Metacognition: Poem

I've already written a post about my thoughts on poetry, so I'm going to try to avoid redundancy as much as possible. I regret not being able to explore different kinds of poetry in this unit. Poetry is difficult to learn and study because there is dissonance between every poet's voice. Finding your own voice in poetry is a challenge. It would have been nice to be able to explore different voices of different poets. In my English class in middle school, our teacher made us write down why we wrote. I wrote, "I write to discover". And that's always been the most important thing to me. It's more important to be able phrase my thoughts and learn from what I'm writing than to produce a final product that mirrors the example but isn't mine in heart. I really hope that my final poem reflected something of actual importance from me to the reader. 

For me, the hardest part of the poem was coming up with an idea and sticking with it. I'm a very impatient person. So when I get stuck, I tend to just give up. I don't let people look through my sketchbook because so much of it is filled with just half finished drawings I've given up on. I considered writing about a multitude of ideas and even wrote a couple horribly vague, disconnected poems. But I didn't like the direction any of my poems were going in. Once I finished my poem, I forced myself to continue to push it to the best it could be. 

But for something that's supposed to be specific, the editing process was incredibly intricate. Every single detail had to be modified in some way, and as a closeted perfectionist that really frustrated me. Some sections I ended up completely deleting because I had to come to terms with the fact they just didn't make sense.

When it came to working on holding a moment, I created a method that worked for me. I was struggling with elaboration. I like to write in ways that allow the reader to be able to interpret my work in whatever way would be most applicable to them. So, I drew exactly what I had written in the poem. If I couldn't draw a decent sketch using the details I used, I had to add more details. If there was an empty space, I had to draw something and describe it. If I had a detail that didn't fit, I had to manipulate it until it did.

All in all, I really like poetry. Poetry forces us to write in a balance between something that's real and brutally honest and something thats creative and imaginative. 

Metacognition: Get Organized

It was the Tuesday night before break and I had a flight to catch that required me to wake up at 3AM. "Hurry up and get all your packing done!" my dad said. Unfortunately, my typical procrastinating self hadn't even opened my suitcase. I instead decided it would be a good time to replace procrastination with productivity and start working on this blog post. I'll make my blog assignment easy on myself and just sort through my records, I thought. As I started sifting through the records, I not only got a few facefuls of dust, but got bored of trying to be neat. Dejectedly, I took a couple of my favorite records back to my rooom and attempted to at least sort those few. But as I got more and more into the project, I ended up completely reorganizing my room.

Not only is my room slightly less cluttered, but my mind is too. It's easier to focus on your priorities when you aren't distracted by your surroundings. We tend to get caught up with computers and work and friends. And once it's all simplified, the stress eases away and the way is paved to focus on what is really important to you at that given point in time.

At the beginning of the year we read "Memoria ex Machina" where the author talked about how he associated memories with objects from his past. This project forced me to look at the memories I associate with my own objects, particularly with art and music. I can recall the exact moment I first heard a song just by hearing the opening chord--I was sick the Christmas I played track 3, I still hated that album until I heard the 4th song, the first track played that time when I had slammed my door in some sort of angry cry for attention. And there's something memorable about the anticipation of the waiting for a record I haven't heard in a while to start playing, waiting for those memories to come back. The needle is set, the record is spinning, and any moment the first track will sound.

On my quest for a cleaner room I found a small plastic box with a ladybug sticker on the side. I had stuffed the box with old drawings and paintings and sketchpads.
I always took it for granted that those types of memories would always be there when I wanted to look back on my history. I thought could just start listening to a record I forgot I owned or flip through old sketchbooks with drawings from a wannabe troubled artist middle schooler and I would remember everything. But the longer the records stayed untouched and the drawings started to stick together, the more dust everything collected. I don't remember exactly what I was thinking or how I was feeling when I painted that picture. Maybe something about it seems silly looking back, but it was meaningful to me at the time. Though I can't recall what the meaning once was, something about it had an impact on how I grew to be who I am today.

And to future me, reminiscing on this blog--go listen to some of those old records. You never know what you'll remember.

Metacognition: Beginning Quarter 2

We're currently in that inevitably awkward stage between quarters where students have to face the question of doom: how hard do I actually have to try this quarter? 

There's a certain level of adjustment we have to go through each year. With new classes comes new responsibilities.

In a previous blog post, I described my style of thinking as a puzzle, how ideas in my head slowly come together, and more often I know the ending before I know the start. But there's also always been something off about the way I process information. In 8th grade, I had a conversation with my English teacher that prompted her to give me a book on synesthesia. I'm not claiming to be a synesthesiac, but I do link the information in my brain in a similar way that synesthesiacs do. I associate pretty much everything with colors; from moods to music to letters to words to days of the week. 

I wish I could be someone who could sit through long reading assignments and notes and lectures and absorb everything I'm intended to. But a lot of times I have to force myself to focus. I'm one of those people who always has to be doing something with their hands. I'm always drawing or scribbling during class discussions or notes so I have a way to collect my thoughts without being otherwise distracted. I craft new ways to do things if I don't understand the way something is taught; in music theory, I made up my own method of transposition, in Spanish, I made up my own way of explaining preterite and imperfect. I suppose it's not the most effective way to learn information. It's easier to just learn things the first time they are taught, not a trial-and-error of various methods.

However, if I attempted to change the way I think, I would lose hold of my identity. There's a tendency to make it seem like our actions define our character, but I think what truly defines us is the way we think. I think academy really gives us the chance to explore what that means for us as individuals. We have the opportunity to learn in different ways and utilize every part of our brain as we continue to grow and enrich our experience. But this requires an incredible amount of effort, dedication, and focus.

So how hard to I actually have to try this quarter? 

Very hard. 

Very. Very. Hard. 

Blogging Around

Dana's post about Education


Dana, I really like this blog post. I completely agree with what you're saying about education turning into a "forgotten issue". This video effectively demonstrates the important cause-and-effect changing the face of education can have in the future of our country. I've been focusing on education for our election coverage, and one of the major problems I've noticed is that it's pushed aside too often. Politicians tend to focus more on issues that they can change with direct results, things that help problems in the present. And while I'm not saying other issues aren't important, the value of education tends to be overlooked. Changes in education aren't something that can have results appear a year or two later; they're changes that take time to develop. If we want to be able to continue to grow as a society, we need to have the enrichment necessary for our future generations to reach their full potential. It's a bit of a cliché, but what if the person who has the ability to cure cancer was part of one of the 1.2 million that drops out per year? My cousin's wife started working as a teacher as part of a program of college volunteers set up to work in charter schools. She fell in love with teaching, being able to inspire kids every day, and now works fulltime for a charter school in Nashville. She sees how important education is in these children's lives, how she sees creativity growing every day. Every child should be put in a learning environment that allows them to grow as much as they can. And Dana makes a good point: it really is up to us to stand for education.

Kara's post about Poetry

This is a really interesting post, Kara. I love the line, "Words were not meant to be wasted on those who are unable to see past their surfaces." There's a craft that goes into poetry that's unique in it's own sense; words have meanings further than anyone can see. But there's also an aspect of poetry found in everything we see, especially music. Kara does a good job of really showing the poetry in music, how it utilizes all the aspects of poetry both in lyrics and in the actual music: rhythm, repetition, variation, imagery. And beyond that, our perception of poetry really doesn't have a great divide from our perception of the world. In retrospect, poetry isn't the usage of words in a certain form, but it's the way things connect, it's the way things are ordered, and it's the way things are interpreted.

iMedia: Sarah Kay, Spoken Word Poetry

In all honesty, up until about 5th grade, I hated poetry. I hated poetry more than I hated waking up in the morning. I hated poetry more than bruised knees. I hated poetry more than dog-eared pages and monsters under the bed and I even hated poetry more than gym class. And I hated poetry so much because as I read it, I heard this pretentious voice echoing in my head. This voice echoed meaningless, muddy words, that only could be appreciated by pompous adults that pretended to understand the meaning.

It wasn't until one day that we had an odd man as a guest speaker at one of our assemblies to read us poems that finally something clicked in my head. Maybe, just maybe, poetry wasn't this distant concept. It could be read in my voice, and it could be relevant to my life.

The spoken word poetry Sarah Kay demonstrates and teaches is a great way of turning perspectives on poetry. Poetry is such an easily accessible mean of art, but it will always be taught with echoed groans. Anyone could write and get energized about poetry if our education system didn't teach it as a chore. Poetry doesn't need to be a struggle. It doesn't need to be spoken by people with extensive knowledge of every particle in our world, and it certainly doesn't have to only connect to one person. Sarah Kay points out that poetry doesn't need to be indignant or arrogant. It can be relevant to you. Good poetry comes from the intersection of ideas.


I've never quite understood the way my brain seems to function. My thoughts don't extend externally. I don't tend to start with a simple thought and gradually grow words and string sentences together. My thoughts sort of start at the finish and percolate from all directions to finish the start. It's a lot like doing a jigsaw puzzle. You know what you're trying to create but you haven't quite gotten there yet--and then two pieces come together in one spot and two in another and two in another until eventually they aren't just puzzle pieces--they're actually part of a picture. Poetry has always been an outlet for me to express myself in that jigsaw manner, playing with the shapes and fits of words. As Sarah Kay says, "Look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of the human mind."

An Inconvenient Truth: Limits of Perspective

The concept of "perspective" sucks. You can distort your perspective, you can contribute to your perspective, but you can't avoid having a perspective. You can't avoid the way you think. Ideally, the perspectives of functioning minds should fuse together in sort of a "symbiotic relationship" (as we learned last year). But perspective has a tendency to block our minds' potentials to enrich themselves with the comparisons to new perspectives. This is where the idea of confirmation bias really comes into play.

But what happens when this confirmation bias blocks your mind from picking up on the important moments? This is probably what irritates me most about perspective. I know I'm never fully going to be able to understand what someone is describing to me. I'd love to one day try to live thinking about life in that Seinfeld perspective, trying to find humor and irony in the most simple life moments I'd never otherwise notice. But in all honesty, it's hard to change your perspective. Maybe you have a moment where something clicks and suddenly your world will never be the same, but that won't always happen. You could spend lightyears trying to explain the appeal of music on the radio to me, but I will never be able to share that same perspective because I'm stubborn and my confirmation bias will block that opportunity from me. 

However, the fact that perspective can be excluding is really the only negative thing about perspective. Our world is shaped by perspectives; perspectives drive creativity. If we didn't have varying perspectives, we wouldn't have our government, we wouldn't have politics, we wouldn't have discussions in class, we wouldn't have arguments with our siblings or friends. We wouldn't have challenges, complications, creations or even change. Yet, if we don't accept the fact that we do have the ability to change our perspective, we won't be able to share new perspectives with ourselves and let in new mindsets. Maybe we should all just take a step back and look at things completely out of any perspective we know.

Best of the Week: Emotional Truth

In my opinion, the best part of what we discussed in class last week was when we got on the slight tangent about emotion vs. truth. In a way, our reality is just pieces of emotions layered on top of each other. It isn't the detail that you remember, it's the emotion. The most important job creatives have is to get their audience to feel emotion. Without emotion, their work is meaningless. They're just authors with invisible words. Painters with blank canvasses. Musicians with silent sounds.

However, there is a line between creating emotion and stretching the truth. There is truth in the fact that people are comforted by hearing what they want to hear, but there's also comfort in wanting to hear the truth. Being able to ascertain the reality of a situation (when it comes to human interaction) is more important than fabrication of an event to reveal emotion. But in most ways, the reality of the event is the emotion. As Mr. Allen said, think of a movie theater. It's just arranged light, but it has the ability to contort the emotions of every viewer. So how can you combine emotional truth and factual truth?

That's where arrangement comes into play. It's the backbone of emotion; all artists play with it. For writing in particular, language becomes. Think of a piece of writing that speaks to you-- the way the words are able to ebb and flow and intertwine with one another. If you rearrange the words, craft them into something meaningful, the emotion is rich and has the ability to progress beyond the text. Thus, words have the ability to emulate both the fact and the emotion. And that is the most meaningful out of all.

Captured Thought: Living for Yourself

The world would be a better place if people only did things because they truly loved what they were doing. There's a sort of enveloping comfort people seem to seek in only doing what they know, and thus a false sense of love associated with something that's familiar. But in our society we have a tendency to be subconsciously manipulative. Most of our actions are driven by our human nature to race through our lives opportunizing success. 

But what are we racing towards? What is it we all want? A fulfilling life? Our life is only going to be fulfilling if we absorb the full potential of our lives as opposed to taking shortcuts to successes. However there are two ways people tend to go about this. One is by focusing all of their energy strategizing around these essentially unfulfilling actions. The other is not even knowing where to go and only half-heartedly committing to everything. Most of our lives are in the unexpected, so what do we gain by meticulously planning every detail of our lives? Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying you shouldn't set goals. I strongly believe that goals help us get our lives on track and even give us reasons to keep going. But the problem is, most goals aren't geared towards our happiness or well-being. And when we base our actions off of these goals, there is no passion to what we do. 

The other problem with not doing things because you completely love them is you are more likely to hurt people around you. I am involved in many competitive environments with theater and music, and although there's a sense of unity within the programs, there's always an underlying self-dependent energy. There's a tendency for people to be very sycophant and manipulative. If you really loved whatever you're doing, you shouldn't need to impress anyone. You should live for yourself, and do whatever makes you happy. 

If everyone focused on keeping something in their lives they were able to be completely passionate about, not only would people be more positive, but more focused and productive in changing the world.