There are two academic worlds, the analytical one and the philosophical one. I have always had a passion for math and science. When it comes to literature, I am out of my natural, mental disposition. I found myself trapped in a mental way of thinking that limited how I could process writing essays and analyzing various pieces of literature. I did not have the highest essay scores or seem to come up with the most unique ideas.
I was struggling to write essays that would get the grade I wanted as I often didn’t see the concepts that my teachers desired me to in identifying biblical allusions or shifts in syntax. Now if you put a math problem in front of me, I could solve it within a matter of moments. My brain functions best when given a formulaic process to achieve a desired outcome. Now with essays and analyzing literature, the english classes seemed so far from that mentality that I couldn’t help but not seem to grasp anything. I would look too hard into finding the specific literary device all to find out that it really wasn’t the one that my teachers agreed with. Even when I came up with ideas that I thought I saw in a work, they never seemed to be literarily correct.
A shift in my english classes happened when I began to shift my mentality of English class into one that aligned more with how I process math and science. I started to lay out a formulaic way to be successful in writing my essays. I shifted to giving myself a game plan when reading a piece of literature and looking to find those literary devices. There was no longer that stark contrast of subjects, but rather a mentality that I brought to each of my classes that would align best with how I process material. I began to see the fluidity in the lines defining classes, as after all, education is a unified conception of various subjects. To be successful in all of my classes, including English, I continue to apply the mindset from math and science, that has been so successful for me, into all of my classes. Education is a wholistic approach to learning, one that is not simply individual classes with their own mindsets, but rather one with the desire for learning under the most beneficial processes.
