Settling

Things are settling a little and my identity crisis seems to have passed. I never really felt that I didn't belong in school, but I am now actively feeling that I belong where I am. Classes are in full swing and one thing that I understand now is that I can either do everything and have no life, or do 75% and enjoy my sanity. I think this is the way it has to be- that I have to pick and choose where to put my energy and it's helpful to recognize the places where I can get by doing the minimal amount of work and where I really want to put my energy. That's the greatest thing about grad school, that I will get out of it whatever I put it, and I can choose what that is.

This week I am ahead of the game, reading for two classes done, one paper and two more classes of reading to do. I feel particularly balanced this week because I've spent a decent amount of time in the kitchen, making homemade ravioli and crackers. Yesterday I also made it out for a day trip to visit with friends and their small baby on their farm across the water. I think that especially made me feel more rooted in my real life and who I am outside of school. I spent the day talking about the other things that make up who I am, which I realized this morning was kind of a relief, after two weeks of talking about nothing but school.

Metacognition

One of my thoughts about starting this blog was that it would be a place to track my time through grad school. I am undertaking this huge thing that I'm so excited about and of course completely intimidated by. We talked about imposter syndrome at home and Phil brought it up in LS Seminar last week and I want to say, but I'm special, I really don't belong here. The reality is that I'm already ahead of the game in having a Masters in Ed, from this department, which makes a lot of things easier to negotiate. The psychology stuff is a lot of what is hanging me up I think.

In terms of workload, I way underestimated how much reading I had to do for this week and did only a small fraction of it over the weekend. I'm tinkering with my google calendar to figure out how to stay organized with the 18000 different things I'm responsible for.

Metacognition was one of the topics in How People Learn, CH. 1, that made me feel slightly better about my position. I am able to be metacognitive in some ways, trying to understand what I know and what I don't, and how. A little self reflection here will help me to carry out this process and hopefully make sense of all of these interrelated things I'm doing.

Right now the thing I think I understand the best is the review of basic educational theory- that learning involves a feedback loop, experience, building on prior knowledge, failing and trying again, being metacognitive.

One thing I don't think I understand very well is cognition, cognitive psychology, understanding how people think and demonstrate learning. Which is ok, because I don't have that background and so it's understandable. It's also the reason I'm here, to build a foundation of how people learn and what it looks like.