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Core Competence

Critical Thinking

I can question how people write essays and consider alternative and better options (a.k.a. the way I would write them). I use my observations, experience, and imagination to draw conclusions about people people’s essay writing and to be judgmental of it.

In Peer Tutoring, my lesson plan exemplified how my thinking is always critical. (After all, my mind has always been in critical condition.)

To create my lesson, “Writing With Style,”  I read through every single essay Mr. Celenza’s English 10 class wrote to find out what they were doing wrong, which was too much to include.

The three circular components of critical thinking are analyzing and critiquing, questioning and investigating, and developing and designing. I demonstrated use of this process by reading over the essays to find mistakes, which was my analysis and critique. Then I questioned and investigated these essays to find the roots of the problems. I could have simply listed all the various mistakes that were made, but I wanted to convey as clearly as possible what this class was fundamentally doing wrong. I realized that the main mistakes could all be organized into the categories of grammatical errors, a lack of following formal writing conventions, poor word choice, and poor sentence structure. I developed and designed a lesson that would break down with clear examples of better options for how certain sentences could be written. By teaching everyone how I write better than they can, I could successfully make them understand what they were doing so wrong so they wouldn’t make the same mistakes again.

I suppose my main goal in improving would still be to better identify the implications of why certain errors are made. It is easy to be a critic (or for me it is), but it is harder to discern the core issues and factors that led to mistakes being made in the first place and cure the illness instead of the symptoms. You don’t treat ricin poisoning with cough drops.

I needed some help from Mr. Celenza to highlight the key point of what I was really trying to say. Sure, I was trying to teach various things to do with grammar and formal writing, but what I was really trying to do was make students’ writing appear more confident and persuasive. Conveying this key idea helps them understand and remember multiple points such as not using first and second-person pronouns that make their points sound more like opinions, and not using words such as “think,” “believe,” “probably, and “maybe”.

P.S. I was being satirical earlier. It’s actually a good class.

 

Creative Thinking 2: ECLECTIC BOOGALOO

In Psychology, my peers told me they’d never seen someone write anime fanfic for a presentation before. That’s because I can think outside the box by reinterpreting others’ ideas in a novel way.

Realizing that Kaguya Sama: Love is War is a show about psychological warfare, I realized that my topic of colour psychology could tie perfectly into a plot of one of the episodes (like if Miyuki Shirogane was trying to guess Kaguya Shinomiya’s favourite colour). So, I whipped up a script and PowerPoint literally this morning. To my luck, a recent Korean paper finding the correlations between personality and colour preferences actually contained lots of evidence for Kaguya’s favourite colour being red. So I used the narrative framework of a Love is War chapter to act as the vessel for an informative and entertaining lesson on how colours are perceived to have specific meanings, and how those perceptions and associations can vary over eras, cultures, and individuals. The question of what Kaguya’s favourite colour would be was the J.J. Abrams Mystery Box to keep the audience entertained and try and answer the question themselves. As that Pixar writer said in that TED Talk, audiences don’t really want 4—they want 2+2. They want to think about and engage with the narrative, and therefore, making my presentation a story helped make it more engaging and educational. This would of course have been a bad idea for a formal paper, but I had some liberty in this case, and thought I’d use it. (I was also just up early and wasn’t exactly in a sound state of mind when writing my script.) All of this proves that I am able to combine the best parts of old ideas together to create something new and unique. Although, like I mentioned in my previous blog post, something creative doesn’t always mean it’s good.

I should probably mention I haven’t gotten the mark back yet.

Creative Thinking

Ah yes, creative thinking. My teachers always used to call my work “creative”. The thing about being creative is that it doesn’t mean something is good. Creativity is simply anything relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas. Sometimes things don’t exist not because no one thought of them, but because they really just shouldn’t exist. Which is why I took Creative Writing, as I knew “creative” didn’t mean “good”. (We’ll skip over the fact that I accidentally took Creative Writing 12 when I meant to take Creative Writing 11.)

But for the sake of this assignment, I think I’m supposed to mention something innovative—something that achieved an apt result in a unique way. So for that I put forth my “Choice Work” assignment for Creative Writing, where I was allowed to write anything I wanted. There was nothing I wanted to write more than nothing itself, but for the sake of passing I asked Mr. Baker what I could write to show breadth, as all I’ve been writing since elementary school is self-insert murder mysteries filled with puns. He proposed experimental fiction—a genre of literary work wherein writers focus on using innovative storytelling techniques that defy literary norms and conventions. So by definition, I was required to actually be creative.

In the end I wrote a story entirely told through someone’s internet search history. I searched for anything like this, and I couldn’t find anything, so it could very well be the first of its kind. But is it good? Well, ignore the fact that I’m not including it here and let me explain how this experimental format actually enhanced several aspects of the story:

Because you read internet search history by scrolling down, this actually makes the story non-linear. This creates mystery, as the reader has to try and figure out what the protagonist is trying to achieve with his confusing searches, but it all comes together in the end. For example, we see he was researching if hamburgers are made of pork, and before that he was buying equipment to grind meat, and in the end his very first search was of what human flesh tastes like (it tastes like pork). There are also searches that seem unrelated at first, such as WikiHow articles on how to invite your ex over, and “steamed hams” Simpsons memes. But by the end we realize why he was inviting his ex over and the steamed hams memes lead into his research on meats. It reflects how people’s internet search history is often quite a confusing string of tangents, helps add some mystery and comedic juxtaposition to the story, and also illustrates the strange fact that deranged individuals often enjoy the same media that “ordinary people” do, and can often appear quite normal themselves.

So in this manner, I used Creative Thinking to do something unlike anything I or most writers have done, which will get me a better breadth mark, and also created a story that is elevated by its unique formatting.