Assignment 1 and power thinking.

I spent the whole day today working on assignment 1. I grouped up with 2 other friends, Rocky and Hesham and spent 6 hours in my dorm room debating and teaching each other. We used up so much scrap paper trying to work things out that my recycling bin was full. They say that you learn the best when you teach. I have never found that more true than today. We each spent about an hour on trying to solve the questions on our own, so when we compared our findings, there were some contradictions. There were some where I was mistaken but for the ones where I was confident that I held the right answer. I realised that when you teach someone, or at the least, explain your thought process, you anticipate questions that others may throw at you, and you start to branch off a part of your brain into coming up possible answers for those questions. Through this process, I will either have checked for any holes in my logic, or have more confidence that what I have is the correct answer. I have noticed that sometimes, I get too confident and jump on the first explanation that makes sense to me and move on to the next question. Through peer interaction, I get valuable insight from other people’s thinking processes, but also it allows me to second guess myself.

                I found this assignment to be challenging but not too hard. I’ve discovered that for whatever question, I can usually shut down all of my other senses and focus into power thinking mode. In addition, I think discipline is very important in trying to parse logic, as the slightest of distractions can throw your whole thought process out the window. I like to think of my brain as a weak computer with not a lot of ram. When I feel like my brain is too crowded with other thoughts and inputs, I go into my brain’s “task manager” and “end all processes” so that I can use the ‘RAM’ towards solving my problems. I’m working on honing this skill so that hopefully one day, I can train my brain into an i7 quad-core processing supercomputer.