CRTW 201 Thinking Notebook   

Requirements  Due Dates  Grading 
What Other Students Have Said About This Assignment

Some years ago I got to watch Martina Navratilova work with her coach before the U. S. Open Tournament. At this time she was clearly the best woman’s tennis player in the world. She and her coach spent 90 minutes going through a series of well-planned drills that worked on various areas of her game to sharpen her performance. At one point her coach moved a terrycloth wash cloth from one spot on the court to another and she practiced strokes from all over the court to hit that same small target time after time. After she finished, she sat down at courtside for about twenty minutes and made notes in a spiral notebook. When I got to interview her later, I asked her about what she was writing. “I write down everything I did at practice,” she said. “It makes me remember what I did, and it makes me think about what I did and why. It makes me understand what I achieved in practice.”

Your thinking notebook is designed to do what Martina was doing: keep a logbook that will record and document your practice in developing your critical thinking, reading, and writing skills over the semester and let you think about what you’re learning. It’s a cognitive exercise journal. Like any other kind of exercise, you have to write in it regularly and consistently to gain benefit from it; just as you can’t get fit by working out once every four or five weeks, you can’t become a better thinker by trying to do all your exercises the night before I check notebooks. If you choose not to take this exercise seriously, you are seriously weakening your chances at success in this class. It is NOT a diary--it should be practice at using the things we're learning and discussing in class, doing exercises from Nosich & WA, circle work, dissecting what's going on in your life, your other classes, your job, etc. The notebook is for metacognitive work--think about your thinking in it.

You’ll probably want this notebook to be separate from your class notes so that you can turn it in to me and not be deprived of your regular notebook. Bring it with you to class because sometimes I’ll ask you to stop and practice something in your notebook or to share results of an assigned exercise with each other.

Due Dates

Minimum Requirements

Like other kinds of exercise, cognitive exercise will pay off better the more and the more purposefully you do it. Here are the minimum suggested requirements. You can certainly choose to do more than this, and you'll find plenty of suggestions on the class calendar to help you exceed the minimums:

• Average three entries per week of classes
• As you read Nosich and Writing Analytically, routinely annotate your reading and write responses to what you read in your thinking journal. 
• Do the assigned exercises at ends of chapters (Nosich) and throughout the text (Writing Analytically) in your thinking journal.
• Annotate each chapter of The Future of Life carefully
• Do all class-assigned exercises

Beyond this,

• Apply the exercises to work you’re doing in other classes, for organizations you belong to, or situations that occur in your life.
• Use the elements of thinking to break down events in the news, the TV shows or movies you see, the elections, the music you listen to, etc.
• As you learn more, go back and try to repeat some of the earlier exercises with more depth and precision.
• Work on papers (or revisions) in a thoughtful and disciplined way.

Here's what some students have said about this exercise:

Doing the exercises in the books was not the most fun in the world, but looking back and reading my entries I can literally see my thinking start to change. I am really proud of how far I have come with critical thinking using the notebook.

Through doing all the exercises I became really comfortable with the concepts/skills being presented.

I found it easier to start my papers by jotting things down in my thinking notebook. This gave me a chance to look back at earlier entries that could help me on the papers. I will probably continue to keep a thinking notebook in future classes.

The notebook made my papers easier to write when it came time because my notes in here almost provided a rough outline for my papers.

Although I didn't really want to do the entries at the beginning, as the class went on I realized that the notebook was an essential part of my understanding of the class and the books. It really made doing my research paper a lot easier.

Keeping the notebook was a challenge for me. I forgot to keep writing in it as much as I was supposed to do and now I'm sorry because I could have gained a lot more from it than I did. I wish I would have used it more in the beginning of the term because now I can see how practicing would have been helpful to me.

I have learned that writing down by hand ideas and structures for important papers helps tremendously. Before this I never really did pre-writing; I would always just type my papers up as thoughts came to me and by the end of the paper my ideas were spread randomly throughout and the flow was not very good. The notebook really helped me be a more organized writer and it made my grades improve!

Even though teachers have told me to keep a notebook like this before, I was never made to do it. Now I see why they wanted me to. From keeping this notebook I have learned how to "dissect" a written work or argument and see what lies beneath the surface, especially the filters, barriers, and impediments involved. I have also learned how to take better notes when I'm reading and what to look for in readings and verbal arguments. This notebook has made me think differently about what and how I read.

Thinking Notebook Rubric