Amy Stone's Metacognition

My own thinking is normally very jumbled although I am naturally an extremely organized person. I do very well with organizing tangible objects but when it comes to my own thoughts, they seem to get lost in the mix. When telling stories or in normal conversations, my thoughts jump around a lot. My boyfriend constantly makes me explain my thought process to him because we’ll be talking about one subject and I’ll automatically switch to a new topic. My thoughts are easily triggered by events that are meaningful to me and I use this process in my writing and reading as well.

Throughout high school and in my years of college, when reading texts I always tend to relate them to events I have experienced in my life that are important to me. I like to annotate my readings by highlighting information I find important and also making notes in the columns about connections to my life. By reading the information in this way, I am able to remember it easier and make it meaningful to me. There are several topics that I read that I am not able to make a connection to. In this case, I try to understand the full definition of the term and then create my own reasoning or story of a way to remember. I rely on mnemonic devices often therefore I must develop my own ways to personally remember the topics and readings.

My metacognition when it comes to writing is a much more tedious process. I normally begin writing with a topic in mind and then stray away from that topic very quickly because my thoughts fly by. I like to begin writing papers with the body paragraphs first because I normally have to fix my introduction and conclusion several times because my thoughts stray from the original topic. I would like to learn better writing strategies and ways to organize my thoughts in the writing process.

I feel that it is very important for children to learn how to organize their thoughts in both the reading and writing processes. I wish that in my schooling I were taught concrete ways to organize information. These strategies would be very important for reading comprehension and writing processes. By developing theses strategies early, children are more likely to use those strategies throughout all their schooling. I would like to begin to learn new strategies that I can teach to my future students as well as learn for my own thought processes.