First Quarter Reflection

Prompt: Where are you in your 40 Book Challenge? How have your blogs been progressing since August? What strategies have benefited you? What have you learned about the world? How have your research skills improved?
Current Book: "The Waste Land" and other Poems

Throughout this hurried first quarter, I have tried to expand my understanding of world issues.  Sometimes, I struggle with having sympathy and too much apathy, but I'm steadily becoming more compassionate and logical in my stances on troubling issues.  This has been shown in my AoWs, which have been increasing in length and hopefully, quality.  Last year, weeks after weeks of so-called "boring" articles of the week made the last-minute homework miserable for me.  Now, I can appreciate the different view points and how much I learn from these journals and reports.  See, I've been trying to expand my conscious, which requires a lot of metacognition. In annotating and analyzing these AoWs, I become more aware of the world.  However, I am always (and will be perpetually) suspicious of the "facts" presented to me.

On the more undemanding side, my 40 Book Challenge has been going great.  In fact, my goal for this year is anywhere between 41 to 50 books.  After participating in the Challenge last year, I knew I was up for this year's challenge.  In this broad goal, I have also set smaller ones, of equal or greater value.  One of the books I've just finished was nonfiction, something I shied away from for a very, very, long time.  Now, I can't get enough of the genre and wish to read, let's say, 15 titles in it for this school year.  To keep myself on track here, I have read 11 books so far.  This figure is much better than my progress in the first quarter last year; where I had read about 5 books at this period.

A final thing I have observed in this first quarter is my research skills.  While I do tend to get off the main track (it is my curious nature I suppose), now I can stay focused for a much longer period of time.  Before all this practice we've had, I would use very broad search terms and my final products would be vague and simplistic.  Now, I narrow the topic down to something that interests me more and that I will hopefully not get bored with.  Still, I flit between 10 different tabs of varying relevance and value, but now I know how to retain and use that information to help me in the long-term.  I can only hope this progresses throughout the rest of the school year.  And I still have a long way to go, but now I have a stronger foundation.  Something that would have really been of a benefit before.