Here we go...

Crazy title, right?  "Good student...bad mother..." Are you thinking, "huh?"

Thought you might, so here is post #1, explaining what we are doing here.  My name is Rikki, I live in Appalachia, have three children, work full-time as a teacher for students with special needs, adjunct at our local community and technical college...and...I'm a doctoral student.

No, M.D. won't follow my name, but Ed.D., a doctor of education.  I enjoy being a student--I like the intellectual debates surrounding pressing issues of our educational systems, discussing different philosophies and theories about learning, and talking with others about best practices.  But, being a doc student doesn't really mesh well with our Appalachian culture.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not surrounded by men in the the Ed.D. program, women are very well represented, but women with young children (namely, 7 yrs, 5 yrs, and 2 yrs)?  Not so much.  On a fairly routine basis, I am called out, either overtly or covertly about how I must not be a good mother if I am devoting so much time to the doc program.  Those experiences bring me to this blog...

One characteristic of educational research is to take a problem and go at it.  After being approached by a fellow classmate and a professor (who should introduce themselves somewhat soon), we decided that being a mom and a doc student in Appalachia would pose for a really interesting qualitative research project.  The question then came, how would we record information?  Well, in this technological age, blogging seemed like a good solution.

So here we go, embarking on this recorded journey of being a mom and a doc student (BTW, I have erased probably 50 characters of my son's typing and my daughter has been put back to bed about 5 times in the course of this first blog).  This blog should be candid and straightforward, and we aren't quite sure what is going to develop from it.  But, you are more than welcome to ride along with us!  Feel free to comment and ask questions!