Metametacognition

By Jonathan Lam on 12/24/15

Tagged: the-homework-life the-homework-life-thought

Previous post: Introducing Search!
Next post: Anticipation: Consuming Distraction or Spirited Motivation?

I began to notice that, being well-prepared and confident for tests, that my most frequent cause of careless mistakes was not because of running out of time, miscalculations, or not knowing the material - instead, it was my own mind that was anticipating the questions and making my mind believe those guesses. Even when reading or checking the questions, my mind overrides what I actually see to what I preconceived, and I rarely catch the error unless I step back and view it without this guessing. Jonathan Lam, thehomeworklife blogger

Although it might sound a bit cheesy, I had to write this down at the beginning of this year. Dr. Nuzzo had taught us early in the year that in order to do well in her class, we had to be metacognitive, or mindful about our own thinking. Our first project was to decorate our writing journals' covers with a collage about metacognition.

At first, I missed the hint. Science had never been terrible for me, and last year Mrs. McTague had taught us well in preparation for this year. In fact, many of this year's first topics were review from last year, so I felt just fine doing what I did.

And then it hit me. An 82 on a quiz. Sure, Dr. Nuzzo's quizzes were supposed to be difficult, but a B-? Never had I on an assessment score lower than an A-, not even when I had a relatively rough start last year in Honors Biology. Following that was our first test. An 86 (but luckily, there was extra credit). And the most maddening part was the easiness of the mistakes. Oh silly sigfig rounding error! Oh silly misunderstanding of the question. Oh silly me!

Worse yet was how this started to permeate my entire school day: in math, for example, I received a 90 on my first quiz, and in Spanish and English I participated much less in fear of saying something wrong (English is a slightly different matter, however, being a huge mental leap from last year — but I'll save that for a different post).

And that's when that which Dr. Nuzzo (and Mr. Breault, our band teacher — see below) said came back to me. I did what I did briefly at the beginning of last year (freshman year): I sat down and looked at my tests and quizzes. What did I do wrong? … How could I have missed that? … Why do I keep making these foolish careless mistakes? I talked briefly with Mr. Excedy, my math teacher, for advice about this, and he helped me discover what I had written out above: I over-study and I over-anticipate. From then, I learned to read directions more closely. I learned to double- and triple-check. I learned to become a better test-taker and student in general. As a result, I became mindful.

Be mindful, not mindless! Mr. Breault, band teacher

It was a bit of a miracle story after then, a sudden happy ending: H. Chemistry and H. Algebra II became like the science and math classes of last year: they became fun courses, challenging to the point of interest but not overly exhausting.

And now that I'm thinking about the act of thinking about thinking, what will that do for me? Anyways, merry Christmas Eve!