Week One, Journel Entry

I'm preparing to go to my biology class and find myself rather excited. The reason for this is that in the last class we talked about a new concept to me; metacognition. Apparantly, this term discribes the act of thinking about how we think. To be honest I find this very interesting as just this last semester a fellow student was asking me to help them in a class (by basically asking me how I manage to do well in all of the various classes that I take; usually seven per semester) and I found myself telling them that they needed to change the way that they looked at each course. In general, I wanted them to simply identify what it was that the professor wanted for that particular course, and do it; that would get them the A. It sounds simple, but in my experiences with people i've found that there are alot more students out there who go to class with a chip on their shoulder than you might expect. They have an idea of whats reasonable and whats bullcrap and that defines how they will do in that course, dependant upon where the teacher falls into those guidelines. I've found rather, that to be a good student you must be fluid and willing to learn in whatever way an individual teacher may desire. Fluidity that can be defined as changing how you learn at times. This concept of metacognition basically says that you need to identify three things when planning to learn something, or think about something. One, know your personal variable. Two, Know the task variable; or what the task at hand requires. Three, Know the strategic variables; that is to say know how your going to go about doing this thing. I can't wait for class so that I can learn more about this particular concept.