I am worried about the Celebration of Student Writing because I don’t feel like I really know what we are supposed to cover when people come up to us. I also don’t feel like I have anything worth looking at to put on display.
December 5, 2009
Research Journal Entry #25
I am pretty well satisfied with my research portfolio. I have everything printed and labeled and placed inside a binder. I also have a corresponding annotated table of contents with complete with links for every item on a page on this blog. I feel ready to begin my final essay.
Research Journal Entry #24
Chapter 8 of FieldWorking for the most part was very helpful. I really enjoyed reading “Shitty First Drafts” by Anne Lamott but found “Toolbox” by Stephen King to be a bit weird. I believe the three questions (What surprised me? What intrigued me? What disturbed me?) the authors have wanted us to ask while conducting our projects are a great idea and really seem to work. I think that when I go to revise my essay that “Some Notes on Revision” by Donald M. Murray will definitely come in handy.
I plan to do a text based essay perhaps with a few images included for my final research project. I am for the most part through with altering my table of contents and organizing my research portfolio so I will begin writing the final paper very soon.
Analysis- What I have been up to- Fieldnotes over Handedness
1. Tests were done and results found that left-handedness is associated with immune disease, migraine, and developmental learning disorders.
Geschwind, N., and P. Behan, “Left-handedness: association with immune disease, migraine, and developmental learning disorder.” PNAS August 1, 1982. vol. 79, no. 16. National Academy of Sciences. 1 Dec. 2009 .
2. About 10 percent of the population is left handed. Lists the many meanings of left in multiple languages. No ser zurdo in Spanish means “to be very clever” and translates as “not to be left-handed.” Says that people believe that somehow lefthanders are wrong and need to be corrected.
Common Phrases
Left handed complement- insult
Son from left side of the bed- illegitimate
Left handed marriage- not one at all
Left handed honeymoon- with someone else’s husband
Left handed wife- mistress
Left handed diagnosis- is wrong
Left handed wisdom- collection of errors
Left handed business- something unlawful
Bent to the left- someone calling you homosexual
Coren, Stanley, The Left-Hander Syndrome: The Causes and Consequences of Left- Handedness. Random House, Inc: New York, 1992. 1-6. .
3. “The two most widely published genetic theories of human hand preference argue that evolutionary natural selection produced a majority of individuals with speech and language control in the left hemisphere of the brain. Because the left hemisphere also controls the movements of the right hand–and notably the movements needed to produce written language–millennia of evolutionary development resulted in a population of humans that is biased genetically toward individuals with left hemisphere speech/language and right-hand preference.” Two alleles associated, D gene and C gene(chance), ppl with C gene will have a 50% chance of being right handed and a 50% chance of being left handed. “These theories can also explain the presence of right-handed children in families with left-handed parents and the presence of left-handed children in families with right-handed parents. If the familial genetic pool contains C genes, then hand preference becomes amenable to chance influences, including the pressures of familial training and other environmental interventions that favor the use of one hand over the other.”
Porac, Clare. “What causes some people to be left-handed, and why are fewer people left- handed than right-handed?” Scientific American. 21 June 2004. Scientific
American.com. 2 Dec. 2009 .
4. Left handed ppl more likely to become alcoholics than right handed ppl.
Left handed people tend to be on the extreme sides when it comes to intellect- retardation or high IQ. Intelligent lefties supposedly have an IQ over 140.
Right hand is used for clean tasks while left hand is used to wipe yourself after going to the bathroom.
“Christians believe that when judgement day arrives according to custom God blesses the saved with his right hand and casts out all the sinners out of Heaven with his left hand.”
Daniels, Donna. “Unique Left Handed Facts.” 22 Dec. 2006. AssociatedContent.com. 2 Dec. 2009 .
5. Left handed women more likely to contract some serious illnesses and die sooner. “When left-handed women were compared with the other women, and the data were adjusted for a number of other factors, lefties had a 40 percent higher risk of dying from any cause, a 70 percent higher risk of dying from cancer, and a 30 percent higher risk of dying from diseases of the circulatory system.” There a fewer left handed ppl in older generations because being left-handed was looked down upon. In ancient Japan a man could divorce his wife for being a leftie.
Glessner, Lynn. “Bad News for Left-Handed Women: Left-handed Women Suffer from More Disease, and Premature Death.” 3 May 2007. AssociatedContent.com. 2 Dec. 2009 .
6. “Research done by a team from the Queens University at Belfast in 2004, suggests that the hand you prefer to use as a ten-week-old fetus is the hand you will favor for the rest of your life. These scientists, studied the fetuses through scans, and identified sixty fetuses sucking their right thumb and twelve, their left thumb. They followed up these children at the ages of 10-12, and found that all the right thumb sucking fetuses were right handed children , but about a two thirds of the left thumb sucking Fetuses had developed as left handed children; the others had switched over from left to right!…. This team suggested that instead of the brain decdidng the handedness, the opposite was probably the real story. Nerve connections from the body to the brain develop before the connections that allow the brain to control the body’s movement.” “Results support the portrait of more bilateral language representation among left-handers, and suggest language lateralization affects high-level language comprehension tasks such as joke comprehension.”- lefties laugh more
Gokhale, S. “A Right Look at the Left: An Investigation into What it Means to Be Lefthanded: In Honor of August 13, International Lefthanders Day.” 31 July 2007. AssociatedContent.com. 2 Dec. 2009 .
Current Codebook
Codes for Surveys:
1. R = Right handed person
2. L = Left handed person
3. Amb = Ambidextrous
4. G = Grandmother served as teacher
5. M = Mom served as teacher
6. D = Dad served as teacher
7. P = Both parents served as teachers
8. T = School teacher served as teacher
9. GP’s = Both grandparents served as teachers
10. * (handwritten star shape) = try to contact person to follow up with interview
Main Codes:
1. F = Forced to write with right hand
2. TILT = When taught was told to tilt page certain way
3. HP = Particular hand position was advised
4. KF = Knows someone that believes in forcing right handedness
5. KT = knowledgeable about the left being “sinister” or “feminine” or “evil”
6. WR = told writing was wrong at any point in life
7. C/D = right is clean hand, left used for dirty jobs
8. PR = has encountered problems due to being left handed
9. PUN = punished for deviation
10. UO = use of other hand when not in school
11. AL = ambidextrous but lost ability
12. SC = change in society- movement towards accepting left handed people
December 4, 2009
Codebook
CodeBook Codes for Surveys:
1. R = Right handed person
2. L = Left handed person
3. Amb = Ambidextrous
4. G = Grandmother served as teacher
5. M = Mom served as teacher
6. D = Dad served as teacher
7. P = Both parents served as teachers
8. T = School teacher served as teacher
9. GP’s = Both grandparents served as teachers
10. * (handwritten star shape) = try to contact person to follow up with interview
Main Codes:
1. F = Forced to write with right hand
2. TILT = When taught was told to tilt page certain way
3. HP = Particular hand position was advised
4. KF = Knows someone that believes in forcing right handedness
5. KT = knowledgeable about the left being “sinister” or “feminine” or “evil”
6. WR = told writing was wrong at any point in life
7. C/D = right is clean hand, left used for dirty jobs
8. PR = has encountered problems due to being left handed
9. PUN = punished for deviation
10. UO = use of other hand when not in school
11. AL = ambidextrous but lost ability
12. SC = change in society- movement towards accepting left handed people
