Metacognition: Jane Eyre Writing Assignment

The collaborative Jane Eyre project we just completed was a success for our group (Meghana, Nirali, and I). However, we fully intended to get the entire thing done in a few hours at a sleepover we had on Friday night, but that turned out to be a total failure. I thought that if we put our minds to it, we could accomplish everything in that one night and get it all out of the way so we could just relax for the rest of the week. This was a very poorly thought out plan, as we were so tired and distracted by things most teenage girls get distracted by, that we only got a few paragraphs written before we decided to call it quits for the night.

Looking back, I'm surprised that I thought this writing assignment would be easy, something I wouldn't have to work on very hard. Treating it this way for the first couple of nights meant I wasn't able to express what I wanted to say and I had no idea why. It took a shift of my thinking toward really focusing and thinking reflectively about the book to help me finish writing my section of the project. It turned out, I had to be much more analytical than I was prepared to be initially.

So though it all came together in the end (and with about twenty minutes to spare), my group finished in the same almost every other group finished: on Wednesday night, with a lot of frantic writing to get it done before the time ran out. And these circumstances ended up bringing out some writing I was decently proud of, which is all I can ask for in a project. I just have to remember to be realistic next time and not try to sacrifice my weekends in the hope of lightening my week work load. It's just never going to happen without the integrity of something being sacrificed.