Second Interview

So the first woman that I asked to interview was not able to do it right away, so I got to interview her sister. They are both stay at home moms and they both lead busy lives. I didn't get a response to all of the questions yet, but the answers that I do have are going to be very useful to my. I am able to pull out quotes and use them because she is the one that wrote them. I hope it turns out well.

Over the Break

Over the break I hope to be blogging some more because I will be working over the break and I hope to get some of my documentary done. When I am working on that I plan on blogging as I go so that I can keep up with everything.

Portfolio

We are working on our proposals today in class. We have about two hours to finish them. I hope to get them done today, but if not, then I will be working at home more than I would like to on this.

Today

Today we are going to be working on the final portfolio of all of our information and our proposals. I have been looking at how many blogs I have done and it doesn't seem like I have many, but I guess all of them sum up what I have done on a certain project. On projects that I have worked on for about three or four days, I would only do one blog for them. Otherwise it would get too repetitive. I hope this doesn't affect my overall grade.

Editing Proposal

Yesterday I worked on my edits for my proposal. I looked over Brittany's and Ashley's, and then had them both look mine over. They both said that they didn't have anything to say about it. I'm guessing because I had Mrs. Fossum look at it before anyone else.

We also got introduced to how we will be putting our entire portfolio together. I think I have a good idea as to how I am going to word everything and put it all together. I plan on doing that today. Well, bye for now.

Proposal

I finished my proposal today. I actually never started it until this morning, but I focused on it very intently and worked until it was finished. I had Mrs. Fossum look at it and she said that it was very good. I just need to have a peer edit it now. Then all I have to do next week is put all of my work together into a portfolio. I will have a nice, easy week next week.

Action Plan

I just noticed that I never wrote about my Action Plan. So, I should do that real quick. I did my action plan to show how I will complete my grad project over the next year. I hope it is efficient enough.

Computer

Well I have to get a new hard drive tomorrow, so I didn't get to do much work in class today because I was over in Mr. Klanica's room. I hope to have everything done by the end of class on Friday. I'm sure I will, but I just want everything done right and turned in on time.

Library

Today I went to the library with Amber, Ashley, Brittany, and Jasmine to return my books. They were renewed too many times to get them renewed again. But we went there, some got them renewed, some returned them. It was a fun 20 minute trip.

Conducting the Interview

On Friday when Mrs. Fossum was out of the class room, I conducted my interview with one of the working moms. She works downtown, so it was easy for me to get to her. I asked her about 10 questions and she gave me very good answers, but when I was all finished, she gave me a few more questions to add to my list and gave me the answers to them as well. I feel that the interview went very well and I plan on keeping in touch with her so that I can use her as one of the people to interview for my documentary in the end.

Sending the Interview

So I sent the interview questions to the stay-at-home mom that I found. She replied with a very kind response. She said that she would be happy to fill out the questions and send them back to me. Honestly, I think that sending the questions to the person and having them fill them out is better. That way you get the direct quotes from the person and you don't have to remember what they said a year ago, because you have exactly what they said.

Outline

I finished my outline. I am very proud of it I have to say. For not getting started on it for so late, and having it done before anyone else, I must say it was good. Detailed, I might add, and long. When I had Mrs. Fossum look at it she noticed that the only major problem was the organization. In the end, my outline went from being, I believe five sections, down to two sections. I thought that seemed a little short, but Mrs. Fossum assured me that it would be the best way to get started with my paper. When I fixed the problems, I really began to notice what she was talking about. It really did look like it could turn into a very detailed paper that would really help strengthen my project.

Behind

I know I am behind again. I keep forgetting that I have to blog everyday at the end of class. So again, I will be doing a blog for everything that I have done everyday since my last blog till now.

Interview

So today I found out that I can now email the other woman that was on my list. She is a stay-at-home mom. I plan on emailing her by tomorrow so that I can get it all set up. Also, my other interview was scheduled for Friday at 10:30.

Planning for the Interview

Yesterday, I was thinking, "I am really pushing these interviews back as far as I can, and I just need to get them over with." So, I went to the office and made some phone calls. I am still waiting for one of my sources to get back to me, but I was able to schedule the other interview. It will be around 10:00 next Friday. That will be a really good time for her and I think that it will be pretty good for me too. I hope everything goes well. Now all I have to do is look over the questions that I will be asking her and make sure everything is perfect. I would like this interview to go smoothly.

Cover Page

I had been looking over the outline and I realized that I had to have the essential and foundation questions on the cover page. So I went to my dashboard to open the teach files where my questions were, but for some reason, the internet was only partially working that day, so I was not able to get the questions. Another day was shot for starting the outline. So I worked on my noted more, hoping to have quite a bit to back up my opinions and information that I put into my project.

Introduced to Outlining

This week we were introduced to outlining and how our outline for our project is supposed to be set up. We are supposed to use most of our notes to create the outline and to have a cover page for it. I guess it will be easy, but then again, I am still looking over my notes, and since there are a lot, it may be difficult to place them in the right spots. I have to base them off of our foundation questions, under each heading or section. I hope I can get them all sorted the right way.

Notes, Notes, and More Notes

I know I have been talking a lot about notes, but that is pretty much what most people are still doing in class. I mean, it is impossible to have all of your notes and resources within 10 weeks or a little more. It takes a lot of time to find the resources, read through them and take efficient notes on them. So I have been looking over different sources that I have and thinking about people to interview for my project.

Blogging

So I am way behind in my blogging, so I think that I will write more than one to explain what I have been doing. It is so difficult to keep up with the blogging. When you are in class, you don't think to yourself that you need to blog for that day because it is not a normal assignment, so I tend to forget that I am supposed to blog at the end of every class. So the next few blogs will describe what is going on.

New Book

Ms. Schuler gave me a book today that she read in college that fits very nicely with my grad project. It is called, "Working Women in America". I copied three chapters already and they all seem to be perfect for my project. Now I just have to go through them and take more note. Ha ha, more notes. Wow, that is interesting.

A Whole Week of Notes

Well this whole week we will be working on the notes from our sources. I don't really have anything to say right now because that is all that we will be doing and have been doing. So I hope to find some good notes this week that I can post to my blog.

More and More Notes

I think I am going to have to come up with some new titles for these blogs because there are going to be too many note taking days to have "More Notes" be the title for every blog. But anyway, today we did More Notes as mentioned. I did, however, find some really good points in one of the books that I have and I think they are going to be very useful. They talk about the amount of money women make when they have kids and when they don't have kids. I think it is a very interesting point to bring out. But that is all for now. Maybe next week there will be a little bit of excitement.

More Notes

For the rest of this week and the rest of next week, we will be working on the notes from all of our sources. I think that I will find some really good information because from what I can see they are really good sources and I have already found some really good information. I have also been asking around to see if there are any stay-at-home moms. When I asked Chelsea, she said that her mom is a SHM (stay-at-home mom). So I will definitely keep her in mind for the future and maybe I can interview her sometime.

Interview Plans and Notes

I completely forgot to do my blogging yesterday, so I thought I would catch up by writing about yesterday and today. Yesterday, we worked on the interview plan papers. And that was about it. It wasn't much to do, but it provided some extra time to do more research and to look into the sources that we have already. Today we were informed as to how we are to take notes on the sources of information that we are looking at. I have a lot of good sources so far and I hope to be able to find some very useful information from them. So I guess I better get to work on them.

Intro to Interview

Today in class we had to think of some people to interview for our grad project. Then, once we thought of them, we had to contact them in some sort of way and ask them if we could interview them and why we wanted to interview them. I have a really good friend that is a working mom and I emailed her today. She got back to me within five minutes and accepted my interview. She said that we could get together sometime soon and we can talk about some of the things that she does and what her family life is like. Tomorrow, I plan on having my interview plan turned in and moving on to another person to interview.

Key Terms

Today, we were working on definitions of key terms that we will run across in our research. I found about 13 of them. I hope they will help.

• Stay-at-home mom: A mother that does not leave the home for work, but stays at home with her child
• Working mom: A mother that works either part-time or full-time while trying to raise a child/children at the same time
• Manifesto: a public written declaration of principles, policies, and objectives, especially one issued by a political movement or candidate. (“The Motherhood Manifesto” is one of the books that I will be using for my graduation project)
• Managerial: involving or characteristic of a manager or management, especially in business
• Colleagues: someone people work with, especially in a professional or skilled job
• Glass Ceiling: a barrier to career advancement; an unofficial but real impediment to somebody’s advancement into upper-level management positions because of discrimination based on the person’s gender, age, race, ethnicity, or sexual preference
• Domestic: relating to or involving a family or the people living together within a household
• Workforce: All the people working or available to work, as in a nation, company, industry, or on a project
• Paid-Leave: paid time off from work
• Maternity-Leave: paid time off to take care of a child for a certain amount of time
• Flextime: the ability to be able to choose the hours a week an employee will work
• Coalition: an alliance, especially a temporary one, of people, factions, parties, or nations
• Fair Wage/Living Wage: a wage sufficient to provide minimally satisfactory living conditions

Yesterday

Well yesterday, I completely forgot to post what I did. So, I am going to do that now. We searched the Carnegie Library website yesterday for some books that may be useful to our projects. We were to find two books, but I ended up finding at least five. There are so many sources that back up my information. That's a good thing because I will never run out of useful information. I hope I can get these books when I am there tomorrow and possibly find some very useful information. I can't wait to go and find these books. They sound really good.

Here are the books I have found so far:

• The glass ceiling: a look at women in the workforce
• Mommy Wars: stay-at-home and career moms face off their choices, their lives, their families
• The stay-at-home mom's guide to making money: how to create the business that's right for you using the skills and interests you already have
• The milk memos: how real moms have learned to mix business with babies - and how you can too
• How she really does it: secrets of successful stay-at-work moms

The Main Essential Question

Today, we were listening to the presentations of everyone else in the class. Now I have an idea about all of the project ideas. I have to say that most of them were really good ideas. But other than that, I was finishing up my foundation questions and my main essential question. I think that they are pretty good, at least I hope they are.

Essential Question: How do women affect family life by entering the workforce?

• What are the advantages of stay-at-home moms?
  
• Who is affected other than the families when women work?
  
• How much do women work each day?
  
• How much time do working women spend with their families each day?
  
• Are women still facing the glass ceiling in the workforce?
  
• How much money would women make if they were paid for everything they do at home?
  
• What sis the percentage of working women compared to stay-at-home moms?
  
• Do children do better in school when they have working moms or stay-at-home moms?
  
• How old is the average women when she enters the workforce?
  
• How much stress is caused from working moms?

Essential Questions and FAQs

I know, I am so far behind in my blogging. I have a lot of catching up to do. But today we worked on our Essential questions and our FAQs. Tomorrow we will be presenting our idea for our grad projects and showing the class our blogs. I guess that is why I need to catch up so badly. Last week I finished my webliography and even had Mrs. Fossum look at it to see if there was anything that needed to be changed. It turned out that there were two annotations that needed to be cut out of my webliography and two more needed to be done to take the place of the other ones. So I worked on that for quite a while. I have been do my best to have everything done on time this trimester, and so far, I am doing better in this class than any of my others. Even though there is a lot of work to be done in here. I think I might already have my Essential question, but things could always change when you run them past Mrs. Fossum.

Webliography

Well our first annotation that we did was just a sample so that we could see how they would look and what they were to include. But now, we have to have 10 annotations by Thursday to make up our webliography. Thursday is when we will turn in our rough draft and we will have two people look at them and help make corrections. The final copy of our webliographies are due on Friday.

Sample Annotations

Today we had to do annotations in class. Well, at least one annotation. It was a sample that Mrs. Fossum wanted to see before we did all ten of them. It is actually pretty easy, just very time consuming.

Robo, Regina. "Salary.com." Dream Job: Stay-at-Home Mom. Copyright 2000-2005. Salary.com, Inc. Thursday, May 10, 2007. http://www.salary.com/careers/layouthtmls/crel_display_Cat10_Ser253_Par358.html

• Salary.com provided very good information about stay-at-home moms. It mentioned in the first paragraph, how there was a woman that never dreamed about being a stay-at-home mom because she was so caught up in the business world. There was also a chart in the article that shows all of the things that moms do and what the salary for that job is. It also gives statistics about stay-at-home dads vs. stay-at-home moms. This website will help me with information on all of the things that women do each day. It will also help me see some of the changes women have to make from being a working mom to being a stay-at-home mom. The entire article will be of great benefit to my project because I can compare the information from this article to the experiences of the people that I will be interviewing.

MLA Citations

Today we had to work on the MLA citations for the links that we have on our blogs. I have so many of them on here now that I didn't know which ones to do first. So I kinda worked from the top, well, the third one down. So here are three of them...

Robo, Regina. "Salary.com." Dream Job: Stay-at-Home Mom. Copyright 2000-2005. Salary.com, Inc. Thursday, May 10, 2007. http://www.salary.com/careers/layouthtmls/crel_display_Cat10_Ser253_Par358.html

Tahmincioglu, Eve. “Workforce Management.” When Women Rise. September 2004. Crain Communications, Inc. Thursday, May 10, 2007. http://www.workforce.com/section/06/feature/23/83/13/index.html

McKay, Dawn. “About: Career Planning.” Women Face Glass Ceiling in Hiring. 2007. About, Inc. Thursday, May 10, 2007. http://careerplanning.about.com/od/forwomenonly/a/glass_ceiling_2.htm

Approved!!!

Well my letter of intent was approved today. Mrs. Fossum and I came to the conclusion that I would do a documentary for my final product of my grad project too. I will do an interview of people on both sides of my topic: Stay-at-home moms, as well as mothers that worked while their kids were growing up. Right now I have a really good friend that has a six-month-old baby and a two year old and she is always on the run. She works 12 hour days sometimes and is even called in to work weekends. She misses her children so much and you can tell that the kids are suffering from not having their mother around enough. It seems as if she is home to go to bed or grab a quick bite to eat and she is right back out the door. So I think that I will interview her as the working mother, as well as a few others. I still have to find someone that was a stay-at-home mom and interview her. But that can happen later. Right now I have to work on the assignments given to me. Today I finished the poster for my topic. If you get what I will be working on completely just by looking at the picture, then my poster was a success. I hope you enjoy it.

Topic Poster

So today we had to start a poster that has pictures and words that describe our graduation project. Since I am going to be doing my project on women in the workforce, I think I will have a couple of graphs that show some differences between women in the workforce and stay-at-home moms. I hope I can find some somewhere. But the Internet is so broad that I don't think I should have a problem finding anything. It is due tomorrow so I will upload the poster then so that everyone can see it.

Letter of Intent

So today in class we had to write a letter explaining what we wanted to do for our grad project. It had to explain what we wanted our topic to be, where we would get our research from, what our final project would be on, and that we agreed not to plagiarize any of the information that we obtained from any source. It was a very easy day in class today. We spent the whole class working on those letters. The only concern I have for the time being is that I don't know how I want to do my final project. Mrs. Fossum gave good suggestions though. I think I might use one of them. She said that I could do something like a documentary or even a web site that explained the differences between women that work and those that don't. I'm not sure which one I want to do, but they are both very good suggestions. Thanks Mrs. Fossum.

If Men Payed Women for Everything They Do...

So I did some research today on just some of the things women do (outside of work). If men were to pay women for everything they do, how much would it cost them? Well...the following information is from May 2004.

• Housekeeper:
  - $16,820/year
  
• Chauffeur:
  - $8.48/hour
  - $74,284/year
  
• Dry-cleaner:
  - $8.28/hour
  - $72,532/year
  
• Chef:
  - $12.00/hour
  - $105,120/year
  
• Banker:
  - $23,900/year
  
• Landscaper:
  - $16.99/hour
  - $148,832/year

Total: $441,488/year

And those are just a few of many things that women do every day. So I will be posting more things they do, with the yearly earnings, and by the time I am done with my project, women will be filthy rich!

Senior Comments and Suggestions

• Narrow your topic so that it is not as broad
• Have beginning and end points (Point A, Point B)
  - How (your topic) progressed
• Get involved in your project
• Use internships if possible
• Use all the resources that are available to you
• Don't make your project similar to anyone else's project
  - Yours will be compared to others'
• Do something to capture the audience's attention
• Don't pick something you don't like
• Don't waste time
  - Work the whole class
• Have a set idea by 12th grade
• When you schedule your presentation day...
  - Don't put it off to the last day
  - Pick one of the first days because you won't stress as much
• Ask to video tape another project so you know what your situation will be like before you present.
• Pick something people will remember
• Think to yourself...
  - "How will I remember a project the best?"
• Pictures last forever!
• There will be many nagging teachers
• Use other teachers
  - Have other teachers that don't know about your project read your paper
  - If they get the point, then you have succeeded.

These are some of the points that the seniors brought out that I thought were interesting and very useful for completing my grad project.

Grad Project Idea

So I guess the first thing is to come up with a grad project idea. So I started thinking about it a while ago, but I didn't want to do anything that is too basic, or something that others were already doing. So I asked my mom what her thoughts were. We sat down and started thinking of some ideas. We finally came up with the conclusion that I would do my project on how women have affected family life by entering the workforce.

• I heard that the graduation project is something that we will all be doing before we graduate. We will have to present it to a panel of judges and we will be graded according to our research, presentation, and our preparation.
  
• So far I have not met anyone that has completed their graduation project. I know a few seniors, however, I have not talked to them about their grad projects.
  
• I think I would like to base my project around family life and the workforce. They are two of many topics that interest me.
  
• I think my only concern is doing my project well. I hope to have enough research to fully complete my project before the deadline.