E603, Fall 2004

Learning Records A1 & A2

According to the test, I am an inventor-type personality, with a strong natural bent to exercise functional creativity and invention. I strongly agree with this assessment, for nearly every explanation is correct about me. I am extremely "sensitive to possibilities," I love to take on an "informative role" in conversations and relationships, and I have a strong "hunger for knowledge." The idea of exploring the unknown and encountering new results thrills me – I love nothing more than to be challenged by an idea contrary to my own and to overcome that obstacle. I enjoy "finding out about everything" with which I come into contact, and I drive my friends crazy asking, "Why? How do we know? Why not an alternative?"

It is also true, though, that I ignore the standard. I often feel the freedom to ask the questions that interest me though I have little patience for others’ questions if I don’t consider them important to my plan. I can tend to be pretty single-minded when I have a goal in mind, and I can easily offend people who personalize my dedication to a certain purpose. I’ve matured a lot in this over the past four years, and it is now much more a part of my natural tendency to stop and consider the feelings of others. But that habit has been carefully cultivated and developed, and it’s been hard work!

This affects my reading and writing in that I love to experiment and break boundaries. The writers I admire most are those whom I deem to be most original and fearless in their proclamations. I enjoy John Cheever’s writing because it is so witty. I also love Voltaire’s Candide because of his skillful critique of the modern intellectual climate (I think perhaps I enjoy Candide because it was the first satire I read, aware of its aims. Pretty much every book critiques something, but I just really love Candide). Voltaire’s call back to practicality, "We must tend our garden," so captures me, I think, because it convicts me of my constant dreaming and calls me to what is real. I am the queen of started projects and very little follow-through. I thrive on new ideas but struggle to carry the old ones to completion. As a reader and writer, therefore, I am most excited by newness of technique and boldness of intellect. Fearless experimentation in a written work speaks to me.

My own development as a scholar and writer has hinged almost entirely on my personal drive to improve. At my small high school, it was very easy for me to impress my teachers, probably due to the fact that I really enjoy writing and therefore might evidence an excitement in my compositions, as well as the fact that very few other students in my English classes ever cared about producing good writing. So, relative to the rest of the students, I stood out as a good writer. I won most of our writing awards and in my junior year received the History/English departmental award.

The reason this is very bad is that I rarely even edited my papers – rewriting was hardly a step in my writing process. In high school I consistently wrote papers at the last minute, and though I did put lots of concentrated effort into my essays, it was usually all night before a 9 a.m. deadline. It was easy for me to please my teachers in high school, so I was rarely challenged to work harder and improve. Therefore, I’m having a hard time breaking my bad habits now that I’m at college and I really want to improve as a writer.

That’s not to say I wasn’t stretched, though. My high school had an excellent History/English curriculum, with the two disciplines combined and taught together in a block-period format (It was so good, I wish I could go back and take all 4 years of History/English again). The curriculum was excellent in its ability to pique my natural curiosity: we were taught to ask questions incessantly, and the seminar format from which many classes were taught placed a great deal of responsibility on the individual student. I was taught and trained well at Trinity. I just don’t think that I was pushed to realize my potential as a writer.

As far as my reading life is concerned… I struggle so much with it! I have stacks and lists of books to read everywhere. This seems to be typical of "inventors": we love the conception of an idea, but the fruition of it is rarely our greatest concern. I begin every book excitedly, with the intention of completing it in a few sittings, but then I usually end up becoming captivated by some other book and so I start that one (I’ve been working to ameliorate this nasty habit, and I’m slowly but surely improving). "School gets in the way of my education," as the bumper sticker says, because I tend to shift my focus from the process of learning and maturing to the product of a finished paper or a grade or a completed project. In my heart I cherish that journey and struggle, the pilgrimage from ignorance to knowledge and wisdom, but I often fall into the trap of results. Reading, then, becomes a tool for writing a response or a task to finish. In light of my first two course goals, I want to maintain the right perspective on my reading: to enjoy reading for its own innate beauty and its ability to change me through its process.

For years I’ve kept a file of my writing experiments, the little projects I end up typing until the wee hours of the morning on Friday nights when I skip parties to go explore new places by myself. On these nights, the rare times that I block out enough time and create enough silence for my brain to process everything around it, I usually end up thinking a thought that changes my course for weeks to come. These ideas come too seldom, though, because too rarely do I nurture my ideas and thought processes. I realized this year that I am to blame for my paltry portfolio. Too rarely do I write, beause too rarely do I let myself think. I met an English major last year who pointed out that "in order to write you have to read." This too was convicting – for so long I had separated the two, assuming that as a writer, I had only to practice writing in order to improve. Now I see the interrelatedness of the two, for they go hand in hand.