I am in the last week of this term!

So, I am in the last week this term and the classes are an anatomy and a composition class. I am not a writer! I like to learn about things! Especially things that make me go, "No way! Are you for real?"! The composition class was actually a great class for me. There is some advice I would like to give anyone going into a class similar to this. First, do not waste any time searching for information! Start as soon as you can for information on the topic. Also, look for information on the opposite side of the fence. I don't mean just sloppily look for it either. I mean really try to understand the opposing point of view. The paper will be the bomb if it is able to counter act the opposing side in a way that is understanding and not just attacking it just because... Trust me it works! Some of the areas I do feel that I gained strength in were in organization. I feel that my paper was well organized, especially after the post draft. I do believe that I have many areas of improvement! I want to improve in trying harder with my reference page. This is something I have a hard time explaining. I know that if I tried harder, it would be better. However, I also know that I have such a hard time with the reference page, that I almost just don't want to tackle it. I don't know if that makes any since! I love giving credit to other authors, that is not what my problem is! I don't even mind the in text citations at all! It is just trying to remember the order the information goes in. Like, the author, the year, making sure it is in parenthesis, then the title, then the name of the magazine, if it is an article, if it is a book, or encyclopedia and so on. My final thoughts are, "I am proud of my class mates and myself for furthering our education and making something happen for US!" I cannot wait to start on my next set of classes and take that next step in reaching my goal of graduating! I also have to agree with the professor, yes the class was fun and no I did not think it was going to be fun. I thought I was going to struggle through writing a paper and that I was going to wind up doing the bare minimum, but I assure you I did the exact opposite! The paper I wrote and the sources I looked up I had my daughter in my mind along with other children with ADHD that cannot help what they have to deal with. While writing the paper I was hoping the whole time, "maybe someone will read this that needs to hear that his or her child cannot help the interrupting conversations, not sitting still in class and having to pull cards, constantly getting sent to the principals office for class disruption, or failing classes because he or she cannot complete his or her work". I do have to say that I did put my very best efforts into the paper! Thanks for the opportunity!

Here I am! Nearly finished with another set of classes!

I an almost finished with my College Composition II Class, which is where I have written a scientific research paper on children with ADHD, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. I am feeling really good about my paper! I feel that I have tackled this class and my paper will come out as WOW! As far as feeling nervous, amazing, or just plain tired? I am feeling all three! I am nervous because I am always wondering what someone else will think, especially after finding out that there is another student writing a paper about why parents should not medicate their children, although there is a different age group. I am feeling amazing because I do feel that I did do a great job! I found all kinds of information that backed my ideas. I am also feeling so very tired because of all the hard work as well as the time of year, after all it is the holidays!
Before this class, I felt like I just wasn't much of a writer and that I just did not like writing. After writing this particular paper, a paper about this disorder that sparked my interest, I changed my mind just a little! I did like doing some investigating and finding out some information about how chidren with this disorder feel and how they cope with this disorder. So, yes it is safe to say that my idea of writing has changed throughout the course! There are some other topics I would like to research. Some examples would be AIDs, Alzheimer's Disease, and leukemia. These are some of the scariest diseases I know of, but I believe that knowledge is power! I know that it is a far stretch, but I would actually like to think that if I had taken the road less traveled, I may have been one of the hands on scientists attempting to solve the hardest problems in the world today: any of those diseases mentioned above! I am a believer that there will one day be a cure for these diseases if not hopefully a vaccine to prevent them!

What the blog! What for What!For School of Course for the Course!!!

So, for this course I have had some issues! I know that all of my fellow classmates have also! I like to write because sometimes I can make myself laugh and I love funny stuff! I am writing a paper, which I know I have written about it on here before, about ADHD in children. I have made some changes. This weekend, I decided to sit down and really get it organized! Yeah right! Writing a paper is for school is okay. I have done it before. However, this paper is different. I feel like this paper might make a difference for people that may know someone that has this disorder and does not know what all comes with it and I would love to inform them so that they will know and understand how to love them! As far as the comments or the lack there of on the blog spot, I don't know. At first, there were all kinds of comments on my dashboard and here lately there haven't been so many. I believe it may have something to do with the up coming holidays. I'm not going to let my feelings get hurt though! I do like reading other's blogs! The only thing about reading other people's blogs is that I cannot tell if it is for school or not! I might decide to keep my blog after class. It just depends on my next set of classes. If I have time to jump on here and do an up date once a week I will, but if I don't have time because I am working on school assignments or if I have a bunch of things happen like I have had here lately with sick kids and having to clean up after smoking up my house, you know nearly catching it on fire! Then I will probably skip blogging! I have to admit, I do like using it to type out my thoughts as I am thinking them! It's been real!

Peer Reviews...

     So, this week in school, we are looking into peer reviewing. Me personally, I like getting peer reviewed information! I like taking advantage of free help! I know that when I am working on something, day in and day out, my mind is familiar with information that I am learning and reading. This is a good thing as far as memory, but when it comes to writing out a paper, I can see how this can be a problem. When I go back and read my paper, my mind can put in place what I am wanting my paper to say, but not pick up on what is actually written! That is why I love for someone to read my paper and find mistakes or give me some suggestions on how to make it better or make more sense. My experiences with this have been pretty much the same. I can take criticism and even if it sounds like they may be hurtful, I always keep in mind that this is written and they don't know me personally so, more than likely they are just having a hard time writing helpful tips. But when I go to help, I am so scared that I am going to hurt someones feelings! So, when I go back to read what I wrote them, it is like a book in itself! I make a point to say I am only helping and I am not wanting to hurt your feelings. Which is true! I want my classmates to get out of my post what I take out of theirs!
     One of the topics we are asked to discuss,"Ah-ha moments", yes, I have had some! When I read a peer's paper about epilepsy, I read that 70% of people with this disorder can live normally as well as reading that a large amount can actually overcome it! Which was great news for me since my sister has just been diagnosed! Also, in my research, as I have said in other blog posts. There is so much information that is out ready to be found on ADHD! One of the more resent Ah-Ha moments was when I did my post-outline of my paper. I didn't realize how my information was not the way I wanted it! My paper had the information I wanted it to have, but I actually left a lot of it out and I did not see until I made an outline of what was in my paper! There hasn't really been anything shocking or intriguing yet, but I am sure I will see in the future some amazing things! Something that I am not understanding is how this blog works. I am not sure if I just haven't looked at enough peers blogs, but I could not find where any one else has posted for our class yet! What's up with that people! I need to see what is going on and how you feel about peer reviews!LOL! I know it is probably the holidays that has everyone messed up and "running late" just like me!
    

What I have been facing the last six weeks-for school!

     Well, my life has been very busy here in the last six weeks! I am currently enrolled in school, for those of you who don't know, and I am really enjoying what I am doing in class! I am working on a paper about children with ADHD. I am interested in this because my eight year old daughter is diagnosed with it. I am learning so much from reading different articles and visiting web sites. I have so much information I have gained that there is no way to put all of it in my paper! I have learned that there are emotional challenges that these children deal with everyday. I also learned that there are many things that are just being found about this disorder. For instance, that the recent studies show that long term medicine has less effect as time goes on, which actually helped me understand why it seems that my daughter may be needing her medication upped because her grades are falling and I am having a hard time getting her to sit still long enough to do long enough to finish it!
     As far as how I feel my ideas may help about my topic for my school paper in later reasearch, I do believe that readers may see all different aspects of the disorder. I believe that there are still so much more research to be done on the disorder also. My ideas are mainly that I know that there are people that think that parents of children with ADHD medicate their children because they act like child, but this is not true. The diagnosis of the child has to be within two different surroundings or environments. For instance school and at home. I also want people to read my paper and have some compassion for the child and the parents also. Dealing with children with ADHD requires an extreme amount of patients. So, when you are somewhere and ther is a child that appears normal and is just "out of control" remember that they could have ADHD, which is what makes them act that way. It is not their fault. Most want to do what they are told, but simply cannot do it. I want other parents to read and maybe see what they need to see about their children. Personally, I feel like I failed my daugter because I did not know that she had ADHD until it was too late. She failed the first grade because I did not know that she could not focus during class. She use to scream and pull her hair out when she did her homework! Basically, I have hopes of educating people about the disorder.
     Six weeks is a long time, so here are some personal happenings I have delt with in the past two weeks! My son had to go get his fifteen month check up. I asked about why his ears were always having this funky wax in them and if it was normal. The doctor looked in his ears and everything looked good. She said that he just had ears that drained well. He had a clear, runny nose and she gave him some allergy medicine because I have allergies and so do both of my daughters. This doctor visit happened on a Thursday. The following Friday, he started having a green, runny nose and fever. I took him back on Saturday. He had an ear infection. I thought that was interesting because only days ago, I had the doctor look in his ears and she said they looked great! Doesn't stop there! My daughter comes home from here dads house and she can barely talk and starts running a fever. I take her to the doctor on Monday, and she has strep throat! Wonderful! A couple days later, I have strep throat and so does my other daughter! Oh yeah! Not to mention the last time I took my eight year old to her three month visit for ADHD, the lady at the front told me to just call in for an apptointment and guess what, I forgot! I had to call and explain what had happen and my daugther ran out of her medicine, which is like the worst thing to happen for an ADHD child. She was every where all at one time and I was very sick and could not keep up with her. She got to playing with my son and pushed him too hard on his toy tracter thingy and nearly broke his nose! Anyway!
     That was the week before last! You won't believe what happened this week! Everything was going pretty smoothly (by the way, I'm skipping all the way to Friday because what you are about to read scared me so bad, I have forgotten what happened prior!). I picked the kids up from school and I went home and started making spaghetti. I had it done and turned on the oven to broil the garlic bread. I was stirring the spaghetti and smelt smoke. I turned around and seen where it was coming from the oven. I opened the door, because I hadn't put anything in there yet, and my husband had left a pizza box in there and it was totally on fire!!!!! I was so scared! I turned the oven off and shut the door. I called 911 and told them that I had a fire in my oven and I did't know how to put it out. The whole time, I was grabbing my baby and telling my daughter to go, run over to our neighbors. I left the house even before the alarms went off. I told my neighbor I had a fire and my daughter started crying about the cat. He ran over to our house and looked for him and when he opened the door, smoke rolled out of the door. My daughter started screaming and crying harder. He came back and said he couldn't find him. So, firefighters show up. The fire put itself out! When it burnt all the way up, since I had shut the oven off and shut the door, it suffocated itself. However, there was so much smoke, I had to let my babies stay at my mom's house for the night. I spent nearly 4 days cleaning everything in my house! It still smells a little- like when you burn popcorn. Everyone was and still is okay! Please tell everyone you know first, don't put things like pizza boxes in your oven, and second if you don't have a fire extinguisher, you can use flour or meal to put it out. I asked the firefighter what to do to put it out IF it ever happens again! Thanks for reading! Hope everyone has happy SAFE holidays! ;-)

Especially for school!

This week I have read about different writing processes and have tried some of them out! My favorites were the listing and informal outlining. I liked them because I was able to keep my ideas organized in a way that they made sense to me. My absolute favorite was the informal outline. This is because I was able to see in a quick glance what my ideas were. A better way of saying that is after I had written down what I needed to, I didn't have to really think about what I had written. I don't know if that makes any sense to readers, but it makes sense to me. Leave me a comment if I confuse you! I also want to acknowledge some of my academic challenges. I never thought I would have a problem with too many references for a paper, but I have found so many! I am having to go over and read these articles about my topic, which is ADHD in children ( attention deficit hyperactivity disorder). I do realize that this is actually a good thing because I have in mind so many good ideas from other authors that back up what I want to persuade my audience to see. The other idea that I want to stress this week is that school is influencing my life in so many ways right now! I am researching this topic and reading articles and I am learning so much! I am truly inspired by this topic! Not only am I learning more to further my education, I am also learning more about my daughters disability and things that I can do as a parent to help her! I know that may sound corny, but it is the absolute truth! I am so happy that I took this opportunity when I did, because what I am learning now is some of the most valuable information I have ever attained! Thank you Kaplan University!

Alright, this past week...

This week was not fun for me at all! All three of my children were sick and had to miss school, which in turn made me miss out on a lot of my studying! Any way, come to find out at their school, the teachers are having them use germx. Now, that is good for them, but if you don't wash your hands before using germzx you really aren't getting your hands clean. Let me just ask this question, what happens when you squirt germx on or in dirt? You get mud made out of alcohol! Yup! I work in the health area where we are required to take these follow up training classes. The nurse that teaches these classes always reminds us that it is not the soap or the germx that gets rid of the germs. It is the friction and the warm water that are the main germ killers! So, a big part of why I am posting this is so that other parents can be aware or maybe know to ask about hand washing habbits that their children are using while at school or where ever. I have had two cases of strep throat this week and let me tell you it was not fun! My son had an ear infection which led to fevers and what not, but my girls got sick from poor hand washing habbits at school! Thanks for reading!