Pride hurt, but a lesson learned

In every class, in our first-year seminar, we had an activity called a daily fail. In which we are given a short time to complete a goal. The goals range from memorization, hard tasks, tapping into our creativity, and various sorts of puzzles.

One thing that has stood out to me the most is the day we had to memorize. She put up three different types of things to memorize on the board. A string of words, apple, faucet, mom, scarf … etc. A string of single-letter words, and then a string of numbers. As a person who takes pride in their memorization, I was excited. I have an extensive theater background, having done numerous monologues for projects, and even once had to memorize a 7-minute monologue.

During this daily fail, I thought of many options, chunking up the words, visualizing, and making an acronym. The former three mentioned are all memorization tactics. Chunking is the process of dividing up the information into smaller bits and memorizing those bits. Visualizing is the process of making a scene or image out of the thing you are trying to memorize. Then lastly an acronym is an abbreviation formed from the initial letters of other words and pronounced as a word.

However, through some disillusion, I thought pure repetition was the best. I thought to myself, “I have done it before, I will do it again”. Yet at the end of my 5 minutes, I remembered barely anything. Only after hearing the successful tactics of my classmates, and trying those tactics did I remember something.

Upon reflection on my time in theater, I did practice all these tactics. To memorize my speeches, I would chunk them, and visualize a scene. I would use repetition to improve a tweak. However, it was the environment that allowed me to be a better actor. When on stage it's so much easier to visualize the story your communicating and the one around you. Ironically, I don’t think I was ever fully conscious of these tactics.

Since this class activity, I realized the potential of these tactics, and I have been utilizing them. For example, sometimes when I read I try to memorize a page number that has important context. So I can always flip back to it when needed. When I used mindless repetition to memorize a page number, I could recall it for only a few days. However, since the time I used visualization to remember a page I have it burned into my head and it's been 3 months.

Reflection of the midterm: Analysis Paralysis

By the time I took the midterm, I was exhausted beyond all belief. I was already running on fumes before the week of spring break, and this was the last thing that was standing between me and the freedom of school. I still pushed through and gave it my all, or at least what I had. During that test, I had written an essay about how failure can make us better, and in my original reflection, I had commented on it not being my best possible work.

I had felt ashamed of my own exhaustion. Upon further reflection I have written so many rough drafts, paralyzed in the juxtaposition of the feelings of accepting your limitations and the idealism that you can do better. But I come to realize that this juxtaposition is THE encapsulation of human progress and success. You must be able to do both to be successful. That’s what I did in my reflection, I was beyond exhausted and recognized my priorities and my limit. You only have so much time, and you can only do so much. “To successfully learn from your failure, you must recognize it key aspects of it but not dwell on it.” a quote from one of my papers.

This brings me to this whole failure portfolio, and what failure means to me. Failure is knowing when something is a bad idea yet you keep doing it. If I derive any meaning out of this project, in which I went above and beyond and questioned my very sanity every step along the way. It is simply accepting that I went maybe a little too far in this, however, the value in this small failure has provided me so much insight into who I am, and where some of my passions lay. It has reminded me and made me recognize my priorities in life, and to give my all to where it counts to me and when I can.

I do not regret interviewing my grandma. In fact, I plan to keep doing it. It has inspired me so much so that during summer in my free-time I will be interviewing my grandma as much as possible. I also plan to photocopy every hand written Latvian letter, and every photo she has. I plan use all this information to take a independent study and write a biography of my grandma, and my family history.