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. 

Gimme, Gimme, Gimme

I must be a bit anxious if I am still up at 4:30 in the morning and watching/listening to Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!  There is something about the beat and the energy of this music from 1979.  Perhaps it brings back a time of incredible energy and passion.

The Night Before

Had my preliminary conference call with my comps mentor.  My questions will be in my inbox when I wake up. They must be in on Nov.15 at 9:59 PM. Will hear back on my results Nov. 23. It will be a fantastic Thanksgiving celebration as a Doctoral Candidate, I trust. The emphasis in the call was upon the dire consequences for discussing the questions with anyone and on plagiarism: failing he exam and expulsion from the University. I guess if I don't know any better than that by now, I shouldn't be where I am. Good night all. Sweet dreams.

Beginning Musings

I began thinking that I wanted to blog the rest of my daily journey to my PhD. I wanted it to lok back on and maybe it can also provide encouragement or assistance to anyone else on the doctoral path or who is thinking of starting on that path. So, to lay down the basics. I am in the PhD in Education program with a specialization in Adult and Postsecondary education at Capella University.  I began studies in May 2010 and what a ride it has been!  I have now finished all of my coursework with a 4.0 and am in my comprehensive exam phase. i am expecting my questions in a couple of days. I will then have 28 days to complete 50 pages of scholarly, brilliant writing. My plan is to pass the first timeround without any re-writes and then on to my research and dissertation.  So anyone want to guess howmuch anxiety I am experiencing right now?

I have spent the weekend organizing a massive amount of journal articles and my own writings.amunt of journal articles and my own writings so that all  tto access.