ENG 104 Blog - Nathan Ten

"Thinking is the intentional act of making connections."(Habits of the Creative Mind, pg 100) This simple yet sophisticated quote summarizes this chapter pretty well. The chapter started with the whole connecting theme and explained how connecting the dots is a big factor in learning how to connect their own ideas to each other and how to apply it to reading and writing. I think that this short quote perfectly encapsulates the idea of connecting and how we think and connect things in our everyday lives.

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dq91zKUMK5oQjLhH4haBp9X7zCihJtGbMtZ0RhYmas0/edit?usp=sharing

During my time drawing, I definitely focused on details and and fixing a lot of the stuff that I messed up near the end. I think for drawing I don't really see how the book described people drawing see it. I don't see words when I am drawing I see a picture and I draw the picture. Not much thought is put in to it unless there is different details that I think are a bit messed up or off. I usually tend to mess around trying to fix little details and I have to stop myself before I completely change the picture. I am pretty happy with how my self portrait ended up even though I could definitely improve some things. I have always wanted to get better at drawing but I never like taking classes for drawing so I use a lot of youtube to learn how to draw certain things. When reading Habits of the Mind "Paying Attention", I definitely don't think I fully understand or relate to what Edwards was trying to say about how people draw. As I sort of said in my quote of the day a...

I like to draw in my free time so reflecting on it is kind of like reflecting on what I do inn my free time. I definitely don't draw realistic pictures or faces often so it was somewhat of a challenge for me to draw my own face even though I have done it multiple times before. I always think something is off with my drawings but probably because they are never perfect.

"If they stopped saying "hand," for example, they could learn to stop drawing the symbol for a hand (five stick fingers at the end of a stick arm) and could instead begin to see the intricate pattern that is made by a particular hand resting on the edge of a particular keyboard." (Habits of the Creative Mind) When reading this whole passage I honestly don't think I truly understand what Betty Edwards was trying to say. I understand what the research said about the two hemispheres in the brain working to do different things. In fact, I learned about that in AP psych during my junior year in highschool. But the way I see it, Edwards is trying to say that people think too much when drawing simple things such as a hand. I don't really have any experiences relating to the situation these children were in so that's probably why I don't understand it as well. I am definitely more of a creative person than academic person.

The 2 Types of Reading according to Paulo Freire Reading the word: Reading to memorize Delve deeper into the meaning of the word and text Annotating Re-writing Summarizing Focusing on more of the details in the text Reading the world: Critical thinking Universal Idea/meaning Thinking about what the text means to us and in our society Critical reading Associating it with reality and our own experiences Looking at the bigger picture

"To s um up, reading always involves critical perception, interpretation, and re-writing what is read." ( The Importance of the Act of Reading, pg 11.) Freire seems to be a common reader just like all of us. I feel when I read I definitely have to re-read and try to interpret what the author is trying to say. Re-writing things also helps a lot when I don't understand something. Re-writing things in my own words helps to understand things a lot more and retain the information more.

An unexpected event that has happened in my life is my health issues that changed my whole middle school experience. I've always had health issues with my stomach ever since I was young, needing to go in every 3 months for small operations for a few years. But after a while they seemed to die down and I was okay for a little bit. But in middle school an unexpected and completely new issue came about. I had to go in to the hospital quite a few times and stayed for about a month after one operation. Although going to the hospital wasn't all that bad, I definitely missed out on a lot of my whole middle school experience and it did change my middle school life as a whole. I would say that missing basically a whole year of middle school held me back academically because of how much I missed. I already wasn't the best student so coming back for my 8th grade year was pretty hard for me academically. The whole hospital experience wasn't all that bad though, missing schoo...

One main take away from Habits of the Creative Mind is that almost everything we learned in highschool about writing and creative thinking is wrong and stops us from reaching our full potential in the writing and creative thinking process. Classroom Agreement: Don't talk over each other, be respectful of each others opinions

"And even if we find a private place to work, there’s always another text message, Snapchat, or breaking— story to pull us out of our writing and toss us into the digital sea." (Habits of the Creative Mind, pg 160) It seems that Miller is really catching on to how students in the modern day work. We work with technology which gives us so many more reasons not to stay focused or work at all. Even just writing this blog post and reading the book I can't count how many times I've tabbed out to look at something or watch just one more video. Even though I have my own room and computer and have no one around me to distract me, there is still a million ways to distract myself using the internet.

"The five-paragraph essay, it turns out, is a very limited form, one best suited to the work of making simple claims and reporting or describing supporting evidence. (It’s also easy to skim and easy to grade.)" (Habits of the Creative Mind, pg 16) The way we learned to write in high school is not a practical form of writing for most platforms in the real world. Miller show us that in order to write better, we need to unlearn what we know about writing from high school in order to be ready for writing in a non high school environment.