Emily Leland

Frances McCue
Honors 205
14 December 2015
Reflection Paper
Ive always been a person who loves knowledge for the sake of knowledge. As
a young child I checked out encyclopedias from the library and read them like
novels. I was on the knowledge bowl team in middle school and high school, a club
that allowed me to feel like I was on jeopardy while at the same time being
marginally social. Even at the UW, where I always thought other people would
delight in random facts like I do, I have yet to find someone who shares my passion
to quite the same degree. So for most of my life my quest for knowledge has been a
meandering trawl through anything and everything I could get my hands on. It has
taken me a long while to recognize the merits of being more discerning, and despite
those reasons I still enjoy browsing around on Wikipedia in my spare time.
Along with random facts, I have always enjoyed learning languages, whether
Im acquiring tiny snippets of Hungarian I know I will never use or devoting hours a
week to dedicated study, like I did in my freshman year Spanish class. It was in that
class that I started to realize that I had no hope in the world of learning everything I
wanted to know in one lifetime. The sheer quantity of new grammar structures and
the unending task of learning more words overwhelmed me. It was like when my
math teacher showed me that the number of real numbers between 0 and 1 is a
greater infinity than the infinite amount of integers. Id always know that there was
a practically infinite amount of facts to learn, just as I knew there are an infinite
amount of integers, but when I focused in on this one tiny corner of human

knowledge, a single romantic language, that infinity was somehow more meaningful
than the larger unknown.
So I started putting borders around the infinities that I wanted to delve into. I
decided that I would become functionally fluent in 10 languages before I was 50. A
little further on, I decided that I wanted to study computer science in college rather
than any of the other possible hard sciences. On the side I learned as much as I
possibly could about human development issues and basic world demographics.
Instead of wandering around the world of human knowledge scraping at the surface
of whatever I could get my hands on I started boring deep into topics. But I still
didnt much think about why I wanted to learn what I was learning. I didnt think of
knowledge as needing applications. This first quarter of college has changed that for
me.
For the first time in my life people are getting internships and seriously
considering what they want to do for a living. Professors are showing me things that
I didnt know even could be applications for concepts that Im beginning to explore
in class. Im being asked to reflect on how I learn and what I want to learn for the
next four years. Im away from my parents and their influence for the first time in
my life. All of these different experiences are making college more purposeful than
any other educational experience has been for me before. And thanks to them Im
slowly learning things about myself.
The piece that spoke to me the most in the course was one of the first
readings that we did, Four Different Ways to Be Absolutely Right. Despite the fact
that it is a somewhat narrow construction and is probably outdated, it is an
interesting framework for viewing the world. When we did the exercise in class of
fitting our own way of looking at the world into the framework, I was one of the few

people in the class to think of myself as predominantly postmodern rather than

scientific rational. I only admitted in passing to my feelings of connection to the
natural world and innate truth and my tendency to look for facts and rational
explanations for things. It made plain to me that I like to see myself mostly as a
person who sees the rules of the game and recognizes them as constructed.
That piece of my identity has dominated how I learn for years. Every time I
learn something that is the slightest bit subjective I look for peoples bias in it. I
think about the language my teachers and my peers use when discussing things
that were learning and reflect on how their word choice reveals the way they think
about race or gender. While Im on my journey learning things it is important to me
to think about where information is coming from and who is trying to give it to me.
I think that tendency comes largely from my living in a house with two
postmodern, atheistic, and not particularly nationalistic parents. For better or worse
they mostly taught me to think that tradition is synonymous anachronism. Part of
my journey in college, and more generally part of my journey in growing up is going
to have to be me consciously questioning how balanced I am in my thinking, and
whether or not what Ive been trained to think is rational is actually the way that I
want to see the world.
As Ive become more conscious of the way that I think and what biases sway
my thought processes Ive become better at writing about unfamiliar topics. I can
better identify why I have certain gut reactions to new issues and what things I have
previously accepted as true that I need to reexamine. Thanks to the quality of my
previous education, especially in terms of English, I came into college confident in
my writing skills. Over the course of quarter I think Ive proven that confidence
justified. So I dont think my skill in writing or communicating has improved

especially in this quarter. I think of communicating as a skill like a muscle where the
more I do it the better off I am. Ive certainly written recently, but not any more than
I did in high school or over the summer on my own. So Ive probably have gotten
better, but not specifically because of anything Ive been doing now that I wasnt
doing before.
In contrast I think I have gotten better at reading. The difficulty or academic
abstruseness of some of the readings Ive done for various classes far outstrips the
readings I did in high school. For the first time in my life Ive actually needed
strategies for when I dont understand something the first time I read it. Ive gotten
a lot better at reading a paragraph, recognizing that I have no idea what what I just
read means and then actually profiting from reading it over again, by picking out
significant lines and trying to understand just those. With that particular strategy
Ive had as much success in understanding readings as I ever did before, even if it
takes longer now.
Working in a group has also been much better this quarter than it was in high
school. Not only has the group project been great, but peer editing has actually
been useful. To me, it seems like Im not really doing anything differently now. Im
just in an environment where other people are putting as much effort into their work
as I am, and when we comment on each others work were all willing to take the
time to come up with useful feedback, rather than just settling for the desultory its
fine I grew to expect from my peers in high school. By the same token group
discussions have been much more interesting because people have actually done
the readings ahead of time and thought about them in an original way so that they
have something to say other than just spouting whatever the author already said.
That makes communicating with everyone in group discussions easier, so although I

dont think that Im communicating any differently in class discussions, Im having a

much more interesting conversation.
Ive had a long journey to get to where I am, and its exciting to think that in
four years when I look back Ill be able to see as much progress as I can see now
between my current skills and my skills as I was entering high school. Although Ive
made progress I know I have a lot further along my path to travel.