Metacognition: Jane Eyre Writing Assignment

When working with my group members Lauren and Alex on the Jane Eyre writing project this past week, I found myself thinking some surprising thoughts. The first and most major was the idea I came up with at the very beginning of the project, when we were deciding on which themes to write our essay on. From the very beginning I thought about the type of person Jane was, and what her values were. When I was working with Lauren, I came up with an idea that we used in the first line of the project, "How do we juxtapose Jane's love and independence?".

I had been toying with this idea in my mind for quite some time, and I was surprised about the direction it took off when penning the project. At first I had thought that while it was an interesting topic, the answer was fairly simple: Jane was an independent woman who did not let love hinder her independence. But as I began to write with Lauren and Alex, I found that the answer was much more complex than that, and that by modernizing the story of Jane Eyre, we could potentially gather how Jane's love and independence inform each other and blend together.

I was really surprised with the directions my thinking took while juxtaposing love and independence in this story, as well as modernizing it. I found that the two concepts went together really well, and that by focusing on one we almost automatically had a spot for the other. I liked the way my thought process progressed, and how Alex and Lauren's thought process also helped mine. When Lauren and I worked together, I would come up with a basic thought, and Lauren would polish and refine that idea to work into our essay.

I think that working with other people on this project really helped with advancing my ideas of what a modern day version of Jane Eyre would be: without Alex, we never would have thought of transforming our modern version into a television show instead of a novel. Without Lauren's "in-character" comments during the discussion Alex recorded, I would never have seen the words love and independence half a page across from each other and connected the two in such a unique way. Also, without our discussion that we had during class time, I think that the project would have been a lot more rushed and confused.

Overall, I really liked how our project turned out, as well as how our thoughts melded together to blend the two main tasks of the assignment to eventually separate it into three main parts and then have a refined discussion with each of us focusing solely on either love, independence or modernizing. I think that this project was as thought provoking as it was by (in our case at least) taking the topic we discussed most in class and combining it with something we hadn't really touched on. In conclusion, I think that this project really helped me open up my mind to things that went past the class discussion, while still using my thoughts and ideas from given prompts.