Blog #5
    After reading Tina Cook's article on "Mess", I have to agree with most of her findings about it being so hard in the beginning to not be orderly when learning to do action research. I used to be that way in the beginning of teaching, but I soon found out in life that you can not always find things when you want to if you are that messy. Being involved in mathematics for so long, I find that I usually rely heavily on examples of how to do certain operations and so on. I feel that you can't just tell someone to solve a problem in mathematics without giving examples and showing them the way to do it. This was how I learned how to do things. This however is not the way that you go about doing "Action Research". I can understand how it can be very difficult because I tried to help my daughter for the last two years as she had a job doing research at Rhode Island Hospital under a couple of doctors. When I asked her what she was suppose to do, she said"Research on Cancer" I was really shocked that the doctors did not tell her to do experiments for a theory that they had, but to write up a proposal and present it at meetings. She struggled at this in the beginning until she had some help from family members and friends helping her to redefine what it was that she was going to do.
   This is what we have to do here also. Look for a question that needs to be answered and come up with ways and data to support some hypotheses that we make. This is never an easy task for people who are not experienced in doing things this way. Hopefully, I'll be able to complete and present my Research as well as my daughter figured out how to do her research.