Megan's+3.3+post

For me personally, all the small procedural process documents that need to be turned in with the project stress me out. Last semester, I did a research project for one of my other English classes where I had to choose a topic by a certain date and was turned loose, only being given a due date that was near the end of the semester. I ended up getting everything done even without a formal structure behind the project, and I had about the same amount of time to work on that project as this one. I’ve said all of that only because I am feeling frustrated about the process documents I need to complete for this project, the research calendar in particular (I feel like we’ve all hated on the calendar at least a little bit, and I want to take a bit of time to formally hate on it here). I completely understand that the purpose of the calendar is to get us to realize that we have more time in the day to work on this project than we think we do, but I think that planning down to the hour of the day when I’m going to work on the project is much more stressful than working on it when I get the chance. I feel like I work best without all the structure that a calendar provides. At the same time, I’ve tried to make it work and am, of course, finding that it is useful, even if it stresses me out to the //n//th degree. If I use the calendar in my future classroom, I’ll adapt it a bit to include all the due dates of the individual pieces and may ask students to work a certain amount of hours per week on the project, instead of asking them to plan out the hour(s) of the day they will work on the project. I’m glad that I’m being exposed to many new ways of completing a research project, so I’ll be able to suggest some strategies to my future students, but I’m not sure that I’ll structure my own research with an in-depth, extensive research calendar. Who knows, though…

Questions:
1. Do you like the research calendar? If so, why? If not, why not? 2. If you could adapt the research calendar for use in a high school classroom, how would you change it?