Salutations, and welcome to my blog entry for week 2! This week's topic of writing: analyzing my learning thus far in Writing 39B. Before we begin, I want to apologize in advance for how long this entry is. Now, let us get started, shall we? 

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To help me illustrate the analysis of my progress, I am going to reference one particular assignment that I believe truly shows my advancement in this course: the annotations on "Immigration Roils the West" by Deverell and Hyde. For this activity, we were instructed to read and annotate the text using the metacognitive tools we learned in class. Throughout the entire time I was annotating the text, I was profoundly aware of my thinking process-- that is, the connections I was making to the text, my opinions on things that were mentioned, and my reactions; I have always been aware, to a certain degree, about my thoughts on a text while reading it. However, this time, because I had to physically write them down, which allowed me to keep track of them, I had to pay particular attention to how my thinking was evolving, how I was responding to the text. Because of this activity, I was learning how to have a conversation with the text. Technically speaking, to converse with an inanimate object such as text on a paper seems, to a point, downright crazy, but it truly is not! To converse with a text is to acknowledge your own understanding of it, to acknowledge your own thoughts and opinions as you interact with it, rather than simply taking in what the author has to say and moving on. And, to be frank, it was almost therapeutic. I became immersed in the text, focusing just on what the author was saying-- what exact words were being used--and noting my opinions of why such decisions were made by the author. At the end of the activity, I could feel that my understanding of the text went beyond what I would have understood if I simply skimmed the text, or if I just read it to get the activity over with. I realized that what I was doing was enhancing one of my habits of mind--my metacognition--which is one of the course objectives of the class: I was learning how to critically think about not only the text, but myself and my thought process as well, allowing me to reach a deeper understanding of the academic discourse being presented. 

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Below this entry is an excerpt of my annotations assignment. It serves as evidence of the development of my metacognition skills, for the annotations illustrate the depth of my thinking process and my monitoring of it. However, on a separate note, I chose this specific page of my assignment because of one specific annotation I made: the annotation in red ink at the very bottom of the page. I was particularly proud of this annotation because I felt that I had noticed something I otherwise would not have even given a second thought to if I was not practicing my metacognition skills. On this specific page, Harold Ezell, the author of "Enough is More Than Enough," verbally attacks his opponents, those who oppose Proposition 187; in one of his attacks, he states, "[t]he Chicken Little opponents, who say that the sky is falling if you vote yes on 187, are not telling the truth" (qted in Deverell and Hyde 290). Whereas he intended the reference to Chicken Little to be insulting, it truly was not, which made me question whether or not he fully understood his choice of reference. By calling his opponents Chicken Little, he believed he was labeling his opponents as exaggerative and dishonest; but in reality, he was doing the complete opposite. Yes, it is true that Chicken Little did seem crazy and exaggerative, as per the movie, when he was screaming about how the sky was falling. However, that was in the beginning of the film. As the story progressed, it became evident that Chicken Little was telling the truth the entire time, and the entire town believed him once they saw for themselves what he was rambling on about. (Albeit, the sky was not literally falling, but it only seemed so because of the aliens that created this effect.) Thus, Ezell's attempt to call his opponents untruthful honestly falls apart. 

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