On to Rocky Fields of Dreams...

I didn't do so well with my vow to write in my blog everyday during my comprehensive exam and the day I turned my exam in--Nov. 15--I couldn't bear the thought of sitting at the typewriter and writing another word.  I spent from Nov. 15 through Nov. 23 resting, truly resting.  I read a 600+ page novel (The Golden Notebook) and knit and knit.  The novel I reread every couple of years or so and always find something new in it.  On Nov. 23, I was afraid to look in my school e-mail, but I was also drawn to it every few minutes.  I didn't hear anything.  I didn't hear anything Thanksgiving Day and I didn't hear anything the day after.  Saturday afternoon the e-mail arrived in my inbox.  My heart was pounding as I opened it up.  I PASSED! 


Of course, there were some comments for possible improvement and some things I didn't do quite as well as I could have, but I passed.  When I had turned in my exam, I wrote to my professor that I entirely expected to have to go into the two week re-write; I had totally run out of steam the last couple of days.  After seeing the congratulations and learning that I am now a PhD candidate, I went into shock.  I think I have been in some kind of shock since that time. 

The time of secrecy is over.  I can now talk about what I am doing.  I missed being able to discuss ideas and thoughts with people immensely while doing my exam.  During graduate school I have become very used to learning by discussion.  I have an approved dissertation mentor and am in the process of putting together my dissertation team.  I hope to have that all done by next week.  On Friday the 16th, I have a conference call with my dissertation advisor to help "breeze" my way into this new process. 

The current working title of my dissertation is "Rocky Fields of Dreams: A Qualitative Study of Under-Resourced College Students and Hope."  I have often heard that pieces of paper (such as diplomas and degrees) really don't make a difference in how one feels.  However, I do find this milestone to have been a huge boost to my self efficacy and esteem.  I now believe that I can make a difference in the world of higher education and in students' lives.  I guess I feel more legitimate.  My students were very happy I passed and showed great curiosity about the whole process.  What better way to demonstrate my belief in education and lifelong learning than to share my journey with my students. 

So it is on to  Winter break for about a month.  I have several classes to prepare to teach for winter term and I am going to get going on the Scientific Merit Review form for my proposed research.  You see, I need to prove to the committee and to the University that my study can actually add some new, original piece of knowledge to the pool before they will let me proceed.  I have jumped back into researching Hope and have temporarily put aside all of the research on transformative learning theory and multicultural classrooms and such (part of the exam).  I am now ready to learn how to take my place among the thinkers.  I rather feel like the Tin Man in the Wizard of Oz that has been given permission to think great thoughts.  I don't know who the man behind the curtain was, though....perhaps he was just me. 

Books are not made for furniture....

"Books are not made for furniture, but there is nothing else that so beautifully furnishes a house."  --Henry Ward Beecher

Well, there might be a limit to how much furniture of books makes a house beautiful.  Almost every day I have books arriving by FedEx from interlibrary loan, or books popping up at the library on a different interlibrary loan, and always more articles popping up to be categorized, read, filed, and/or stored on my Kindle.  I have never in all of my graduate work time had the opportunity to delve so deeply into the literature on a small handful of subjects.  It is wonderful, but...talk about information overload!

I am weary today.  Feeling the strain of the last two weeks.  I think I have been getting a little grumpy also and I need to be mindful of stopping that.  I am now at less than two weeks till turn-in date for the exam.  I am beginning to feel a time crunch.  I am affirming today that I have all the time I need to get this done!  I have all the brain power and perseverance I need. Have a great day everyone.  I am primarily a teacher today and then it is back to the exam desk all day tomorrow.  More later.

Thanks for stopping by,

Kym 

Hallelujah!

Today I learned a valuable lesson: don't fight one's natural cognitive patterns.  At the beginning of this exam process I had set myself a timeline which incorporated working on a question per week and giving myself one week for final revisions and proofreading/editing.  For the last two weeks I have immersed myself in research, but the writing has been a real struggle. The thought of sitting down to write was actually making me very anxious and almost ill.  I was really beginning to doubt my ability to complete the exam.  When I finally let myself wander afield a bit, to research all of the questions at the same time and work back and forth on all of them, the writing suddenly began to flow.  Now, I know from experience that my mind does not react well to being bounded to one line of thought at a time through to completion.  My mind is naturally more divergent than that.  Why it took me two weeks to finally realize that "all roads lead to Rome" so to speak with my three questions, I don't know. Now that I have finally let myself walk parts of all of those roads at the same time....hallelujah and Eureka!  The writing has flowed so well today.  Leonard Cohen singing "Hallelujah"

Thanks for stopping by...

Kym

The Little Engine that Could....

I have lost some momentum this week.  I found that the demands of teaching took priority for my time.  I moved onto Question 2 on Saturday night as my little grey cells were just whirling over Question 1.  I am still contemplating it in the back of my head, but found I needed to start another line of research and turn my back on the first for a bit to get some perspective on the writing.  I do keep reminding myself of the Little Engine that Could...I am going to bed now.  My plan is to get up very early and spend all day tomorrow at my desk researching and, yes, writing....the writing part has been the hardest.  The process is still causing some anxiety.  Odd for a writing teacher isn't it? 

A Brain on Fire, Kindle Magic, Bloom's Taxonomy, and Fear

Hello everyone.  I have been remiss and not posted for a couple of days.  Of course, I have had my nose in dozens of books and tens of dozens of academic journals.  I feel like I have been on some kind of wonderful scavenger hunt that has led me through the lives and thoughts of some amazing thinkers and theorists and even back to some phenomenal women thinkers from the "good old days."  It has been fun and I am having a hard time wanting to shut down my "little grey cells" for sleep at night.  I can't discuss particulars until after November 23, but suffice it to say that I am amassing lots of ideas for teaching my classes starting next term.

I do have to share some wonderful Kindle magic, though.  I figured out yesterday that I can download hundreds (probably thousands) of PDF versions of academic journal articles directly from the databases on the internet to my Kindle.  This means that I don't have to print them out and I don't have to sit at the computer to read them.  I can carry them all around on my Kindle, highlight them, and even annotate them.  To top it off, it is all free.  I have portable access to all of the accumulated scholarly wisdom I could ever possibly want (or even get through) right at my fingertips in just minutes.  It is truly a miraculous phenomenon of our age.  I wonder how doctoral students of the past managed?  What did they even do before there were all of these online databases?  That would mean endless days, weeks, and months in libraries.  And what if your library did not have a copy of the journal?  I shudder to even think about it.  I even downloaded five years of the entire published proceedings of  international conferences.  Each of these files runs about 500-600 pages.  It took less than a minute!  I never in my wildest imaginings would have thought that I would be working on my comps and dissertation with the luxury of virtual libraries and databases and a computer with MS Word to automatically do all of the formatting for me.  I had one of the first home computers: a Commodore 64 (I believe), but that was long after I graduated from college and I never learned to program it to do anything even though I tried. 

I can still vividly remember my undergraduate years in the 1970's when I struggled to format footnotes and such on a typewriter (yes, it was electric) and had to frequent at least three different libraries for research: the graduate library, the undergraduate library, and the health sciences library.  The undergraduate library at the University of Washington had carpeting and bean bag chairs and we thought it was very modern.  The graduate library--Suzzallo--had stone floors, cathedral ceilings, leaded windows, and amazingly cold drafts.  I wasn't dressed on the magnificent stone steps like the students in this photo, though. The study carrells were small and had very hard straight-backed wooden chairs.  I usually felt as if I was in some ancient cathedral in Europe.  The librarians seemed to be as ancient as the building and just as cold.  Yet, it was my favorite library because I could find books in all kinds of languages (even though I couldn't read them, it felt very scholarly) and so many of the books were old and musty and I knew that they must contain great wisdom for some reason. It was in that library that I discovered the poetry of Sappho and even found her poems in their original Greek.  The Health Sciences library was rather smaller than the other two and smelled like formaldehyde which permeated the air from the clothes of the medical and nursing students who often ran out of one of the labs to grab some reference.

Bloom's Taxonomy...yes, I am dealing with that right now in a sense.  My questions are multi-layered taking me ever deeper (or rather ever higher) on the ladder of Bloom's.  My fear, however, is keeping me so far at the lowest layer of reviewing and describing.  Tomorrow, though, I vow to jump into the evaluating, synthesizing, and defending among other tricky feats of grey cell dances.

Speaking of fear...you should check out one of my classmate's amazing blogs: "The Unpaved Road to 40...and Beyond."  She has such wonderfully sensitive insights and commentaries on life. She had a very insightful piece on fear a day or so ago.  Speaking of commentaries, I must get back to my "other" writing and say goodnight.  It is Friday night, so I might be up for hours yet and am planning on an uninterrupted weekend of work on the exam.  What an amazing gift I have been given:  the time and opportunity to immerse myself into a few select ideas and subjects for the next 24 days.  The process itself is worth all of the fear...oh, excuse me, that is right; there is nothing to fear except fear itself.

Exhausted

I am so exhausted after teaching my night class, I am finally going to sleep I think after two anxious and sleepless nights. I visited the library and checked out many,many books and printed out lots of articles.  All for one question. Good night everyone. More tomorow, I rpomise. How about Bloom's taxonomy?

Questions Arrived While I Finally Slept

My questions arrived somewhere between 5:30 AM and 6:30 AM while I was finally sleeping.  More on those later, but for now I am still caught in the energy of oldies, but goodies (?) like YMCA.  Keep learning everyone!  Update tonight on the progress.  I am off to the library for a pile of books and just downloaded hundreds of pages of academic journal articles to my computer.