Critical Reflection #1:

As Confucius said “True wisdom is knowing what you don’t know” and Socrates said, “Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.”

1. What do you know?
   • Explain what you already know about your essential question. Explain why the topic is important to you, and what is motivating your inquiry.
   • What understandings and experiences are you bringing with you as you start this research process?
   • How have any outside sources informed your understanding of your essential question?
2. What don’t you know?
   • Why is it important for you to find out more about this question? Tell me what you want to know about your essential question?
   • What are the areas of inquiry that you think need to be explored?
   • What are the other questions that are lurking just beneath the surface of your guiding essential question?

As I began work on my first day of senior project, I was so enthusiastic. I’d been planning out every inch of this project since last fall, which understandably put a lot of pressure on this first day. I prepared my workspace and went to work. I was advancing through my research/sources at a good speed and completing the task I made for myself that day. This would be my routine for the following days.

When working on my senior project, I found myself becoming less and less enthusiastic about what I was learning. I was spending a good 6-8 hours a day analyzing the same information and reading the same texts. I tried everything from adjusting my workspace, to changing work hours, and even work methods. Still, nothing fixed this loss of ambition I had. I began to think that If it’s only been a few days and I am already so tired of this, I would not be able to enjoy these next coming weeks, and lose what could have been such an exciting last trimester.

So, after talking it over with the people in my life as well as Allison, I came up with a new approach to my project. I would spend some time reaching out to veterans of any of the wars I’d been studying and conduct interviews with them. I am now spending my time developing interview questions and a list of references which allow me to not only get a break from the research aspect of my project but allow me to put a “face” to the people I’d been learning about in the stories I read.

It wasn’t until I re-evaluated my senior project, and eventually found a way to incorporate more of a person to person and face to face experience, that I can now say I’ve finally begun to reestablish some of that same ambition –for a senior project– that I had had last fall when brainstorming initial ideas.