“Your work is not deep enough, you are not synthesizing new ideas” – Few words spoken by glorious Ms Madsen that left me going nuts halfway through this project.
Only now can I reflect on this statement and understand what it means.
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Throughout the past few weeks, PLP 12 has entered a new era led by our great, glorious leader that is Ms Madsen. This new project, focused on the idea of “intolerance”, was designed not only to learn about the Holocaust but develop critical thinking skills like analyzing and synthesizing.
As you can tell by the Bloom pyramid, these essential abilities were setting us up to be able to create original work. This work would be in the form of a children’s book that could teach grade 5s about intolerance.
Here is the final book I fully hand drew. I am very proud of it and I spent a lot of time making it the best I could imagine. Please check out the link!
I’m not writing this blog to reflect on the final product as I feel that I’ve completed very high quality work and demonstrated the driving message of my tale. I am more interested in talking about a keystone part of this project that was designed to help me build the understanding to make this book possible. It might have only been a paragraph to demonstrate our understanding of Holocaust Survivors testimonies that many of my peers would quickly move on from, but it left me more stumped than anything else in this recent year. Let’s talk about how I have changed my thinking to better understand, and more importantly, better synthesize key ideas after 4 whole revisions, and lots of help from my teacher on this task.
To speak candidly, I’ve always struggled to understand what “going deeper” meant. Every idea is built under another idea so you could theoretically continue delving deeper into any idea you choose so how do you know what is good work and extending work compared to just shallow thinking.
As a guide of how I improvement journey, here’s my first draft of this task.
As you can tell I’m kind of restating the driving question of this assignment but not really making a point. I reference the testimonies but I don’t actually really use them in my argument because there is none. Ms Madsen tells me to revise and actually make a point with evidence. So here’s my first revision.
Once again I still feel like I am not really understanding the task and just inflate the original paragraph with more words and a bit of an example testimony.
It was only after a (slightly heated) conversation that I realized my downfall when it came to writing. I failed to understand that it was not about just restating the main idea of a driving question but using pieces of our understanding that we have analyzed to create a new idea. I did one more revision before the conversation that I think it’s useless to show because it was basically a rehash of the second. Here is the final piece of writing I did which had me prioritizing spending a LOT MORE TIME thinking about my response rather than just writing.
It is unfortunate that I never really understood this idea of “synthesizing” until the recent lecture by Ms Madison to the class; which was incidentally, by far the best English lesson taught to me in high school. I am happy that even if it was late, I can truly begin to write works that enter a new level of understanding.
They say the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago. The next best time is right now. This is hopefully the seed for a better journey in writing that will serve me in my soon post-secondary years.