Metacognition: Short Story

Writing this short story was a rather tenuous process for me. The relative amount of time I've spent writing daily probably peaked around third or fourth grade, so, as you can imagine, I'm perpetually rusty in my ability to frame, illustrate, and inform, especially in fictional or semi-fictional contexts. Therefore, my thought process was somewhat hindered by inability to express those results in writing, but I think it forced deeper introspection on how to deal with those challenges.
Mr. Allen gives challenging feedback during creative processes. This challenge was compounded with a slight lack of determined direction for me, as I wasn't quite sure how I wanted my story to work or what the central conflict was. Whatever stuck in my first draft, I was given the help needed to shave and smooth it down to something operable. I noticed that in my thought process, despite my initial lack of direction, I tended to want to stick to the story as outlined in the first draft, despite knowing it wasn't directed or perfected, which disappointed me.
These problems were solved in the end by a conference with the above-referenced English teacher, and I feel like that is a course of action to stick to in the future, since there can be no synthesis without both a thesis and an antithesis.

Metacognition: Jane Eyre Writing

Helping to write my group's Jane Eyre dialectic/discussion was a pleasant experience. The thought process was fairly straightforward given the nature of the assignment. Our topic, enlightenment and what happens after, lends itself very nicely to the format as we could easily ascribe certain views and opinions to Bronte and her creation. However, the process became interesting and challenged once we needed to create a philosophy for the Academy student (Deb Ator), which wound up post-dating both of their lives, and relating it to their systems of thought.
Not really doing ourselves any favors, we chose to have the Academite be a Nietzche-based nihilist, providing a strong counterpoint to the idea of enlightenment through religion, god, and loved ones, with enlightenment through selfishness.
Reflecting on the process, I think this was an effective choice to make. Although slightly extreme, it very nicely contextualizes the views and realities of Bronte and Eyre. It often is hard to capture the full implications of anything unless you provide an extreme opposite. I also think that the synthesis of these ideas provided meaningful insight into how we should live our lives- each of the characters were irrevocably devoted to something, which, we discover, is the only way to fulfill ourselves.
I was glad that the group's thinking led us down the path. Although Choi chose and propogated Nietzche (perhaps predictably), I was pleasantly surprised and enjoyed my ability to fit in those views with the somewhat more docile ones of Bronte.
The one part of the process I thought could be improved was developing more distinct ideologies between Bronte and Eyre to better illuminate not only why Bronte created Eyre, but also why Eyre has lived on through the centuries.