Metacognition: Jane Eyre Mashup

Let me start off by saying this: the Mashup was different than any assignment I've done in the past. And for that reason, my thought process and the way my mind worked were a new experience as well. When the project was first assigned, I was unsure as to whether I would be able to create a product like the example I had seen. I had no idea how so many different elements could flow and come together to form one developing idea.

I worked with Shea in a duo. We started off by collecting all of our elements. We chose individualism as our topic, so at first, we only searched for sources with individualism in mind. We weren't quite sure which direction we wanted to go in regarding individualism, but we assumed that our elements would fall into place eventually. After finding all of our elements, we began attempting to piece them together, trying to form a new, deeper thought in the process. The first few elements we used fit together surprisingly well; needless to say, we both cheered and danced around when we thought that the project would be easier to complete than we had been expecting. After placing four or five of the elements, however, we got stuck. We started to realize that we needed to clearly define our claim, and once we did that, we discovered that some of the sources that we had found didn't fit well anymore. This was definitely frustrating, since we had to take somewhat of a step backward. But after we added a clear focus, it became much easier to put the pieces together, since we weren't just aimlessly putting random elements into place.

We had to put 37 elements together. That's a lot of elements. After about 20 of those elements, we got stuck again. We worried that we were starting to stray from our focus, and started to question some of earlier work. Every time we tried to add on another piece, it wouldn't feel right, so we would erase it and try again. We went through this process several times until we finally figured out where we wanted to go next. Suddenly the rest of our ideas started to mend together, which felt extremely rewarding. After multiple days of work, countless frustrations, and plenty of spontaneous outbursts of joy, we had finished putting our project together. Both Shea and I let out a huge sigh of relief. We made plenty of edits after that, mostly on our commentary. The commentary was actually one of the more difficult parts of the mashup, because it often felt like it was disrupting the flow of the other elements. We worked hard to prevent these disruptions from happening, and after we finished those edits, we were finally done.

This mashup honestly felt like a final. There were so many different components that went into it, and at some points, it felt impossible to put them all together. Although there were plenty of mind blocks and moments where my brain just wanted to shut down altogether, in the end, it was pretty cool to read the whole mashup, especially at the parts where one part flowed perfectly into the next.  It was fascinating to see how my mind managed to connect so many different elements.