productive weekend!

I am happy to report that my 20 pager is complete! I spent a lot of time yesterday finishing it up and I have to say I think it came out pretty good. It's really difficult to write research papers that include so much of what other people have thought and said. I can write from my own perspective all day, but when it comes to rephrasing very smart things said by other people, I am often hard pressed to make it sound better than how it was phrased before.

I still have some final editing to do, but the drafting stage is done and that is the hardest part! I started out trying to cheat the margins a little (yep, I'll admit it!) but by the end of my writing, I had enough even with 1" margins. I don't think my teacher is going to be super picky about that, but I had a little bit of guilt over using bigger margins just to make the paper longer. I always teased my husband about that when he was in grad school because he would write headings that included 5 lines of information that was totally unnecessary just to make the paper longer. He would write his name, the teacher's name, the course name, the date, the assignment name...Then when he finally started the paper the first line would be about a third of the way down the page. Silly boy!

I still have two more assignments to do to finish out this quarter, but neither is that awful. The biggest is the unit plan for 10 global picture books with a common theme, but the maximum page allowance is 6, so I am not too scared of that. I already have the books and the theme, so I just need to make the annotated bibliography, and write up a few lesson ideas and goals as if I were using the books in a unit. I will post my list of books because some of them are pretty cute.

Now that my paper stress is over, I am off to the gym!