End of year teaching and reflections on my love of research
We have 10 weeks of school left, counting this week and the last week of school. The last week will be finals. This week is already almost half over. Then one week will have a math taks test. One week has a holiday for Good Friday. One week has the freshman picnic. So that's like 6 weeks?

I am loving the end of the year. I am going to miss my student so so much. But I am finally at the point of the year where everything else is nothing new. No firsts. I have read everything that we will be doing for the rest of the year, so I don't have to feel anxious about barely keeping one step ahead of the students. And I love research.

Research (and my 11th grade research paper process) is one of the reasons that I majored in English (not literature, not creative writing, but the technical writing track) and certainly one of the reasons I love libraries. I love finding other people's words and putting them together. Seeing how they mesh. I love looking up articles and seeing where I can fit what. I love looking for a specific fact and finding something that will work perfectly.

I love the MLA handbook and I love that every question has an answer. Oh how I love rules. English rules!

I love my paper. It is excellent and I got a 93. I love the binder it sits in. I love the weight of the papers behind it and the dividers that organize everything. It is really a shame that my research paper was on breastfeeding. We chose our own topics --basically anything. My teacher thought it was funny that we had both breastfeeding and Hugh Hefner as topics in our class. And as weird as it might seem to choose that as a topic as a 17 year old, it made a great paper. Scientific fact plus controversy. But quite awkward to share that with my students today.
- posted by Alicia @ 8:42 PM