Research papers...not as easy as I once thought

For those of you who are interested, I made it to the next stage in the Teach for America process! As I nervously logged into the system (which let me tell you, it felt like an eternity!), I knew that my fate was relying largely on the phone interview that I had done a week ago, and in my honest opinion, it was wishy-washy. But, then the page loaded, and “CONGRATULATIONS! You have been invited to participate in an in-person interview” popped up. My project this semester of writing about teachers and identity still seems that it is applicable to my future, and I feel more of a passion about writing it and figuring out what makes a teacher successful and what causes burnout in so many teachers; after all, I don’t want to burnout in my two years in the program, and with this paper, maybe I will be able to figure some of that out (still assuming I do well in the final interview, still keep your fingers crossed, please).

Anyway, onto my real blog topic.

Before this class, a research paper seemed so simple: you would think of a general topic, find a plethora of resources that surrounded your topic, and then essentially write a summary of those articles with a little bit of your own opinion. Of course, you wouldn’t JUST use the opinions of those sources, and you would throw in a little of your own personal flair. Of course, you would have the responsibility of making the paper flow, avoid grammatical errors, and it would be best to develop a dialogue between the articles. However, beyond some basal level of understanding, you could succeed with fairly little effort.

Now, in my current argumentative writing class, the research paper seems so much more difficult. Whereas before I always would use newspaper articles and a text book, now each resource is a journal article that is 20 to 40 pages long, and even after filtering through numerous abstracts on my topic, half of these papers that I read end up not being relevant. Additionally, I have come to find that what used to only require regurgitation of the main idea of resources isn’t really the point of a research paper, especially an inquiry paper.

When I started researching my topic, all I knew was that I wanted to research teachers and Arlie Hochschild’s idea of identity which includes the true and false selves. For any reader who may stumble on this blog and isn’t in English 225.021 this semester (or for those students in our class who haven’t read The Self We Live By), a true self is the identity that you would be able to reveal in a completely uninhibited situation, whereas the false selves are those identities that we present in social situations that are appropriate to the situation at hand. False selves do what Hochschild calls “emotion work,” which is the act of intentionally suppressing what you truly feel and instead expressing those emotions that are appropriate to the situation at hand or would be more likely to produce a positive effect (such as a teacher who suppresses their feelings of despair and angst and instead smiles and speaks in an upbeat tone, or for professors it could be the act of being polite and reserved to the student who fervently argues with them and tells them that even though the professor has a Ph.D. on the subject and has spent 30 years in a lab laying the foundation for the concept, the student’s choice of answer B is correct even though the professor knows the correct answer is obviously A).

However, despite knowing that I wanted to explore this issue, I had few questions about the topic beyond how teachers fit into this identity scheme. Instead, I should have tried to think of a spin on the topic, like “does presenting false selves and suppressing the true self contribute to low self-esteem and high burnout rates for teachers in low-income communities.” Or, I should have at least looked into other’s view of teacher identity, and how their concepts differed from Hochschild’s ideas. Additionally, I thought that since I was not the authority on the subject, that the only arguments I should put forth would be those that other professionals had made. Instead, I should be looking for sources that fit with my ideas, although perhaps not always perfectly. Also, I should be looking for more conflicting views, because without giving the opposing view an adequate opportunity to change your mind, a mountain of research on one side of the issue doesn’t establish your claim no matter how mind-blowing their reasoning and research may be. What seemed so simple and easy before can in fact be very difficult. It’s not that I don’t know how to think in depth when writing a paper, it’s just that often deep comprehension and contemplation isn’t necessary, so I feel a little rusty.

Finally, I would like to say that although textbooks are often boring, I have learned something particularly helpful from Aims of Argument. Before, I often did a lot of research and a week later would realize that a source I passed up and thought was irrelevant, was now in fact relevant to my paper, but I wouldn’t be able to find the source at that later time. In Aims of Argument, they present the importance of a “research log” in which you write down every possibly relevant source and how you got there, a record that could serve particularly helpful at a later time. After all, what I am arguing now in my paper differs significantly from what I was originally arguing (or rather, regurgitating), and it may significantly change by the time I turn in my final draft. Wasting time looking for a resource you already found is completely counterproductive, and now I don’t have that problem.

I could say more in this blog, but doing so may bore you silly, so with that I will say please continue to cross your fingers for me for Teach for America, and more importantly, have a good week :D