Among Mirrors

This is my final post... as a CHP 395 student. My hope is to blog every once in a while when I think of something to say. It's just that I already write down thoughts and moments in a notebook to which I can refer if I want to throw myself back to a past time, and there are so many other things to do. Nevertheless, writing on this blog is a bit of a creative outlet for this math major, and Gawande told us to write something, anything.

Here I am—here we all are—among mirrors: reflecting on our reflections. We have this one mirror in front of us, and we're trying to look back on all of our experiences over the past 15 weeks, each a little mirror of its own. Its hard to choose which ones give the best picture. This also reminds me of those reunion shows with which most reality television shows end. You know, where all the people come back looking nicer than they did while the show was taping. All of my blogs are coming together for this final post, but just like in the reality reunions, only a few will get to talk for a majority of the time.

My best blog post from the first three weeks is probably Limits and Living with Others. I was able to connect a couple of different ideas from a few sources into one coherent post. It's funny to look back on what I wrote about the dishes not getting done very much. One of my housemates put a sheet above the dishwasher to keep track of who was starting and unloading the dishwasher. I think it increased our overall helpfulness by simply making it known when we haven't been doing our fair share recently. Imagine that: a real life example of effective change!

From the nest three weeks of the semester, I have chosen I Think I Can because it was something that hit close to home. I find motivation a very intriguing subject because there are so many questions about it. I tried to explore that in a way that brought my faith into the discussion, and I tried to do it in a way that presented my beliefs in a more expository than persuasive way. I felt especially good about the finished product afterward, and I think it shows some personal growth.

As for my other two "wild card" posts, I have picked Your Blog Bites! and This One's About Vision. These two posts are very different from one another, but I'm happy with both of them. The former was a lot of fun to write because I got to pretend to be a harsh critic. I intended for the intro to catch people off guard and draw them into the post. For me, the intro is the most important part of a blog. If you don't hook the reader within the first few sentences, you've likely used the wrong bait. On the other hand, my penultimate post was much more analytical than my other posts. It brings in more of what I was able to gather from our conversation last week. I didn't contribute too much that day and chose to listen more to what everyone else had to say. I think that it gives a pretty good summary of how the class went and some reasons why.

I think I've made it known that I liked the blogging aspect of the class. Sure, sometimes I felt like I had nothing good to say. Sometimes it felt forced, but most of the time it was a fun way to use parts of my brain I don't often use. Part of the reason I liked minoring in anthropology is that it was much different from math. I didn't have any anthropology classes this semester, and this course in some ways jumped in the space left by those courses. I think I will continue to use this blog, whether for other classes or for just sharing thoughts. This next semester during student teaching, my supervisor wants us all to keep a journal and send him the entries on a weekly basis. Maybe I'll post them here and send him the link. I hope to continue to grow as a writer and use reflection in conjunction with it as a way to grow as a reflective practitioner wherever I teach.