Blogging Around

First I went to Kyle's blog. Kyle mentioned that while our blogs are interesting, few people read them

I had the same thought when we started blogging- How many people see this? I put Ads on my blog, and for the whole year, Google owes me... $4.15! That's about 250 page views total.
Maybe if next year's prompts were a bit more open- ended, they could develop into something people would really want to read.



Some passerby did read Mitch's post, which lamented posting on topics that weren't easy to write much about. He posted

ur gay

I responded:
Hey Mitch,

I saw the comment above mine and thought, that just about sums up our blogging experience- being forced to write up a few paragraphs on a topic that has little context for the outside reader, and sometimes little for us, either. Sometimes our prompts make for good posts, but not always.

Metacognition: Blogging

I've liked blogs this year!

Grade-wise, they're a double-edged sword- 15 free points is helpful, but 0/ 15 is horribly punitive for forgetting a small assignment- larger than the penalty for a late large assignment.

That said, they're usually fun. Once you make it to the keyboard, there's no pressure, you can just write whatever makes sense. Some of the topics are a bit hard to follow- perhaps for next year, link to an exemplar (from this year) below each topic, if you keep the same ones.

Blogs let me write like I'm talking, and I enjoy that. For the paragraph above, I started with

"Some of the prompts are, like, what?"

I wrote that, and then thought

That's not proper! And it doesn't make as much sense!

So I fixed it.



While I'm stuck in a loophole of thinking about what I'm thinking while I'm thinking about what to think, I'll share a cartoon with you all.
You may need to click to see it all.

Metacognition- short story

Editing my story this time around, I had a bit of a challenge. I had to partially rewrite the middle and write an end. Rose and Harold, an older couple, want to pull off a scam to prove they've 'still got it.' I had a bit of a problem- I didn't know what they'd do! If I had a good idea like the one I needed, I'd probably be scamming people, not writing a short story. I went out to dinner with my mom, and, as we were finishing our desert of chocolate lava cake, she suggested, "why don't they steal wine?"

And so they did.

I used the idea of a shop like WineStyles in Northbrook as a model, in a town like Troup, Texas. They used a turquoise van, like the one my family owned until I was about 11. In fact, almost everything I wrote about was based on my experiences.

I wonder where Robert Frost got his inspiration....

Metacognition: Jane Eyre Essay

When I started, I had a bit of trouble picking a group. I knew I'd work with Eli, but I knew that we needed to find a third to fill our group, or we would find ourselves grouped with a certain individual who has trouble wich such group selection.

Albert and I started in the lab. We first took on one topic, because we thought it would be easy. After about two thirds of a page, I thought, 'from where I am now, that topic would be a natural extension of the flow of the dialogue. So, instead of rewriting our initial launch trajectory, we changed targets. (Imagine- NASA's rocket for Saturn messes up at takeoff, so they reroute it to Mars.)

I wrote the discussion's first half, but that was during rehearsals for Cinderella. Eli and Albert took it from there.