Metacognition: Writing My Short Story

Writing my short story was pretty frustrating. Initially, it went great. I wrote my story fragment, and it was actually pretty decent, especially considering I wrote it. I felt like it was open-ended enough to leave the reader thinking and that not knowing the whole story actually enhanced it and made it more mysterious. When I fleshed it out for my first draft, I added some details, but mainly just polished what I already had. At this point, I still felt that my story was going in a good direction. Then, I discovered that we were supposed to write a "middle", I was confused. I hadn't intended for what I had to be a "beginning", I had tried to write a full story. I tried my hardest to extend the story, and failed miserably. My story suddenly became about as interesting to read as Heart of Darkness. I was frustrated that I was being forced to do something that made my story considerably worse. The next assignment was to create an end for the story, and I was actually pretty satisfied with the ending I did. Though switching from first person to third person was kind of a cop-out, all in all, it wasn't too bad. Though I'm very disappointed with the middle of the story, I think the beginning and end are pretty good, and I look forward to maybe revising the middle to make it better.

Metacognition: Jane Eyre Project

When I first found out about the assignment to culminate our reading of Jane Eyre, I knew that it would be very different from the one for Heart of Darkness. In most ways, it was a lot better. The project did present a unique set of difficulties, though. First, my group (Corey, Nick, and me) had to find an effective, efficient way to collaborate. We thought about making a Google doc and then each person editing it on his own. We eventually decided against it, though, because it would be hard to create a dialogue with any flow or rythm if we each did our part separately. Instead, we decided to meet at my house a couple times and work together, face to face. This turned out to be an even better choice than we anticipated, because when one person had an idea, someone else thought of a way to make it better, and we kept building off each other's suggestions. It was also a lot easier to make it like a real conversation when we weren't working on it by ourselves. What's more, though we had fun, we were also focused on finishing the project and it probably took a lot less time than if we hadn't worked on it together. All in all, I think our project turned out great (dare I say A-worthy?), and I'm proud of how our group collaborated. Hopefully, we can do more of these types of projects in the future.