Learning Records

After reading the descriptions I was amazed by how accurate this test is when strength of preference is taken into consideration. When I finished the test, I went through pages 139-152 and highlighted everything that I thought applied to me.

The first category has me labeled as an extrovert. I highlighted three of the attributes in the extrovert column and two in the introvert column reflecting the 22% preference for extroversion. I selected for myself the ability to volunteer in class, thinking out loud and the ability to write without prior planning. On the other side though, I selected longer attention span and a preference for one-on-one or small groups. I have often thought about this before when people asked whether I was introvert or an extrovert. I usually describe myself as an introvert. My friends on the other hand always claim me as an extrovert. This breakdown helps me see why the discrepancy exists. When it comes to academics and within the classroom, yes, I am definitely an extrovert. When it comes to social events, parties and friendships though, I have always considered myself an introvert. I am usually more comfortable on my own, and I like to spend a lot of time alone.

When I arrived at the next section I was surprised to see that the Meyers-Briggs test was extremely accurate. I highlighted five attributes in the intuition column and none in the sensing column, reflecting a 75% preference for intuition. Mr. Meyers and Mr. Briggs (I’m taking a guess on the Mr. part) were very good at what they did. I found myself even laughing when I got to the part that says “hates busy work” remembering the number of discussions I had with teachers when they assigned me busy work which usually ended with me being invited to come before or after school to discuss the matter with them (an offer I never took up). The preference for intuition also explains why I always try to focus on the big picture and the most important themes of a subject rather than get caught up in every little detail.

The next two sections on thinking/feeling and judging/perceiving didn’t really show a clear preference for either when I highlighted individual attributes. There were two things that did stick out to me. I have a bad habit of taking criticism of my work personally especially if I put a lot of effort and personality into it. I have worked on this in the past and am much better than I was, but I still tend to take criticism of my writing that is non mechanic in nature as a criticism of me. I’ll get over it eventually. The other thing that stuck out was a preference to work alone. I always work alone when I have an option because I don’t like relying on other people. I am usually the one that does most of the work in a group project which I am sure many people in our class have gone through.

I definitely think the Meyers-Briggs test was worth taking and examining further. It did reveal a lot about me that I had noticed in the past but brushed to the side as unimportant. Hopefully now I will be able to focus on these issues and learn to cope with them.

One of the main questions we ask in this course is “Who am I?” It’s one of those questions that I think I will be asking until the day I die. Tonight, September 14^th at 11:30 PM, I’m going to answer that question as “I have absolutely no clue.” At this point I know better who I am not.

So far I’ve learned that I’m not as bad of a writer as I thought. I’ve also learned that I’m nowhere near where I want to be. I remember reading a short piece of prose once on writing. The author compared a good writer/critic to an executioner. This wasn’t any executioner though; he was the best executioner that ever lived. Every time he chopped a criminals head off it came of cleanly and beautifully forcing an onlooker to appreciate the art of the execution as well as the concept of justice achieved at the same time. That is how I want my writing to be. I want it to be clean, succinct and a piece of art in itself. In order to get to that point I will have to be focused and work extremely hard to develop my writing skills.

One step to becoming a better writer that I can take immediately is to become a much better reader. I think in the past couple of weeks I have been able to read with a clearer and more attune mind. I in fact thought I was an excellent reader until the other day when I got my first paper back from Professor Martinich. A short 500 word essay was full of suggestions and comments concerning diction, structure and flow that I had not noticed. The beauty of the situation came when I read his suggestions and realized how much his minor, picky changes would improve my paper. If I am to become a better writer I must learn to read with a much more discerning mind, picking apart every sentence to form the best possible ideas.

I also must learn to apply these ideas of close reading and better writing to classes other than my Plan II classes. In the past I have often slacked off on diction, structure, flow and other literary elements when writing papers in classes like US History and Physics. I must strive to be an excellent writer at all times even if the professor is grading strictly on content and information rather than presentation and writing ability. This will hopefully lead to becoming the writer that I want to be. I want to read an article in the New York Times and think to myself, “I could easily write an article twice as good as this guy.” While it is quite a lofty (and maybe unreachable) goal, I think it is a good mindset to have to improve my writing. I just know that improving my writing is a continuous process. I am sure there will be many bumps, detours and catastrophic accidents along the way. Despite these obstacles, I will continue to write. I won’t be like the guy that tries to write a novel and gets “halfway through page one when [he decides] it is too hard to be a writer” (180).

I recognize the importance of writing at a superior level and realize that this is a goal of mine that I would like to achieve the most. This is a goal of mine that I would have on here no matter what I decide to do with my life in the future. I firmly believe in the importance of writing and effective communication skills as a basic human function that is beneficial to any person.

There is so much more to learn from this world if I would just approach it with a new frame of mind. I have this as a goal on my list because I think it would serve to enrich my life experience more than anything else. 12-8-05

It is important for me to gain a better understanding of myself and my ambitions through constant introspection and journaling. This will also help me to better manage my time when it comes to long term projects and writings.

This, going along with ‘knowing thyself’, is a goal about growing intellectually and emotionally throughout this course. College is a time and place that can serve as a catalyst for change in many people. I want college, and more specifically this course, to help me develop into the person I see myself as in the future. 12-8-05

I want to make sure that I get the most out of my college experience starting with this semester and more specifically this class. I don’t think I will have a problem devoting enough time to my coursework. In fact, the opposite is more likely to occur. I hope that this course though will teach me to better manage my time, setting priorities for activities in and out of the classroom. 12-8-05

I want to familiarize myself with the western tradition. I feel that this is an important part of my liberal education. It provides a basis for all further study.

I sometimes have trouble giving full consideration to the validity of opposing views and ideas, causing me to retreat into my own mind. This debilitates the discussion. I need to critically analyze the validity of someone else’s views better in order to fuller understand my own views. This will also aid in active discussion.

I crossed out number four and added this goal because I realized that I first need to figure out who it is I want to be and what is I want to do. This goes hand in hand with goal three, ‘know thyself’, and is just an extension of it.

Regarding my specific goals enumerated earlier, I think I have generally made progress towards fulfilling them even though many of them will remain lifelong goals. I have become a better writer through practice and a heightened awareness to my own learning preferences. My writing still needs much improvement, but I am making progress.

I have thoroughly enjoyed the new sense of semiotics in all aspects of my life. I am learning to scrutinize things at a different level. I now question the purpose of things I see daily that I casually passed by a month ago.

“Knowing thyself” is a goal that I will never fulfill. The more I learn about myself, the more I realize how much I don’t know myself. It still remains an extremely important aspiration. Its position is more that of a guide than a goal.

It is difficult for me to become the person I see myself as in the future if that person becomes more obscured as it is viewed. I have identified several areas in my life that will help me become this person in a general sense. I am pursuing these now in hope that the vision I have of myself will become clearer as time progresses.

I continue to cherish the college experience as a time of change and personal realization. Over the last several weeks, things have changed for me. These specific changes I will identify in the learning record.

I added the goal of “becoming more familiar with the intellectual, literary and mythic tradition of my world” as I have realized that the ideas presented to me in several different courses are all related. I am learning about political philosophy in my Western Civilizations class that explains literary works in my World Literature class. The knowledge learned in my discussion class, Uses and Abuses of The Bible, has proved invaluable when studying literature.

This goal I added as a result of the recent discussions we have had on the novels A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Jude the Obscure. I find myself mentally becoming stuck on the views that people present during class discussion in a bad way. I become wrapped up in why the person thinks a certain thought, but instead of analyzing why, I usually become frustrated and dismiss the person’s thoughts without coming to conclusion in my own head. I need to better analyze an opposing thought in comparison to my own. This will help me be more active in the discussions.

The person I see is thinking. He is thinking about a thousand things at once. These thousand thoughts are undeveloped concerning a thousand different subjects. He wants to refine these thoughts. He wants to make sense of them. At the same time he is afraid of refining these thoughts and developing them into something more. Does the development of one thought preclude the consideration of another? He is afraid of abandoning any pursuit at the chance that that pursuit is the one he will later realize was his alone to pursue. It is the one that years from now he will realize truly made him happy. He is afraid of regret.

He tries to sift through all of these identities. They are spread out before him, each one offering the world. Each one a mask to wear. Each mask the result of a collection of past experiences as well as a promise of a future life. He is unable to choose just one. There are so many he likes. Maybe he can take his favorite pieces and craft a new mask. The pieces will allow him to be who he truly wants to be. It will form a collection of his favorite moments, his favorite thoughts and his favorite memories.

He does so and is pleased with his new creation. It is a beautiful mask, a happy mask. He wears the mask and is happy, proud of his accomplishment. This happiness is fleeting, though. He soon realizes that without the depressing memories, the negative thoughts and shameful moments his happiness means nothing.

He tears the mask off his face in a fit of anger and frustration. It is thrown to the ground and shatters into its pieces. He begins to realize that “each form [he identifies] with, each role [he attaches] to, is ultimately incomplete and transient (154).” He doesn’t know what to do now. He is unable to discard the masks completely, and at the same time, he knows that he can not return to wearing a different mask and thus assuming a new identity each day. He realizes that in his mind, “behind all these identities is a state of awareness that incorporates them all and yet is still able to rest behind them (155).”

He thinks about this state of awareness and how to achieve it. He wants to feel the “liberation that comes from loosening our identification with self-image altogether (155),” but is unable to. He continues to reperceive his situation, hoping that a new perception will lead him to a deeper sense of who he is. Like the Witness, he begins to realize the value of Not Knowing and is consoled by it. It is a monumental step for him to accept the condition of Not Knowing. He has always been used to knowing or approaching a state of knowing. It has given him comfort his entire life. Knowing has meant control of his situation. It has meant a perception of what is to come in the future. For the first time in his life, he is faced with entirely creating his own future and is frightened by the feelings of uncertainty. Not Knowing allows him to come to terms with this uncertainty. The simple matter of identification allows him to find comfort in it.

While not content, he is overall happy with his situation. College has been a wonderful experience for him so far. He has explored many of the identities and learned about himself in the process. He enjoys spending large amounts of time reading for his classes and becoming engrossed in his studies. He doesn’t like discussing this with others, though, because he has sensed the lack of understanding. Other people, even in a program like Plan II, find it weird that a student truly likes what he is doing and wants to pursue it beyond the bounds that the class places on his studies and ideas. There are some people at the university that feel as he does and he is determined to find them.

Plan II has been both a wondrous gift and a disappointment. It has allowed him to grow and develop intellectually. At the same time, he has been disappointed in his peers (including himself). He expected the other students to be more different than himself. It has become apparent through classroom discussion that even though the students here have different interests and have come from different backgrounds, intellectually they are all very similar. They are all college students. They are all lost. They are all trying to make meaning of their world and are coming up empty handed. They are united by this common state which overshadows their ‘diverse’ backgrounds.

The future is uncertain, but he is okay with that now. He will more than likely get an A in this class, but that isn’t really the important thing to consider. The important thing is that he has grown and changed as a result of this class. He has particularly enjoyed the articles and writings in the course reader that pertain to nature and its role in our psychological development. Nature has been important and his past. Hopefully, he will remember to keep nature an important part to his life in the future.

He has enjoyed the material presented in this course so far and is continually amazed at how it fits into material covered in his other courses that are in completely different departments. He considers the phrase, “Hammer your thoughts into unity,” regularly, and hopes that it will assist him in his future endeavors. It is providing him with some problems as he feels that he is receiving two completely different educations – business and liberal arts. He would like to pursue an advanced degree later in his life, but realizing the necessity for specialization, he is clueless as to what course of studies to pursue. For now, he will stick with both and hopefully achieve a higher level of unity between the two.

Here I am. It’s the end of the semester, almost. In one week, I’ll be taking my last final exam and heading home for Christmas break. I might even be able to pull a 4.0 for this semester. It all depends on how well I pull through this last week. The University decided to shut down today because the temperature was below freezing. Normally, this would mean a day spent with friends having fun. Not now. Since I’m in college, I’ve actually learned to manage my time. Today I rewrote an essay, revised P2B, finished a book and now I am working on this. This wouldn’t have happened three months ago. Another distraction just walked into my dorm room. The decision: go see the midnight showing of Chronicles of Narnia with a group of friends for a guy’s birthday or stay in the dorm, work on this and get to bed before midnight. Three months ago the decision would have been the midnight movie. Now, I can only think that this work has to get done and that I have multiple exams to study for. Come to think of it, I think this is the first set of winter exams in the past three years that I am not going to go see a midnight movie before. I had my priorities set straight in high school. I went to see the three Lord of the Rings movies at midnight every year and it always happened that I had an exam the next day.

This year things are very different. Middle Earth has helped keep me on track academically instead of distracting me from end of semester projects and exams. It is funny how a project designed to connect a person to a place can help the writer grow and get a better sense of what he is doing in this place, the University of Texas at Austin. I began project two with no sense of direction at all. The first one was easy. I wrote about the man who has a building named after him that I go to class in twice a week. I was at a loss for the second project. I had connected myself to Dean Parlin in my first project through a sense of place, a physical community at UT and in Plan II. I wanted something more for this next project. I needed to find someone who had a much greater bearing on my life and intellectual development.

The first thing I did was go through my list of favorite authors, because reading has a considerable effect on my intellectual development. Robert Heinlein has no connection to UT or Oxford. The closest I could connect Heinlein to Austin is that he served on the USS Lexington air craft carrier which is now a museum in Corpus Christi Bay. Orson Scott Card lives in Greensboro. I have no clue where Isaac Asimov is from, but I know that it is nowhere near UT or Oxford. Then I remembered Tolkien. I had considered doing him for my first project, but saw that someone had already done a project on him, and I wanted to do someone new. After looking over that person’s project (which wasn’t necessarily bad), I realized I could contribute significantly if I did a project on Tolkien.

I did some preliminary research, received book recommendations from my high school English teacher (Tolkien enthusiast and speaker at international conventions), went to the library and dove into Tolkien’s world. I spent an entire Sunday afternoon reading a biography of Tolkien by Humphrey Carpenter. This is something I could not have ever done if I was not deeply connected to my work. As I read Tolkien’s biography, I began to understand the man behind Middle Earth more than I ever thought possible. I did not just learn what certain details in his writings meant but why he wrote so strongly about them. My appreciation of Tolkien developed from that of a wonderful author to that of a wonderful human being with a mission in his life. As I read about this mission of his, this desire to tell stories that even his peers in academia could appreciate, I felt so strongly connected to Tolkien that I began to fear that I could never write about him in a way that would do his life justice. My fear developed from having the first draft of a project due in four days to not being able to create something so wonderful that it would do justice to Tolkien’s memory. At this point, I was motivated to create a worthy project two beyond any sense of motivation I have encountered in the past involving writing.

This fear of not creating a worthy representation almost paralyzed me. I remember the day before the project was due being surrounded with papers in my dorm room, filled with ideas, outlines of how to approach this project. I finally settled on an approach that I think Tolkien would have respected. He was never a fan of biography as a genre. Instead, he preferred to tell stories, so that is what I did. I’d tell a story about Tolkien. That way there would be no pretense of comprehensiveness.

After several drafts and an added author’s note, I think my project has evolved into something that Tolkien would respect from a freshman in college. By writing about the life of a man, both scholar and creator, I have come to realize several things about myself. While I always understood the importance of education, my understanding of an education was that of something handed down to me by an institution. I now realize that at this time in my life an education is something that I must create for myself. Tolkien understood this more than anyone else. When he wanted to learn about linguistics, he created his own language. As C.S. Lewis said, Tolkien has “been inside language.” I must get inside my education. In the past several weeks I have outlined several specific goals for myself. This includes a reading list, things I would like to do, places I would like to visit and a general goals list.

I have modified my final goals list to reflect this new understanding of my education. I crossed off goal number two, “learn to approach my surroundings in a new way through semiotics,” because I think I have achieved a good understanding of semiotics. What remains for me with this goal is just a continued application. I have also crossed out goal five, “get a better idea of what college is about and its role in my life as a defining experience,” because I think that now, I finally do understand what the role of college will be. I have to return to the document on freshmen English in our course reader and attached to the learning record webpage to explain this: “As for your teacher, he does not exist to give you the answers. His function is to ask the questions, and if by inadvertence he should ever chance to tell you something, you should immediately turn the questioning on him. Whatever answers you reach in this course, they will be your own. You will do your own learning.”[1] My time spent at the University of Texas is one where I will be asked many questions and exposed to the tools that will help me answer them for myself. Beyond that, I am on my own. I will learn for myself as little or as much as I wish. Even though I have stricken through goal four, “become the person that I see myself as in the future,” I have more refined it than crossed it off my list. In doing so, I added my eighth goal, “figure out who it is that I want to be.” This goal is merely an extension of goal three, “know thyself,” but it serves as an important reminder that this is an ongoing process and that I must constantly evaluate myself, keeping in mind simultaneously a notion of my past (both personal and collective), my current state and future directions.

Luckily, this class has given my opportunities to examine these three facets of my life: past, present and future. Through the road map presentation, as shown above, we examined our past.

At many times in this class we have focused on the present. During this course of study we have often discussed the absurdity of our present reality as shown above during our Mad Tea Party, me trying to kiss Professor Bump’s pig at his ranch for extra credit points and our reenactment of scenes from Alice in Wonderland at the Zilker Park. We have been required many times in this course to take our stance and strongly voice our own opinions and thoughts as shown in the picture of me to the left. Sometimes we even may voice these opinions too strongly or without consideration to others in this class. At these times, Professor Bump often chastises us and causes us to feel quite sad and depressed:

Despite these moments, our class amazingly continues to function and that is what makes it so wonderful. We talk about our past, the absurd present and allow time for meditation of the future. While I do believe that meditation is useful, I think that it hard to do in a classroom setting. During these times of meditation in class, I admittedly was usually catching up on some sleep. This doesn’t mean I think meditation is useless. I have used it in the past, but it requires a certain mindset that I just was never able to achieve in an in class setting.

Even though I was unable to meditate in class, I think that this class has been extremely valuable to my education and development as a human being. It has been quite enjoyable, both intellectually and socially.

Through this class and my outside readings this semester I feel that I have a better grasp of who I am. Now, I constantly see how all of my classes are connected. Sometimes I am amazed that my professors haven’t coordinated their syllabi. It is almost frightening how I have realized what E.M. Forrester meant when he said, “Only connect!... Live in fragments no more.”

Going back over Ram Dass’ The Witness I can easily see how what he is writing has related to me this semester and what I have done. A recurrent them in Tolkien’s work is fellowship. This stems from his affinity for the company of male intellectuals in a social setting (the T.C.B.S. and the Inklings). Ram Dass wrote that “deep companionship, born of honesty, can often arise when we meet one another in Not Knowing (161).” Tolkien enjoyed the company of these men because they all accepted “Not Knowing” and were consoled by it. The fantastical writings of The Inklings can be seen as an exploration “in the land of Not Knowing (161).”

Tolkien’s entire career is an exploration of the “state of awareness that incorporates [our identities] yet is still able to rest behind him (155).” By exploring how someone else has explored their multiple identities, I have become more aware of how I can explore my own. Ram Dass also said that by specializing “we often end up shortchanging what we have to offer one another (154).” I now see that I can no longer identify myself simply as a student. It is too restricting. It only implies things that I can not do. I must be a student, a thinker, a creator, a mover, a human being and so many more things all at once. In the next four years I will figure out how to balance all of these identities. For now I am shifting between my multiple identities. I must figure out how to achieve unity, or as my MIS 301 teacher would say, I must learn how to operate at the edge of chaos – that area far enough from equilibrium to achieve massive change while still maintaining enough stability to survive in the mean time.

[1] Varnum, Robin, 1950- / Fencing with words : a history of writing instruction at Amherst College during the era of Theodore Baird, 1938-1966. / Urbana, Ill. / 1996, pp. 250-251

Strength of the Preferences
Extroverted	Intuitive	Feeling	Judging
22	75	25	22