Showing posts with label Research. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Research. Show all posts

Wednesday, March 15, 2017

More Research? Say it ain't so!

Star wars me
Star wars me (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
I've been trying to get my research paper draft going, but right away I ran into a snag-- I need support for my very first point, and I can't find it in any of the sources I have.  Yup.  Back to the library.  At least I know exactly what I'm looking for this time, so it shouldn't take long.  I'll start searching as soon as I finish this post.  
I shouldn't complain.  I already wasted an hour today looking at my Facebook notifications.  Some of the Star Wars fans are objecting to my argument that Kylo Ren is immature, but I had two comments that called those fans immature.  What can you do?

Saturday, February 18, 2017

An Embarrassed Baby

This baby is totally outraged.
One more thing about The Tomkins Institute:  they have videos of babies experiencing different emotions.  The one for shame is of a baby having a bath, and it's amazing:  you can tell that the baby is feeling shame.  The video starts with the baby looking sad, and either the mother or the other woman in the room says he looks depressed.  They laugh about that, and then the baby hunches over and looks down.  He stays this way for the rest of the video.  It is kind of funny, but I wished they would stop laughing, because I think the baby thought they were laughing at him and he kept hunching over more as they went on laughing, so much that at one point one of the women becomes a bit concerned that the little boy is going to put his head in the bathwater.  
The baby is rescued by his father, who doesn't laugh.  He talks to the baby in a very sympathetic tone.
This baby has already started using the withdrawal script to deal with shame events.  I'll talk more about what I've found on script theory in another post as soon as possible. 

Wednesday, January 20, 2016

Starting my research blog

English: A panorama of a research room taken a...
English: A panorama of a research room taken at the New York Public Library with a Canon 5D and 24-105mm f/4L IS. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Welcome to my research blog for my English 102 class.  I’m a first-year student at a community college that I’m not going to name because I just had a lesson in why you shouldn’t name names (more about that later).  I did okay in 101 (I think the prof liked my grammar more than my writing; he went on and on about how he appreciated not having to mark a lot of mistakes.  But he didn’t have much to say about WHAT I wrote.  He did ask on one paper that I try not to use so many parentheticals.  I guess he had a point.).
Anyway, this term I’m going to be writing a research paper, and the materials I got on Blackboard make it sound as though this is a much bigger deal than I expected.  I mean, I’ve done research papers before, and they got good grades. 
I’m already over my 100 words, and I still haven’t said much about myself.  I’ll save that for my next post.  

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Getting a jump on the new semester

Cover of "The Four Feathers (Full Screen ...
Cover via Amazon

For me, spring semester starts tomorrow, but I just checked and my English 102 class is already set up on Blackboard.  I read the syllabus and the first assignment, which is to set up a blog and do 20 posts by the end of term.  The first post has to be about the topic for my research project, which has to be a film.  I looked at the list of films, and the one that jumped out at me was The Four Feathers (all the rest are newer movies), probably because Rebbie (Rebecca, my older sister, who had a big Heath Ledger crush) made me watch it with her when she first got the DVD.  It was pretty intense for me, since I must have been about eight or nine years old at the time.  I've seen it since then -- and I have a better understanding of what's going on in it than I did as a kid -- so I think I'm going to go with it.

I also have to have a "critical approach," which I'm not quite sure I understand yet, and the one it was listed under is something called shame theory.  This makes sense to me.  If you haven't seen the film, it might not make sense to you.  The feathers in the title are symbols of cowardice that people give to men who have acted cowardly in some major way.  The hero of the story is a British army officer who resigns when his unit (or whatever it's called) is ordered into action.  He does this because he is afraid, and then he spends the rest of the film doing incredibly brave things in order to give the feathers back and redeem himself.  Basically, now that I think about it, it's all about shame.

I'm not sure how this is going to work, but I guess I'll find out more tomorrow morning (assuming we don't have a blizzard or get frozen by a polar vortex again).
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Wednesday, August 28, 2013

What about the fantasy-adventure genre?

Strange Fantasy 01
Strange Fantasy 01
 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)


The critical approach that I'm taking for my research project is genre criticism, and the film I'm analyzing is Percy Jackson & the Olympians:  The Lightning Thief.  My understanding of this approach is that it looks at how a film fits into an established genre, or doesn't.  Science fiction and fantasy is one of those genres, as is Action/Adventure, and it seems that my film fits into both, but it's not really science fiction or action:  it's fantasy-adventure.  Beyond that, it is also part of a subgenre that features kids as the heroes. 

And there's the problem for me as well as the benefit.  It seems to me that I'm going to be trying to identify and define a new(ish) category, so there might not be a lot of material available on this genre (bad) while I will have to do a lot to explain my model (good, in terms of meeting the length requirement).  Not only that but I have to include a lot of different films if I stick to what I have so far.  The characteristic that all of them share is that the adults are not involved in the stories except as villains or advisors (and their advice is frequently ignored by the kids).  However, I think that I have to exclude all of the teen-dystopia films (like The Hunger Games), because some of them are almost horror films, going all the way back to the first Halloween, which actually is a horror film.  And that's just the start! 

This is going to take a lot of thinking.  I'm hoping to get started on my library research in the next week.
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Wednesday, August 21, 2013

New Semester, Same Old Textbook Sticker Shock

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Fall term started Monday, and I'm already having anxiety issues.  I've been saving up to try and get out of my parents' house, but my books made a HUGE dent in my bank account.  My English prof says that we can use the old editions of the books for her class, so I just saved $120 right there, and I'm trying to focus on that, because if I think about the others I'll start crying.
So anyway, I've looked over my assignment package for the class, and that's why I'm posting today-- Project 1 is this blog!  We're supposed to have it done by next Thursday, but I have this morning free, and I thought I'd get it out of the way.  According to the assignment, the purpose is "To record and share your thinking as your research project progresses," which sounds easy . . . and makes me suspicious.  Where's the catch? 
 
This first entry is supposed to be me discussing my film and approach choices for my research project.  Since I haven't even had 24 hours to think about it yet, I can't say I'm committed to anything so far, but I do have a few ideas.  One thing I've noticed lately is that there are a lot of what I think of as teenagers-save-the-world-while-adults-do-nothing movies, and, now that I think about that, it's kind of strange.  Some of them are about dystopias (like The Hunger Games) and others are about hidden societies, like in the Harry Potter films.  Looking at the list of films and approaches, I guess I'm thinking of genre criticism, and the movie I'd like to use is Percy Jackson & the Olympians:  The Lightning Thief.  I'll check to see if that's okay.

One down, nineteen to go!

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Wednesday, March 27, 2013

The Essential Scenes in Fellowship of the Ring

Elrond
Elrond (Photo credit: Dunechaser)
The two scenes I am using for my analysis (so far, that is) are the call to action (the council of Elrond) and Boromir's final test.  I may have to go into his final battle as well; in fact, I think I'll probably have to do that.  At any rate, I'm working on each one separately, which is proving to be the best way:  working on the Rivendell scene, I'm getting ideas for the later scene where Boromir succumbs to the ring and "attacks" Frodo. 

As the scene progresses, each of the heroes reveals his agenda for the quest, and it seems as though the different outcomes are inevitable from that point on, particularly for Frodo, Boromir, and Aragorn.  Since I'm looking at the film as having its own . . . completeness (I can't think what else to call it), the quest of the fellowship as a group ends when the film does, at least for my purposes.  Why this matters is something I will save for my next posting.
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Thursday, February 21, 2013

My Working Thesis Won't Work

Dwarves at the Council of Elrond in Peter Jack...
Dwarves at the Council of Elrond in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Well, I've got a working thesis for my research project, but I don't think it will work in the long run, since it seems kind of obvious to me.   I need to come up with something that more people will disagree with.  For now, I'm going with "Each of the members of the Fellowship of the Ring is a hero in his own right and on his own hero's journey."  This doesn't really take the archetypes into consideration, and that's what I'm most interested in, which is why I'm not happy with it. 

Just now I thought, or remembered, that I'm confined to the first film (which I have sort of been ignoring), and I'm wondering if you can really tell from FOTR alone that each one is a hero.  I mean, it's obvious once the entire trilogy is over, but at the end of the first film, Frodo and Sam have gone off on their own, Boromir and Gandalf (supposedly) are dead and the rest are split, with Merry and Pippin captured by orcs and Aragorn, Legolas, and Gimli trailing them.

And, I just thought of something else that deserves its own post, so that's all for now.
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Friday, February 15, 2013

Research Plan- Hero Archetypes

The Power of Interlibrary Loan
The Power of Interlibrary Loan (Photo credit: Newton Free Library)
I turned in my research proposal on Wednesday, and I think it was okay.  Now I'm supposed to be coming up with a research plan (through 3/27), and I need to get going, because the annotated working bibliography is due on 3/13.  What I've done so far is kind of random:  searching the web for usable (i.e. scholarly) sites, a stab at finding journal articles, and a quick book search.  Even though The Fellowship of the Ring is not a superhero story, I thought that I had found a good book for the project in Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, Jeffrey J. Kripal, because of the way it was described, so I ordered it on interlibrary loan, but it's not very helpful as far as I can see (it's interesting, though, and I had to keep myself from just reading it anyway).  I'm going to get more organized, starting now. 
Here's my plan:
Week 4 (this week):  Search for book reviews in Academic Search Premier (Dr. Toffee showed us in class that you can click on book review in the document type menu and it'll sort them out for you).  I'll have to skim the reviews for now, and then I'll get at least three of the books from the library or ILL.  
Week 5 (2/18):  Assuming I get the books right away, I'll read their introductions and check the index and table of contents for stuff specifically about heroes and hero archetypes.  And, I'll do the MLA works cited entries and annotations to start my bib.
Week 6 (2/25):  Articles!  Have to find them, then read them, and that may take me through week 7 (3/4).  I want to do the entries and annotations as I go so that all I have to do in order to turn in the bib on 3/13 is double check the MLA rules.
The literature review draft is due on 3/19, so I also intend to pull out the sources for that as I'm compiling the bib.  By that time, I should have a good idea (I hope!) of whatever else I'll need to write the argument essay, which I will then try to locate, and that takes me up to 3/27 (week 9). 
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Friday, February 8, 2013

Elrond's Council and the Heroes

The eponymous Fellowship from left to right: (...
The eponymous Fellowship from left to right: (Top row) Aragorn, Gandalf, Legolas, Boromir, (bottom row) Sam, Frodo, Merry, Pippin, Gimli. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This week, I'm supposed to be answering the question, "What have you found in a scene (using the model)?"  The scene that made me choose The Fellowship of the Ring for my research project is the council scene at Rivendell where representatives of the various groups of Middle Earthers (there has to be a better way of putting that!) are trying to decide what to do about the ring.  What I thought from the beginning is that all of the men arriving for the meeting look like heroes.  The way that they each have their own moment onscreen seems to be saying, "pay attention!  This guy is important."  And the rest of the scene bears that out.  Each of them is on his own quest, with his own priorities and agenda, which leads me to what I think is the biggest discovery I made:  they all volunteer for those reasons, not because of the reason Elrond and Gandalf see as overwhelming, that the ring must be destroyed.

And just now, writing this, it occurs to me that their individual reasons (I'm just guessing at this point) determine the outcomes each of them will experience.  Does that make sense?  We'll see. 


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Tuesday, January 22, 2013

New Year, New Semester, New Research Project

Film poster for The Lord of the Rings: The Fel...
 Copyright 2001, New Line Cinema
(Photo credit: Wikipedia)
For once, I'm getting a jump on my homework-- English 102 doesn't start until tomorrow, but yesterday I checked to see if the instructor (a Dr. Toffee; I don't know her) had anything on Blackboard.  She did.  I read the syllabus and the assignment sheets, and this blog is Project 1.  Since it is now set up and working, I guess I've made a good start. 

According to the assignment sheet for Project 1 (I put a copy in the pages block to the left of this posting so you can see it), this first post of the semester is supposed to be discussing my "initial thoughts on [my] film and approach."  What that is referring to is the topic for our research project (I also put up a copy of the topic sheet in the pages block).  I have some initial thoughts, but they'll probably change when I have more details about what's involved.  So far, I've selected a film, The Fellowship of the Ring, and my critical approach/model is myth criticism (I've sort of got an idea there, but I'll save that for a later post, mainly because I don't know much about myth criticism yet and I don't want to look like an idiot).  I thought about using The Avengers, but (thanks to my family) I'm so much more familiar with LOTR that it should make it easier to analyze.  I hope. 

And, I just realized that I'm way over the 100 words I needed to write.  It's not a problem, at least I don't think it is, but I'll check tomorrow.
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Saturday, July 21, 2012

How Am I Doing?

Grade cutoffs
Grade cutoffs (Photo credit: ragesoss)
I'm working on my final project for the course, a self-evaluation essay that goes with a portfolio.  And, I'm having a few problems.  I spent a lot of time over the past 7 weeks researching disability studies issues and watching Avatar (I must have seen the entire film 7 times and the scenes I used for the paper at least 30 times), which I remember doing, but the actual writing is kind of a blur.  So, I re-read what I wrote, and I'm kind of mortified by my first paper (a scene analysis with a DS approach, no outside research).  It looks like a sixth-grader wrote it.  On the other hand, I am now totally impressed by my research paper.  I gotta wonder, does everybody else in the class feel this way?

I won't know the grade until Monday, but I think that my improvement since early June has to count for something. 
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Sunday, May 20, 2012

Rethinking Teaching the Research Paper

Term Paper Galore
Term Paper Galore (Photo credit:
Bright Green Pants)
Rhonda is taking a brief vacation before the summer term begins, so this seems like a good time to explain a few things.  This blog began as nothing more than an example of a first-year composition student's research journal, but along the way I've received comments and emails from other instructors all across the country, and the question most of them have has to do with my assignment for the research project.  I'll have to give a brief background as to how I arrived at this point.

Like most of us who teach the first-year comp courses, I began by allowing students to select their own topics (with the usual few taboos), most of which had no academic significance, and then I watched most of them flounder around as they produced papers that didn't do what research papers are supposed to do and were quite boring on top of it.  Additionally, I could not guide them as well as I wanted to, since I generally had little expertise in their topic areas (i.e., I didn't know the important scholars in the field, and so on).  This situation was not preparing them at all for the reality they would be facing in other courses as they went on.  Imagine a sociology class, for example, where you were told that you could pick any topic! 

After a few years of frustration, I began looking for ideas on how to give them a more realistic assignment, one that could be accomplished within the time available both inside and outside the course.  This was not an easy task, for many reasons.  First of all, how could I give them a realistic paper assignment without having to teach what would essentially be another course within the course?  I thought back to my own experience as a first-year student, and I realized that what I had been taught about teaching this course in grad school was nothing like the way I had learned to write a research paper back in 1974.

When I started college at what is now UIC but was then the University of Illinois at Chicago Circle Campus (I still think of it as Circle), I was a sulky 17 year old with a load of adolescent resentment.  So, when I looked over the section list for the research paper course, I selected one that had the intriguing title, "Visions of Hell."  It fit my mood.  It was taught by a doctoral student, whose name I cannot now recall, and over the ten-week term (Circle was on a quarter system rather than semesters) we read several works of literature that had to do with, well, visions of hell.  The research paper assignment was to pick a particular work and analyze its specific vision of hell based on criteria that we developed in class as well as criteria we found through research.

In the intervening years, the idea of the research paper course being a literature course gradually began to die out, for a bunch of reasons that I won't go into here, and I think this was part of the problem.  I was taught to write a paper that analyzed a specific object (in my case, a work of literature, but it could have been a population, a natural phenomenon, a political event, whatever) using a method developed from authoritative sources in relevant areas in order to arrive at -- tah dah!-- new knowledge.  The fact that I learned this using a work of literature did not matter:  the overall concept is the same for anything under analysis, in any discipline.

At my current school, where I cannot require students to buy additional texts beyond the mandated ones (which are not literature-based), I had to come up with an assignment that would rely on material available to them without purchase.  A few quick in-class surveys revealed that my students ALL had access to films, which they also enjoyed (a plus when you are already making them read a lot of unfamiliar and often difficult material in their research).  I'm a film buff myself, so I went with that.  I set aside three or four class periods to do a brief lecture/demo of several critical approaches (gender, cultural, and disability studies, myth crit, and shame theory) and prepared a list of films (ones I either owned or could borrow from family or friends) divided into those approach categories. 

The results, so far, are almost all positive, and the best one has to be that my drop rate has gone down dramatically.  Most of my students are finishing the course with a passing grade, and all of them are producing actual scholarly work, creating new knowledge.  It's rarely breathtaking new knowledge, but they are saying things about these films that nobody has said before them.  Their critical thinking and revision skills are vastly improved, based on what I've read of their work.

Of course, there are some negatives, mostly coming out of them being pushed out of their comfort zones.  They come in expecting to do the same kind of research they did in high school, and some of them like to blame me for making them work harder than that.  That hasn't changed from the method I used before.  Overall, I'm pleased with the way things are going, but I've been making constant adjustments in the course since making the switch.

So, if you were wondering what Rhonda was talking about in some of her posts, the mystery is solved.  I am collecting data as I go along with an eye to an eventual article.  We'll see how it goes.

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Saturday, February 25, 2012

My Hypothesis

English: A panorama of a research room taken a...Image via WikipediaThis week, I'm supposed to be doing a QHQ (Question-Hypothesis-Question) about my research project.  Here goes.

Q:  What's the deal with Dolarhyde, his son, and the other young males in Cowboys & Aliens?  (yeah, it's not too elegant a question, but it's really my starting point)

H:   Dolarhyde is looking for a more satisfying father-son relationship than he has with his son Percy.  Percy is a bully, and it's pretty obvious that Dolarhyde has made him that way:  he uses his clout to get Percy out of trouble, and Percy makes a lot of trouble.  He does whatever he feels like doing, no matter how obnoxious or dangerous it is.  In the scene where Percy (accidentally) shoots the deputy, he has already threatened everyone in town with his father's wrath, and there doesn't seem to be any doubt that his father will back him up.  But when Dolarhyde shows up to get Percy out of jail, it's also clear that he doesn't think much of his son.  He tells him to shut up, and ignores him while he tries to intimidate the sheriff into letting him go.
What I'd really like to know is how they got to this point, but the film doesn't offer any hints about that.  So, my next question is . . .
Q:  With all of Dolarhyde's more-or-less paternal interactions with the other men and the boy, what do we learn about his parenting style?
I sort of have a (or is it "an") hypothesis for that one, too, but I'll stop here for now. 
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Thursday, June 16, 2011

Choices, choices

Casino Royale (2006 film)Image via WikipediaAt first I was against having to choose a film for my research project, but after trying to pick one, I have totally changed my thinking.  I've had some real trouble making up my mind about a film; I can only imagine how much worse it would be for me if I were taking this course in a full-length semester where I would have to come up with a topic without any limitations on the choice!  I finally settled on Casino Royale, and I'm going to take a masculinist approach.  Yeah, I know I'm not a man, but apparently you don't have to be male to do this.  My brothers are really into James Bond, and what made me decide on this is that I always wonder why, if they think he is so cool, they don't try to be like him.  Does that make sense?  My next task is to come up with a research question. 
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Friday, March 25, 2011

What's my thesis?

Character co-created by Will Eisner. Image fro...Image via WikipediaHere it is, at least the one I'm working with for my draft:
The presentation of physical difference in comic-book superhero films closely parallels the lived experiences of people with disabilities.
I'd like to make it harder-edged, but I'm starting my draft today, and I think this will work.  Dr. Toffee says that we don't need to do an outline unless that's the way we work best, but she also says that we should try to break down our draft into sections and start wherever we think we have the most stuff ready to go.  For me, I guess, that would be the section where I go over the disability studies sources (she calls this "a lit survey").
So, in this section, I need to explain the d/s perspective and what they call the "social model" of disability, which has to do with identity and how the way people with physical and mental differences are seen by the larger, non-disabled population.  Since almost everything man-made is designed for a pretty narrow range of people's sizes, shapes, and abilities, the disabled have to deal with obstacles that their surroundings present.  There is also a cultural model, which is very similar, and I'm not sure yet which one is better for my project.  I have a lot more sources on the social model, and that may be the deciding factor.
Incidentally, the superhero picture at the top of this post is ironic, in case you were wondering-- it reminded me of a tee shirt I saw on a website that sells disability-themed message shirts.
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Saturday, June 12, 2010

Summer School- English 101

Rhonda is back!  This summer, she is taking the first course in the composition sequence, so you can consider these postings a "prequel."  The course is not a research-writing class, but I always include a research component in every major assignment, though the students generally don't realize that.  They think that it's only research writing if you are using books or articles.  For her first assignment this summer, Rhonda had to interview a classmate and write two different profiles of him:  one for the state department of education (for a needs-assessment study), and the other for a recruiting magazine the college wants to distribute.  We'll see how she does this term.

"Dr. Toffee"
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Tuesday, April 20, 2010

My revision (or, Will this Ordeal Never End?)

Still from the 1903 moving picture Sherlock Ho...Image via Wikipedia
I'm probably going to do a lot more revision between now and Friday.  I wasn't all that unhappy with my intermediate draft, except for the big disaster with the DVD featurette.  I'm thinking now that I should have taken Toffee up on her offer to pretend that didn't happen.  On the other hand, I can see that the new thesis really is more scholarly, and it looks like nobody has ever talked about the Sherlock Holmes stories from this angle, so I actually am "creating new knowledge," which is supposedly the point of academic research.  So, yay me!
But still, this has been so much more work than I ever would have expected.  I have never revised anything as much as I have this paper, and I never completely shifted a paper's main point before.  If I've learned anything that's super important about research, it's to really think things through from the very beginning.  I should have done more of that thinking on paper, too, so that I could have gone over that stuff again and again.  It probably would have saved me a lot of time later on.
Here's something I might have used if it had been published more than 5 days ago:

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Saturday, April 10, 2010

More research! Will it ever end?

Herbert Block, who signed his work "Herbl...Image via Wikipedia
Yes, I'm doing two posts in one day again, mostly because I don't want to work on my paper right now, but if I don't do any school-related work, I'll feel guilty.  So, I'm supposed to talk about the new research I have to do for my revision. 
First, I need to find stuff about unreliable narrators.  During my conference, Dr. Toffee said something like  "discussing that would build my ethos as a serious scholar."  Really, I don't know how serious a scholar I am, but I'm sure working like I am. 
Next, I need to go through the stuff I already have about Watson, and maybe get some more.  Okay, I'm going to have to get some more.  I don't think it'll take too much time, but if it does, I guess that's the way it goes. 
Finally, I need to take a day off and think about something else, research-wise, because I've got a political science paper due in a couple of weeks.  That one is about McCarthyism (I'm going to argue that those Tea Party people are just McCarthyists -- or is it McCarthyites?-- with new outfits, and they are going to bring the Republican party down), and my instructor looked worried when I told him my topic.  After he suggested a couple of authors, he said, "I look forward to reading your paper," but he looked just as worried.  I don't care.  My aunt doesn't have health insurance, and those guys pissed me off.

Here's an article that brought home to me just how much of a slacker I am.
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Sunday, February 14, 2010

Assessing my progress

Whitney Valentine, 1887; Howland sold her New ...Image via Wikipedia
I was having coffee at the Student Center a couple of days ago, and Lisa (she's in the class, too) came over and joined me.  Her topic is interesting; her real first name is "Brittany," which she hates, so she is researching the connection between names and self-image.  Lisa is worried about the research project (I have the feeling that she's always worrying about school), even though I think she may be further along than I am.  So, thanks to Lisa, this seems like a good time to figure out where I stand in terms of deadlines.  I feel like I have a good sense of what I want to do in the paper -- but I know I'll probably do a lot of adjusting before I even start writing.  The due dates seem far away, far enough that I have to keep making myself work on this; if I don't keep cracking the whip, I'll wind up the same way I did all through high school, working like a maniac right before things are due and never being happy with the way they turn out.
Okay, so today is Valentine's Day (despite having a chocolate lunch, I'm not really feeling the love right now), and here's the schedule: 
  • Research proposal is due 3/5,
  • the annotated working bibliography is due 3/26,
  • a draft of the essay (for a peer review and then a conference with Dr. Toffee) is due on 4/2
  • the final revision is due on 4/23
  • the complete research journal is due 5/7
Lisa told me a couple of weeks ago that she made up a "Master Schedule" as soon as she had the syllabi (or is it syllabuses?) for all her classes.  When she said that, I thought, if she just had disinfectant wipes, she could call herself "Monk"; now I think that she has the right idea, so as soon as I finish this post, I'm going to make one for myself.  I can already see that there is a conflict with poli-sci in week 12. 
The research proposal is no big deal; I could even crank that out now, probably, but it'll be better if I can get some more reading done.  The bibliography seems to be the toughest thing before the paper.  In English 101, I was always getting back papers with corrections all over the works cited page.  I've set up a file where I'm saving the results from my searches, and I've already got a folder going with a couple of articles I printed out (yes, Dr. Toffee, I did buy myself a stapler!).  If I can just keep that stuff organized, I'll have the info I need for the citations.  I'm also going to set aside an hour on the days I don't work to read and search some more.  When I have a better idea of what I need to know, I can -- I hope -- cut that back some.  And, I have a Word file going of ideas, more like random thoughts, really, for the paper.  I can't think of anything else I need to do right now, so I guess I'll sign off.
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