Key Concepts

Practices and Habits of Mind for You to Work With

Responsibility for Your Own Learning. I cannot stress enough the significance of having
responsibility for your own learning for what you see, hear, and feel that dictates your path in life.
Being knowledgeably responsible means that you take your time to invest thought and/or experience into
a subject, whether you find it intriguing or not, and storing that knowledge in a place where it may be
easily retrieved. I engage with this concept more often than any other. In fact, in all my classes I tend to
be very open with my thoughts and questions. I believe it is my right to pursue information that I deem
important, and that the teacher will not just give me what I need, that I must search for it. For instance,
last semester I was in a freshman engineering course ENGR 1201 that introduced the basics of electrical,
civil, and mechanical engineering. In this course, the instructors would never inform you of homework
due dates, quizzes, or exams. Furthermore, each student was assigned an entire book to read in the case of
pop quizzes featuring questions on the books contents. Ultimately, I was responsible for my own
learning, for my own grades, and for my own good.
Independent Inquiry and Curiosity. This concept ties in very, very closely with Responsibility
for Your Own Learning, in that you are in charge and you ask the questions that need answering. As with
the first concept, I engage with this one nearly every day. In my University Writing Program class UWRT
1102, for instance, I have chosen to inquire on the possibilities of reducing the usage of timber for fuel in
industrial and home businesses in hopes of reducing deforestation and promoting the health of the
environment. But, this concept goes in much deeper than simply asking a question and pondering on its
vastness. In fact, this concepts calls for you, the inquirer, to continually think outside the box, i.e., to
propose original ideas that will enhance your understanding of the question itself. I, for one, understand
that modern societies cannot simply exist if the wood market vanishes, but I also know that there are other
means of energy available that should affect the wood market but not completely eliminating it either.
Nuclear energy, bamboo, composite materials, green charcoal, and so forth.
The Writing Process & Revision. I am a strict upholder of proper grammar and punctuation.
Agreeably, the content and flow is equally important in a papers wellbeing, but grammar and
punctuation, I insist, play just as big of a role. I am continually developing my writing and revision skills
through rereading, re-rereading, re-re-rereading, and . . . The simple act of scanning through your paper
and searching for typos, runoffs, etc. is fairly straightforward.
Getting Out of Your Comfort Zone. You could say that I am a traditionalist, that I despise
change and alterations to my daily rhythms. And, in fact, I do. I absolutely hate anything that I cannot
grasp upon. Well, I guess I am more of sore loser than a traditionalist. Getting Out of Your Comfort
Zones proves to be challenging and tricky for me chiefly because I am unfamiliar with anything
uninteresting. Being unfamiliar with something and attempting to dive into its depths will prove fatal
because first, you cannot get a clear grasp of what you are searching for, and second, you simply do not
have the motivation to squeeze out effort towards its cause. I believe I may better engage this concept in
the second half of this semester if and only if extra credit is rewarded or my grades have suffered.
Multi-Modality of Print & Digital Texts. Referring back to the previous concept, I abhor
interruptions to my daily rhythms. That includes anything that I cannot wrap my head around, e.g.,
writing and researching. This concept, however, is on an entirely new level; it is a combination of the
previous concept. Imagine if writing and researching was combined into a research project that was to be
culminated in a written document, visual representation, presentation, and explanatory documentations.
To better engage with this concept in the latter half of this semester, I believe using multiple sources of
various backgrounds should be able to smoothly introduce to me the concept of variability and multimodality. For instance, citing a website, book, article, dissertation, and an interview, and conjoining them
into a cohesive paper sounds reasonable enough.