–> Critical Reflection #5 Assignment: Metacognition [CR5]

What have you discovered about your process, your habits?

Now, what do you know you don’t know? Circle back to your essential question.

5/13

Essential question: How can storytelling help me to examine the world around me?

While I’ve never done this sort of writing before, I have done a lot of writing, and so I expected my process and work habits to be similar. These can be very odd. For example, while many people find first drafts helpful in academic work for formulating their thoughts, I prefer to just think about my topic for a while and then spit out an entire essay, fully formed. I treat that as a first draft, making some revisions and editing, but usually I don’t need to do much. This is because it can be hard for me to translate my ideas into sentences that people can understand. I expected a challenge with my project because I tend to produce work in one or two work periods rather than incrementally, because I lose my train of thought pretty easily, and I don’t like to start and not finish something. Because of the nature of the Senior Project experience, that approach doesn’t work. I’ve never really done a project of this magnitude before, especially with so little guidance and expertise, so I didn’t know what to expect, but I thought developing my ideas with freewriting and brainstorming might lead me to a sketch I could essentially fill in, so I didn’t feel I wasn’t completing things. This kind of worked, but I have another, bigger problem, one I also had when trying to decide on a senior project: new ideas. Before I follow through on one plot idea I had, I get another that I like better, and am deeply dissatisfied with the others. This makes it very difficult to really get anything done. However, it has upsides. I’ve been struggling with my essential question: I couldn’t figure out how to connect it to my project and I felt I wasn’t answering it. I’ve realized, though, that the new ideas I have are actually a result of examining the world around me in the context of my work; I just never made that connection. This is partially because I expected more introspection to result from the work and I had thought that what I examined might be smaller-scale, more immediate, and closer to home. I’ve still been feeling kind of stuck between my essential question and my project. I’m not totally sure what my goal is: to address my essential question or to complete my actual project. The two seem incompatible; addressing my essential question means continuing to engage with new ideas, which prevents me from finishing my project.