Notes and Thoughts

Today in class, DrM noticed a page of scribbles I had in my Baxter Magolda book. Anyhow, yeah, that's what I do. It wasn't really to clarify anything in particular, but a place where I record my thoughts after reading parts of the book. In addition to the thoughts that related directly to the reading (see previous post), here are my scribbles:

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Frustrated. I am still on Ch 1 of our book. I find myself wholly and utterly frustrated by my inability to just sit and read. Sometimes I wish I could just sit and read - just take it in and think about it later. But the more I read things that are connected to something I studied before or to something someone said or to an experience I had, I find my mind straying from the reading and reflecting back. It is frustrating to take entirely too long to read something because your mind keeps bouncing around and you cannot keep up - with your thoughts OR your readings.

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My problem is my mind bounces around too much. I am too affected, too intrigued. I feel pulls in all directions. But I like the connections and feeling strings connecting me to people, ideas, words, and thoughts. --That these "strings" of connections can go both ways are what I find to be most compelling and beautiful.

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motivation --> what is behind motivation - parents, grades, intrinsic learning, etc

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How do you eat knowledge? Do you smell it and hesitantly taste? Do you bite? Do you savor it or quickly consume it waiting for your next fix? Do you swallow right away or chew a bit? Do you ever spit it out because it tastes a little funny and then look at it, maybe pick through it because it tasted a little odd... do you pop it back in your mouth again? Or maybe it is so disgusting you don't even try it? Do you lick your fingers clean? How do you eat your knowledge?

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Children
-uninhibited
-haven't yet learned to stifle their creative imagination

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Active engagement in learning

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We can't generalize from only one perspective...at the same time, we shouldn't deny the value of individual experiences.

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SO...yes. In addition to my previous post (which made sense) these are my random scribbles in my book. Some are indirectly related to the reading while others are...a few tangents removed from the reading. :)

A few other thoughts I had that I didn't write down here was how feminist literature influenced Baxter Magolda. In the second semester of my first year of college I took a great psychology of women class and we read some of the works that Baxter Magolda cites - We read the first part (it was in our reader) of Belenky et al's Women's Ways of Knowing and Hare-Mustin & Maracek's Making a Difference: Psychology and the Construction of Gender.

That psychology of women course was the first time I was introduced constructionism AND...I went back to look at my midterm for that class and believe it or not, I mentioned Perry's "dualism"! Wow. Totally did not remember that AT ALL. (Though I do remember writing it at like...4 am.........) It's an interesting paper. On the first day of class, our prof asked us to write down questions we hoped the class would answer for us and she collected our paper. For our midterm assignment, she handed those papers back to us and we had to answer our questions based on what we had learned in class thus far. I thought it was an amazing assignment. Though the class seemed to have more of a feminist theory background than a "psychological" one, it was my first introduction to feminist theory and constructionism and that was exciting.