Thank you so much for sharing! I very much appreciated your vulnerable and honest reflection of what you experienced this week. It is helpful to know that there are others who are also trying hard to balance family life, work and school. It can feel at times like I’m not doing any of them well because I’m pulled between too many things at any given time. I am reminded of a reading from our LDRS500 course and Lillian Watson’s (1988) Light From Many Lamps, where Sir William Osler shares advice about the secret of success. He shared his thoughts with students from Yale in an address he called “A Way of Life”. He told them “to concentrate on the day’s work, to do what needed to be done to the best of their ability, shutting off the past and the future, living in day tight compartments” (Watson, 1988, p.215). He went on to say,
The load of tomorrow, added to that of yesterday, carried today makes the strongest falter…. Waste of energy, mental distress, nervous worries dog the steps of a man who is anxious about the future. Shut close, then, the great fore and aft bulkheads, and prepare to cultivate the habit of a life in “day tight compartments!” (Watson, 1988, p. 216)
Dale Carnegie (1948) refers to this same message in his book How To Stop Worrying and To Start Living and says that when things become overwhelming to place them in day tight compartments. I have found myself doing that a lot this week. My dog has been really ill after surgery and I have been concerned about her along with the enormous costs associated with her care. Between my dog, and all of my other responsibilities including this course, it all began to pile up as a huge weight. I was reminded of this passage and decided that I was going to tackle one thing at a time by placing each item into day tight compartments. It is very comforting to me to know that we are all on this journey together and that we are present to encourage each other in both the good times and especially through our struggles. I am grateful that you shared!
To answer the question that you posed…
My closing question is more practical and likely not going to generate much in the way of substantive responses from my fellow students, for which I apologize. I would like to get an understanding of how my fellow students read and follow qualitative research reports. I am from a clinical background – the vast majority of research I was exposed to in both of my baccalaureate degrees was quantitative. I found some of the qualitative articles assigned in both LDRS 500 and LDRS 671 sent my head spinning. Between trying to keep track of all the acronyms and the multiple hypotheses that kept coming up in the articles I had difficulties following the direction and understanding what I was reading. Do you have a mental method, or another method of following all of the concepts and hypotheses being introduced?
Your comment made me smile as I am the complete opposite! I don’t enjoy reading the quantitative research reports and much prefer the qualitative ones. Perhaps it’s because of my background in Humanities instead of Science. I can appreciate however, that there are limitations for both kinds of reports and that if somehow they can be combined, they might better meet the needs of all audiences.
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