Research: Informal vs. Formal

Hey Tess! What's up? I was wondering if I could talk to you about this research project for school. See the assignment started in my AP world history class and I had to research the rights and responsibilities of a topic of my choice. Then we had to make notecards and bib cards for at least ten sources on information about the topic you chose. After I did all of that stuff we were told that we had to complete a project like an exhibit, a video or something of that source on our topic that could be entered in this contest for National History Day. Aside from that we have to write a four to six paged paper on the research we found. And we had to redo our bib cards to make sure our sources were reliable which took forever. Sounds like a lot right. I know. Well at least I learned some things about my topic so this project didn't seem like a total waste, ya know. Well I learned that Spartan women were able to dress freely, train their body, own/ inherit land, be involved with politics but "behind he scenes and were able to educate themselves. And i even learned that all of their "freedom" may have come from Sparta's isolation from any other civilization or the fact that men couldn't handle all of the land and its responsibilities on their own when Sparta expanded so they included women and gave them more "freedom" to help themselves out. And there's plenty of more information on Spartan women that I learned as well. I figured that since you are so interested in women's rights that you would want to learn about the rights that some women had a long time ago.

In AP world history ,a couple of months ago, my class and I were assigned to participate in National History Day. For National History Day our teacher, Ms. Harper, informed us that we would have to research a topic that occurred in the past or during ancient times that pertained to rights and responsibilities, which was the theme for National History this year. My topic is on the rights and responsibilities of Spartan women. We had to research our topic and create at least ten bib cards on the sources we used to find information. Our bib cards had to include an annotation as well that included an evaluation. summary and reflection on that source. Our teacher then checked our annotations and bib cards and gave us feedback on them before we had to start working on our English portion of this project. Also for the world history portion of this National History project our class had to make some sort of visual display that explained our topic and all of the information we learned through an exhibit, a ten to twelve page paper, a documentary, a performance or a web site. This visual display is due around March and if its good our teacher will enter in the National History Day contest against other students all over the nation. And for English we had to transfer the information we learned and researched into a four to six page research paper. Also before writing the research paper we had to edit and revise our bi cards and make sure they were reliable and credible. From all the research on my topic I learned a copies amount of facts and information. I learned that Spartan women weren't really respected by other ancient civilization women because of their many rights and freedoms and they looked at them in a different way. Spartan women were allowed to train their body, educate themselves, participate in behind the scenes politics and participate in contest against men that enhanced and reflected their physical training. Spartan women were supplied with these many rights most likely due to Sparta's isolation and their fast and quick expansion. Spartan women were even able to dress freely, participate in other jobs and activities besides watching after children and cooking and were able to educate themselves in literature and other subjects. All of these rights were frowned upon by other ancient civilizations especially Athens.