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Other than Capt. UberHusband’s year in Iraq, I believe there have only been two Sundays in the seven years we’ve been married (and probably the year and a half we dated before that) when I woke up by myself on a Sunday morning. Actually, I take that back. Last year when he went to Paris, he left on Sunday and came back on Friday. So, this would be the only non-deployment Sunday.

CU travels a lot for work now, so it isn’t entirely odd if the alarm goes off at 6 during the week and he’s not here. Weekends though…weekends are a whole different thing. It gets kind of lonely, even if I have already talked to him twice today and exchanged a dozen text messages…LOL.

On the upside though, he is a distraction…and without that particular distraction I can blow through some of the schoolwork I’ve been putting off - like finishing up my strategic marketing midterm, and working on my research project.

Speaking of my research project…you know what? I am really getting frustrated with my applied research methods professor. I’m paying good money (and my own, mind you…not my company’s) for the expertise of the faculty, not to do my professor’s work for him or her.

Case in point…my professor’s instructions for this week’s class activity:

Our first challenge is to come up with an item pool to measure the construct of “republican”.

If you looked around the web enough, you would find little quizzes here and there that try to match a user with a presidential candidate, or that try to tell the user what political ideology best fits with him or her.

For our first pool of items, create and propose items that would help to measure “how republican are you?” You should also work with items proposed by classmates to clean them up and put them in the best wording format.

Here’s last week’s:

In the activity discussion, post your research question and a brief description of how you could set up an experimental or quasi-experimental study of it. The fun thing about experimentation is that you can be creative in setting up the design, but remember to take into consideration the goals of precision, generalizability, and realism that we learned when we studied research design dilemmas.

After you post your own design, review your classmates and make recommendations to strengthen their design proposals.

First off, I don’t think “generalizability” is a word, but I don’t think that’s the sort of feedback he’s seeking. Secondly…I know why he’s doing this - he wants us to “improve our critical thinking skills” and look like idiots when we make public recommendations based on three days’ worth of subject review. Thirdly…um, no. YOU are the professor. YOU work with us to clean up our items and put them in the best wording format. YOU work with us and make recommendations to strengthen our design proposals. YOU teach us.

If I were a subject matter expert on the concepts of this class, I wouldn’t be taking it. If I wanted to work in a silo and teach myself, I would have bought a better book, because the assigned text is a tad dry. Plus, the feedback I’m getting so far from my classmates is of sub-par quality (”I think this sounds good. All of the required elements are there.”) - which sort of proves my theory. There are actually more examples of how I am essentially teaching myself in this course…but really, none of you are interested in that…LOL.

So, here I sit…with a schnoozer at my side and My Baby is Missing on Wifetime…really, really wishing I would have finished up my MBA while CU was in Iraq. Ah…coulda, shoulda, woulda.