Connection: adjacent possibles and the Internet

In class when we were talking about how the Internet was the adjacent possible that made the protests in Egypt more effective, I started thinking. What kind of adjacent possible is the internet to pretty much every teen in the US? I think that it's the best and the worst one out there. There are many teens that use the Internet in a great way. They use it to learn about other cultures and what is happening outside of where they live. They use it to become less ignorant. There are also the teens who abuse the internet as an adjacent possible. They use it to hurt people and glorify their own lives. I think that the Internet can be the best adjacent possible that there ever was. If there was no Internet I wouldn't be able to do this blog post right now. I wouldn't be able to learn about more things than I can think of. The teens who are growing up in the age of the internet are, in my opinion, the luckiest. We have doors open to us that until now have been closed. I think that we should take advantage of this and use it to better our world in te future.

Metacognition: First Semester

This semester of Humanities was very fun for me. In the past I had never really been in a class that was like humanities. Throughout the first semester I learned many things about the way that I think.

There were a few things that really surprised me about my thinking. I never really noticed before how scatterbrained I could be. After taking this class, I started to look at how I thought about things and realized how I could go from thinking about fruit loops to thinking about psychology and not realize how I got there. In the past, I had thought that my thinking was pretty clear. I could easily understand how I got from topic A to topic B. Now, I realized that sometimes it's really hard to explain my thought process. Another thing that surprised me about my thinking this semester, was the fact that I could think out of the box. I used to be a very "in the box" thinker. I pretty much believed what everyone told me and then formed my own ideas just based off of that. This semester I realized that I could actually think about things that other people hadn't said to me before, that I could think up ideas all by myself. This surprised me because I had never really thought about doing this before.

Also this semester I found a few things that I liked about my thinking. When I discovered how I could get from topic A to topic B without really knowing how I got there, I kind of liked that. I liked the fact that my mind could put together random things to get from one subject to another that weren't really related. I used this to my advantage when I was creating some of my mindbook entries. I thought about something that someone else had said that they might be doing and started thinking about things that were kind of like that and then coming up with an idea that was completely different from theirs that I liked a lot. Another thing that I liked about my thinking was that I could think of connections to what we were doing in class easily. If we were having a discussion in class and someone said something that I knew a little about, something related to that would pop into my head and it would help me understand better. I liked this because it helped me understand some things that I may not have understood before.

Along with the things that I liked about my thinking this semester, there were also some aspects of my thinking that I didn't like and would like to work better. There were times when I was working on my mindbook or reading a book and my mind would shut down. If I was reading, I wouldn't be able to comprehend what I was reading anymore, or if I was working on my mindbook I wouldn't be able to think anymore. This happened because I was tired or frustrated with what I was doing. I would like to be able to work on this so that I can have a more pleasant time reading the books in class. Another thing that I would like to work on is the speed that I can think. There were some days this semester where my brain wouldn't think very fast. This made it difficult for me to comprehend what we were doing. I would like to work on this because when this happened it made me very frustrated.

Overall this semester in humanities has been a lot of fun. I've learned a lot about myself and the way that I think. Hopefully next semester I will learn even more that will help me lead a better life and be a better person.