1. "I am most concerned with keeping the proper mindset.  I’m sure that we’re going to have a hefty workload, which I don’t mind, because I have the opportunity to become something by the work that we’ll do.  It’s easy, however, to let the trees blind my view of the forest, so to speak.  I don’t want to lose sight of the greater goals we have for the class when I begin to think about deadlines and due dates.  If I can complete the year having kept the mindset that I will live out what I learn, and if I become a better person because of what goes through my head, I’ll count myself successful in your course."

I want desperately to gain skill in thinking.  Perhaps the most frustrating aspect of life, as I see it, is that everyone seems to have a bias.  No fact stands alone.  Every morsel of information is either presented in light of or interpreted through a preconceived idea or disposition, and that makes it awfully hard to reconcile opposing viewpoints or to be "objective" in filtering through contrary theories and beliefs.  I’d love to be able to interact with ideas themselves, rather than accepting some expert’s theory on the ideas.

In order to do these things, I commit to creating an environment for myself that is conducive to achieving these two primary goals. Thus, I will work against every natural tendency and habit in my body by not procrastinating my work. I will begin work on large projects the day they are assigned and break my work into smaller bits, so that I don’t have to pull another all-nighter… I wish to complete the final revision on all my projects and essays at least one full day ahead of the prescribed due date.

I seek to "hammer [my] thoughts into unity" by appreciating their intrinsic truth, as well as that determined by their context. Moreover, I seek to learn what it means to hammer my thoughts into unity.

I feel like our class has actually done a lot for me personally. One quote from Jude, especially, had a significant meaning for me, and several of our readings have made me think a lot. Thinking through the concept of "place" has helped me reconcile my former ideas of place with my transition to UT. Am I necessarily becoming a better person because of my experience in the course? That I can’t say for sure. I do feel like the practice of reading and doing a fairly considerable amount of writing/writing frequently has improved my ability to synthesize ideas and communicate them. Something I wonder each and every day is how I’m going to "live out what I learn" in this class and all my others – how do I make the knowledge and truth jump from the page into my life and the world? My whole life I’ve grappled with that question. I actually get pretty frustrated with the college experience sometimes because I don’t feel like anything’s changing as a result of my time here. I mean, here I am, racking up student loans and devoting all my time to this college experience, and the world’s problems are only continuing to get worse – the AIDS orphans in Africa aren’t benefiting from the time I spend working on Logic problem sets.

Then again, I have to remember that college is about preparation – preparing myself to not just do a certain job but to be the person I’m intended to be. These four years are about struggling and grappling and laughing and growing so that, if I do eventually work for the Peace Corps, I’ll embark on my journey with more than a diploma in my pocket; I’ll be a person who’s learned how to love, how to survive, how to thrive. I’ll have learned what it means to live.

My thinking, to be honest, has been cloudy for the past, oh, three weeks, because I’ve been tired since at least the beginning of October. So, while I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and learning, I don’t think I’m reaching my potential: every time I get deep in thought I either get sleepy or just hit a brick wall because I’ve only had 3 hours of sleep the night before. So, in order to change my thinking, I’m going to change my habits:

I’m going to start sleeping more.

I just added the part about starting projects the day they’re assigned. I haven’t been doing so well thus far in avoiding procrastination. Hopefully getting started earlier will help me finish earlier!

Our journals help me unify my thoughts – I’ve enjoyed the writing that’s required of us because it forces me to think and process our assignments. Of course, I don’t yet know what it means to hammer my thoughts into unity, but I believe that I’m learning. At a few different times during the semester, seemingly random ideas from different classes have synthesized nicely. When that happens, I think about the second or third day of class when Professor Bump noted that "We murder to dissect … the butterfly was greater than the sum of its parts." It’s been awesome to begin to realize the interrelatedness of all things. That makes Logic [a little] more tolerable: I know that it’s [somehow] helping to make me a better writer because the material in Logic isn’t completely separate from the William Blake poetry we read in class. It’s all about the process and about my learning how to learn and to live. Sometimes painful, sometimes frightening, all these courses I’m taking and decisions I’m making and challenges I’m facing are somehow all building into me as a person in this complicated network and blend of events called Freshman Year, the last year of being a teenager, my period of individuating, my first time living on my own, what feels like my first shot at living. I’ve made some pretty stupid choices, while other decisions have worked out quite nicely. I’m choosing to trust that this whole plan is for my benefit and things are going to come together properly.

[1] If the course were to end right now, I think I would have an A. Right now I have 353 points of the possible 1,129 (with 900 points equaling an "A"). Though even the student with the highest grade in our class has less than half the points required for "A" status, we have several hefty grades in the next few weeks, such as P1B, P2A&B, and the Portfolio. These larger chunks of points will provide the opportunity for points. I just need to start working on them now so that I don’t suffer from procrastinating all that work.

[2] Most of my suggestions for my self-improvement are in the comments I made on my course goals above. Mainly, time management is a skill I desperately need to improve. I’m hoping that when I go to the time management session this week, they’ll teach me several nifty incantations and give me a genie bottle to rub so that my problem will be miraculously fixed. If this doesn’t happen, though, I’ll have to settle in for the long haul of implementing more discipline and foresight into my schedule.

I should also find out more about creating web pages. I can’t really shell out $100 for Dream Weaver, but I’ll find out what I can do…

[3] What would I alter about our class? The first thing that comes to mind is not requiring us to "perform" our journals with the parenthetical citation arm movements… it makes it hard to follow others’ writing when they’re constantly interrupting their thoughts with authors’ names and page numbers.