me to figure it out. I can’t even figure out how to do a percentage without a calculator. Even then it’s too much for my musical/visual brain to handle. Why can’t I just draw some stick figures or write a song about it? So that’s why I’ve been living in thesis limbo land, because I can’t do this unless someone is holding my hand. Hmm, maybe that could be one of my song lyrics.

Anyone want to re-write my thesis for me? I mean, I don’t have a lot of money but I can make a killer dinner of white spaghetti…

Have a good weekend everyone. I’ll be here, wishing I was doing something that didn’t involve numbers.