Tuesday 27 May 2014

Getting things started

Imagine a teacher sat at her desk, piles of books scattered around her, a laptop perched precariously in-between the mess. Pens and highlighters are littered around the room, the desktop and her lap, as she pours through the books, using her skills to skim and scan to find glimmers of information that make sense to her. Her brain is beginning to hurt as she stumbles over words like 'phenomenological' and 'ethnographical', trying to decipher their meaning and their usefulness. She is a student of history, English literature, and these scientific phrases are beginning to muddle her mind. Suddenly, she starts to realise that many of the books keep harping on about keeping a log, a reflective record of her work. She remembers her lecturers also mentioning that it might be a good idea to create a blog, one where she can reflect and record her thoughts. A light-bulb slowly comes on in her mind, much like those energy saving bulbs which start out quite dim but then blaze away after a few minutes, and she finds herself logging onto her school Google account, ready to start the reflective journey. 

If you haven't already guessed, that teacher is me. The reflective blog is here, ready to be filled with my thoughts, rambles, rants and general ridiculousness. The general idea is that I can record my thought process from this point onwards, in the hopes that it will a) not be time consuming and b) will aid me in developing my ideas and practice over time. 

I'm hoping that not many people will read this, but if they do, then I hope that it will be somewhat informative, and perhaps even mildly entertaining. It will reflect on my professional progress only, so if you're looking for a diary of my day-to-day life, then I'm afraid you should look elsewhere (although I can assure you such a thing does not exist, so don't waste your time looking). 

I really am sat at my desk, there really are books piled around me, and I really do have highlighters and pens littered about, like a colourful assortment of candy coloured chaos. I'm nearly through collecting research on...well...research methods. I hope to finish my research by the end of the day, at which point I will need to print things off, re-read my article, and then start to type together some kind of review. I hope to have my first draft done by the end of the week. Fingers crossed I can stick to my schedule. In fact, in order to do that, I should probably stop procrastinating by typing this and just get on with it. Wish me luck. 

KC