I don't really think I learned anything about critical thinking this week. Although reading tragedies and blogging about them forced me to THINK, I don't think it really effected my ABILITY to think; I don't do that kind of thinking often, but it's the same kind of thinking I've done all through high school when I know I need to do something.
Also, I think my ability to think critically changes depending the situation I'm in and the pressure I'm under. If I'm doing something in class and I have a few more days that I know I can get it done in, I'm likely not going to try very hard for the first few days, and my progress might look a little sloppy and like I'm not putting my best effort forward. But, if I have something that's due the next morning and I'm working on it at home in my own time, you'd see a different side of my critical thinking ability. When the pressure is high and I'm working on something at home, I'm always able to get a lot of high quality work done, surprisingly. I'm kind of a naturally good critical thinker, but it doesn't always show in the most convenient of times. So this week I didn't really learn anything new about critical thinking, I was just able to put my prior skills to use a little more than usual.
0 Comments
As bad as it sounds to say, I feel like I didn't learn that much this week besides some things here and there about point of view which I hadn't learned before, probably since we've been writing our group essays pretty much all week. Also, I had an experience myself in which I had to look at something through someone else's, and vise versa. I know that's not really the kind of point of view we were talking about for our essay, but still. It counts.
Also, this week i got sent a contract to work at my summer camp for half of next summer. It's a job I've wanted my whole life, so I don't know why I'm suddenly getting cold feet, but I am. It sounds so exciting and great, but on the other hand it'll probably be the scariest, most independent thing I've ever done. I'm going to be challenged in my faith and my mental abilities, while also trying to keep someone else's 7-9 year olds alive for a week, which is absolutely terrifying. What if I'm not good enough? What if I'm the youngest counselor there and nobody tries to be friends with me? What if it's the loneliest five weeks of my life, when I could be at home spending time with my friends before college? On that note, what if my friends forget about me while I'm gone and we lose touch? So today, when I went to accept the contract I was sent, I didn't accept it. I didn't decline it either, so I think I'm just going to let it marinate for a while and pray about it too. I really want this job, but I think it's an opportunity cost thing. I don't really know what I want anymore and that scares me, but I really just hope I make the right choice in the end. On the bright side, though, I'd be making money- which would be nice because I've never had a job before and I'd have some spending money for college. That doesn't necessarily outweigh the things I'm scared of missing back home, like time with my sister and my friends before I leave them for four years, but that could all just be things that could hold me back from having the best five weeks of my life. This wasn't really about what I learned in class and I apologize for that, but it's something that's been on my mind and writing about it felt like the right way to get it out. I did learn stuff this week though, I promise. Click the button below to read an article about the job of a camp counselor, which I legitimately read in my free time yesterday while trying to decide if the job was right for me. Also pray for my grade because this is a very low quality and irrelevent blog post and I can already see my grade going down because of it. The end. This week the biggest thing (and only thing) I felt that I was able to take away was from the talk that the author gave about his experience with effective writing and how we could apply it to our own. Before this week, I'm now realizing that I wasn't writing effectively at all, and this kind of goes along with a lesson my psychology professor taught in effective studying last week.
First of all, I learned that your writing space should be your writing space. From the author, I learned that you should have one designated spot for your writing to take place, whether that be a home office, desk, or just a quiet spot for exclusively writing only to happen. I think he brought up a good point, because, for example, if I were to write in the kitchen, I'd usually get sidetracked and eat a snack or something. To go along with that, my psych professor talked about a similar topic last week, but with studying, and I think they go together well. She told us that in order to effectively study, you must place yourself somewhere where other things don't happen. She said not to study in your room because that's where you sleep, so consequently you'll be thinking more about sleeping than studying and become too tired to get your work done. Along those same lines, there are certain things you shouldn't do while studying in your study space to avoid creating distractions that can become habits. For example, when you find a new study space, you should avoid bringing any electronics in this area so that you never have that distraction in the first place. Once your brain knows that your phone is sitting next to you and you can check it whenever you want, your thoughts will drift to that instead of your studying (or writing) just because you originally brought it into your study space at all. Another example would be food- if you introduce food into your study space, all you will ever think about when you're there is eating snacks. Overall, I think that these two lessons learned in different classes go together very well. I think that in order to study effectively you must do certain things to avoid distractions, and I think that in your writing space you must do the same. You must almost set rules for yourself when you first establish a writing space so that food, electronics, and other distractions don't cause you to lose your focus and make you less productive in your writing and studying. This week taught me many lessons about how to be a less distracted and effective writer, and I will definitely take them with me as I move forward. Click the button below to read about more ways to create an effective writing space. I don't really know where to start out with my blog this week. I did learn a lot of things, and I could write a lot about how I learned to revise my pieces by commenting on them, but there's another topic that isn't sitting well with me that I want to write about.
I've noticed a reoccurring topic and literature and poetry, and it's sex. Coming from a conservative, Christian point of view, the use of sex as a casual topic for many of the poems and pieces we read in class is kind of concerning. Of course I know that this is something that is relevant in many of my peers lives and I'm not here to judge them for doing things that are below my personal standards, but I'm having a hard time understanding why class is somewhere appropriate to be constantly talking about sex like it's a casual topic. Over the last two weeks my friend and I have had many conversations about this, and I've compiled a list of things in my head that would be more worthwhile to write about in poetry and present to a group of teenagers than sex, so I'm going to list them here to add more words to my blog and stress how inappropriate and out of context the poetry and literature containing the topic of sex is in this class. We could listen to poetry about dogs, family, nature, food, skydiving, babies, farmers, etc. Okay so these aren't really relevant or interesting topics either, but they still are more appropriate to talk about in a classroom that's not health class. Literature is ART!!! It's also kind of interesting! That’s what I learned this week in AP Lit, that even though I read and interpret literature differently than I interpret art, it’s still something that can be viewed in a more imaginative way than what I previously thought to be true. I’m not the biggest fan of literature, but after this week in class I am going to try harder to notice the artistic elements of literature than I did before. I’d consider myself to be a creative person, and I love art, so when I look at art I think about it much deeper than I consider literature, which explains why I might understand a piece of art better than I can understand the meaning of literature that an author is trying to convey. Also, everyone’s perception of everything is different. Sometimes I forget this and end up feeling like everyone understands something but me, when in reality nobody’s understanding of a piece or art or literature is necessarily right except for the author’s. That being said, my perception of a piece may be totally different to someone else’s perception of a piece, which is totally fine. After this week, I think I’ll have a better understanding and appreciation for the literature that we’re going to read than I did before. When I start to train my mind on how to think about something without just seeing a page with a ton of difficult writing on it, I can actually understand what point an author was trying to communicate by the different poetic elements that they use. Overall, I’m finally beginning to understand how to critically think about literature! Comparing lit to art really helped me to think about it in a more creative way than I previously had, which is how my mind works. I’ve always kind of hated reading and understanding literature, but now that I can better understand it I think that I might actually enjoy it a little bit. Click the link below to read Literature as an Art Form from JournalPulp.com
This week went by so fast that I almost couldn't remember what we learned, as it started to blend with weeks one and two towards the end. I feel like I've been going and going and going, and I haven't really had a chance to stop and breathe, let alone try to remember which lesson from the last five days of AP Lit specifically intrigued me. I think I'm going to use the quote from the board, "Don't use water to put out a grease fire" to help whoever's reading this to understand my progress in this class so far. I'll start with the grease. The grease would be my inability to understand literature (sometimes) in the way this class requires one to, and my very vague understanding of critical thinking when it comes to the understanding of the meanings of literature when we are to understand not only the literature itself, but also the different possible meanings of the writing besides what it may mean literally. The actual class itself is the burner, which is so demanding, intense, and a kind of stress I've felt before but that's familiar in the way where it's a huge burden sometimes. The burner is hot, and risky, just like one week of miscalculated reading can lead to a sudden drop in my grade, which, at the time, will feel impossible to recover with everything else going on in the class that I don't understand. When the burner and the grease mix, a fire is obviously a result, which in my poorly constructed metaphor would represent me crashing and burning, as I try to balance the critical thinking that this class demands with the fogginess of my brain filled with distractions from things outside of class. In the end, I try to put out my grease fire with water, which ends in me crashing and burning and understanding less and less how to understand the deep meaning behind the literature that I'm being told to critically think about. For now, I'm trying to find a better method to put out the fire. Read The Guardian article How to Read Literature by Terry Eagleton by clicking the link below.
This week has been an experience. On Monday, we set our reading rate, which I thought I would be able to accomplish as I'm usually good at keeping up with school work as it's given and not falling behind. I was very wrong. See, I forgot to factor in that I'm a swimmer, a team captain, a club president, a Sunday morning church service and Sunday night youth group attendee, a math class homework do-er, a psychology 100 nightly study-er, and many other things all while trying to include a healthy social life and sleep schedule. With all these things combined, I found it much harder than I'd previously thought to keep on task with my SSR book for AP Lit.
I learned many things this week that were important in class, but the one thing that seems to be sticking out to me the most wasn't a class lesson at all, but a life lesson. In the beginning of the week, Mr. Schoenborn said something that remained in my head for the rest of the week and probably will remain in my head forever; "You're always going to be busy, so it's pointless to make excuses.". You're probably wondering why I didn't listen to his words if they stuck out to me, but then you and I would be in the same boat. Overall, this week I had a very hard time juggling my involvement outside of school with the necessary time and focus I should've committed to completing school work and reading my SSR book. As i go into this next week, I won't be any less busy, but I'm going to try my absolute hardest to prioritize better and to accomplish more than I did during the second week of AP Lit. It's very important to me to maintain my work ethic and the respect I've built up from various teachers over the years because of it, and in a way I feel like I've failed myself in this class by not reaching the goals I've set so far. The moral of this post is that I learned a very valuable lesson in time management, and it's ironic but symbolic that I wore a watch for the first time today because it marks the start of me actually using it. See article Too-Busy Teens Feel Health Toll from the Washington Post by clicking the link below. The first week of school usually hits me like a truck, but thankfully this year so far has been different. As a senior, I didn’t feel the same amount of anxious that I usually do in the beginning of the school year, so I hope that sticks around. I was worried about taking an AP class on top of a dual enroll course and a math class, sports, and clubs, but now that I’m a week in, I don’t know what I was so worried about. First, I have a good class. When I walked in on the first day, the only people I recognized were three or four of my friends; I hadn’t seen most of my classmates before. On the first day of class we went outside and introduced ourselves and explained why we’re here and how we got here. Doing that activity made me realize that I wasn’t in a typical AP class, and I began to regret my decision of choosing to take it less and less as the hour went on. Throughout the week, this realization occurred to me more and more as we read poetry at the beginning of class every day, which I didn’t appreciate previously but started to enjoy towards the end of the week. The most memorable thing that I can take away this week was the discussion of immersion learning. As I thought more about it and about what I want to do with my life, I was able to connect it to my own life in a way that could affect my entire future. For my whole life I’ve wanted to learn American Sign Language, and I’ve been debating on whether or not I should sign up to take a course at CMU for the spring semester, and after this week I think I’m going to. In the future I want to be an occupational therapist, which definitely means I’ll be working with children who speak ASL or are learning ASL as their main form of communication. I think it would be a huge accomplishment to be able to communicate with the deaf community and understand their culture as a hearing person, and I plan on enrolling in a course as soon as I can after the discussion today. To relate this back to immersion learning, I want to be in a position where I know enough ASL to be thrown into a school or university of deaf students and be able to communicate and learn more from them in a short or extended period of time. Maybe, if immersion learning works for me, I could end up teaching or instructing members of the hearing impaired community as a career or just being able to communicate with ASL speaking people in general. I’m glad that this class has already opened my eyes to future opportunities that I’m going to investigate more. See How Immersion Helps to Learn a Language by the New York Times. |
Kayla Campbell
Write something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
November 2017
Categories |