Research Blog

Well, my paper is finally submitted and done. It turned out all right in my opinion. I belive that there's always room for improvement, but it also could have been worse. And what was more, it really was a learning experience for me. I know I said this in a blog entry earlier, but I knew that school funding was an issue, but I had no idea about most of the particulars until I delved into my research a bit more. At my high school, I had an idea that things were not perhaps ideal, but in all honesty it didn't seem that bad to me. I knew that there were problems, and that most teachers and staff did more than one thing, but then I watched that news story on my school about a month ago, and they just made it look absolutely horrible, like it was the worst place to go to school, and I remember thinking, well, I didn't think it was that bad. But it all comes down to what we get used to. I was used to it, so I didn't notice that in many ways, it was bad. I had no idea that my school was one of the first ones to join the lawsuit because it was considered one of the most affected schools by the funding defecit. I always knew that it was a part of it, but I had no idea that it was at the forefront of it. It was really quite a lot of eye opening information for me. Most people don't even realize the problems that these schools face. Sure, most manage to keep their students competing with larger schools, but the small schools definitely need the help and resources that state aid can provide. Another thing that I hadn't realized was how different Minnesota is from South Dakota in the area of teacher certification and salaries and retention. They are worlds ahead of South Dakota. Maybe we need to learn something from them. It seems to be working well for them. I had so much information on this topic, I probably could have written a 10 page paper. That was the hardest part, trying to decide what to use and what not to. At any rate, I'm kind of glad its done now. I'm ready for Christmas.