Wednesday, November 30, 2016

closing in

About 5 minutes ago, I uploaded my final draft of the research paper for my last content course.  Our last course meeting is this upcoming Saturday, and all I have to do now to prepare is make a poster board so I can present my research.  Yes, I am doing a science fair project!  I knew what I was getting into when I signed up for this class, and it was fine.

Except the APA formatting, which makes me want to rip my hair out.  It's just so fussy. I admit, in the early days, it seemed completely arbitrary and non-intuitive, but I've been working with it for a few years now and it really isn't as arbitrary as I thought it was.  It's actually pretty consistent, and there's something nice about that.  I wish my students used it, but we are inexplicably using MLA format at school.  Still, reformatting my tables and putting appropriate captions on all my graphs (not to mention taking the titles off the graphs, they are including in the caption, so you don't put a title on the graph itself!) was tedious.  Glad it's over.

School is OK, too.  I have a huge stack of grades to put in, but I will whittle them down during the day tomorrow.  I brought them all home with me today, hoping I would get to them, but I decided to finish the paper first.  It wasn't due until Thursday but there was no point in putting it off, and now I have the sense of having a bit of a breather.  *whew*

End-of-term is rushing up to meet us.  I can't wait to be free of this feeling that I have 6 things pending at any given time.  I'll be happy if I can whittle it down to 4.

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