Sunday, September 20, 2009

Alex Nabolotny's Metacognition

Reading and writing have always been my favorite subjects in school. I find that reading comes easy to me and writing does not really seem to bother me. When it comes to math and science, however, it is a different story. I think a big part of this is because math and science are both very clear-cut subjects. You have an experiment, you do the procedure, and you get your result. Or, in math, you have a problem, you solve it, and you get the answer. With these subjects, there is only one right answer and I think I find that intimidating. I like having that freedom of choosing what I think is right. With reading and writing there is no right or wrong answer. You are allowed to have an opinion on what you read, or write. I also like having an opinion because then I am able to hear what my peers’ opinion is and I can see the reading and writing in a new light. Because I enjoy reading and writing so much, I have come up with a couple of ways to organize my thinking in those subjects. As we saw with our literacy snapshots, reading is not always for pleasure. In order to organize my thinking when reading articles or textbooks for school I try to look for key words, or titles. By looking at the title of something I find I have more of a chance figuring out what the main idea of that book, or that article is going to be about and therefore I have a better chance at analyzing it. It is kind of like knowing the answers before taking a test. Some of my organizational skills with writing include making a plan or outline. Whenever I am going to start a paper I always try to make a general list of things that I really want to include. By doing this it makes it easier for me to come up with the details because I already have the main points. Before I started using this outline idea, I used to spend hours just trying to write the introductory paragraph of papers, now it is much easier. The key to conquering any subject is organization. It makes everything go smoothly, and it really helps ease the stress of homework!

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