Teacher, research your pupils, Part I

Update: Using my students as research subjects...

As a caveat of my Transition to Teaching (TM) program, I need to go to graduate school and get my Master's in Education before 2 years is up. For people that don't have an education degree that go into teaching, the state is vary wary. Apparently, it was brought up that without a degree in education that these career professionals could be doing horrible damage to the kiddies without realizing.

Now, I've always been a fan of learning. I've always loved school. That's part of the reason why I went into teaching to begin with. Also, I really hated research. Talk about boring and monotonous. (This is where I hear the Chinese curse: "May you live in interesting times," floating through my head.)

My love of education stopped at graduate school, Education Degree Version.

Suffice it to say that I'm not impressed with the learning going on in these classes. My latest rant is that of the quality of their research. It's called "Action Research." The action, apparently, is to test an idea without controls and relevant statistics.

High horse time: I was a cancer researcher in my former life. It pains me on an almost physical level to write a graduate thesis about my "research" without controls or statistics guiding the way. I've been been great at statistics, but programs are built for people like me that get mixed up on when to use a T test versus ANOVA versus a regression analysis. Yay for computers to think for me!

I'm just sayin'. Um... how can you ever say that what you proved was because of your hypothesis and not just a random pattern?