Even through all of the Fridays when I stayed up late writing them after procrastinating during the week, writing these blogs has been one of the most enjoyable things I’ve done in an English class. I learned a lot by reading others’ blogs and seeing an interest or side of them that I hadn’t seen before. I truly believe that the lit blog is one of the things that made this semester enjoyable.
Throughout the semester, my favorite blog to write was the “Animal Intelligence” blog. I wrote about the intellectual advantages that animals have over humans, especially in emotional intelligence, along with showcasing different animals’ abilities with communication and problem-solving. What I liked the most about it was being able to reflect on humanity in general. When I was younger, I heard a lot of things that separate humans from animals — the ability to believe in God, the ability to use thumbs, having to worry about taxes, but foremost intelligence. But if animals could attain high levels of intelligence, then what really separates humans from animals on a level other than just being a different species? Are humans special? Through the post, I also got to reflect on the animals in my life. My dog, whose picture I put in the blog post, had been dealing with arthritis for two years at that point (I think her arthritis medicine was visible in the picture) and finally passed away almost a week after I wrote the post. Writing the post got me to think about how much value pets, with their emotional intelligence, add to our lives, and now that my dog has passed away. Furthermore, I was able to consider questions about learning. The average bonobo knows zero words, yet Kanzi the bonobo learned over three thousand. He shows that we can learn a lot if we put our minds to a particular subject. However, I admit that I didn’t research that blog post well, and widely overestimated animals’ intelligence. For example, as Krishna told me later, an octopus, who I pointed out as having exceptional problem-solving abilities, can solve a maze, but can it create one? Regardless, this blog made me think more about many existential questions and prompted me to look further into animals even after submitting the post, even though I’d never been a huge animal person before.
By reading other people’s blogs, I feel that I learned how to make top five lists about everything. Many of the blogs showcased a person’s favorite five of something. While I thought these were repetitive to see over and over again, I think that these types of posts were some of the most insightful posts of the whole class. They showed insight into the writer’s personality and interests, and after reading, I could go buy the products or watch the movie that they said was good, knowing that it would be high-quality. Furthermore, writing a good top-five list takes skill in not only having a decent understanding of what you’re talking about but also persuasion. People make a decent amount of money sidehustling by submitting top ten lists to different websites, so having that skill is not entirely invaluable.
I think that the most important lesson that I’ll take away from this semester is to check my work. This semester, there have been frequent times when a lapse in concentration caused me to lose points and sleep. From not having a defensible interpretation on a timed writing, to forgetting to put “approximately normal” instead of “normal” in Stats, to reading one line of code wrong in AP Comp Sci. This obviously isn’t just a problem for me this semester, as it has been a recurring theme throughout my entire academic career. Since first grade, I’ve gotten much better at double checking and eliminating silly mistakes, but I want to eliminate the stress over them once and for all second semester before I go to college. Truthfully, I will probably not be successful in being perfectly mistake free at any point in my life, but at least striving towards that goal will put me in a much better spot in life than if I let all my mistakes slide.
I wouldn’t be surprised if I wrote 2+2=5 on a test before.
I had heard about the blogs before from seniors of years past, so I was looking forward to it a little bit, but writing them was more fun than I thought it would be at first. I learned a lot about my classmates that I wouldn’t have known otherwise, and hope to continue blogging second semester.
YOO DEERAJ,
I remember you talking about the animal vs human intelligence blog post during lunch. Yeah that’s really insightful that a lot of animals could think in so many ways! Really did not know that Octopuses could solve mazes.
In terms of your mistakes, I kind of disagree here. In my opinion, writing can’t really have “mistakes” per say. Mistake means that there’s something wrong with it – a flaw that needs to be fixed. In my opinion, a better word or phrase would be “better”. Writing can’t be classified as good or bad and timed writings just impose artificial rules and rubrics to grade ungradable things. So ultimately, I think that writing itself is more like an art than a math problem.
On a deeper level, I also think that mistakes like 2+2=5 or writing approximately normal vs normal are just reflections on the system we live in rather than yourself. Like really, do we really care about the word “approximate”??? In terms of personal growth, I think the most valuable mistakes to learn from are not from those that people designate, but rather ones that we can really understand and value in ourselves. I bet that the difference between approximately normal and normal won’t be too big of a deal in the future.
Keep at it big man. You got this.
-Ya boi Kai
Hi Krishna, this was a cool read. I also liked blogging as I do agree it was one of the nicer things that made the semester and the class more enjoyable, plus it was for pretty easy points. I did not like it at first, but like you, it slowly became less unenjoyable and I did not dread the fact that I had to write a blog as the semester went on. One question I have is why do average bonobo know zero words, but yet Kanzi the bonobo know over three thousand. Is it because he was just born genetically smarter than other bonobos like some humans are, or is it because he has more training on words that other bonobos can attain but do not have training, or is it a combination of both? Lastly, I do agree with you that this semester still reinforces my ability to make silly mistakes, like in software engineering where I forgot to put brackets which made my whole lab not run, or in stats where I also miss points for not putting approximately normal. It will be an ongoing struggle to not make silly mistakes for future assignments but I do think that I am getting better at it and that double checking while you do it and after you complete something is vital.
I meant Deeraj, sorry, I just mix up names with twins sometimes which is kind of rude but I’ll try to fix that mistake next semester.
Hi Deeraj,
Let me divide this up into two parts.
I wanna start by talking about your animal intelligence blog, animal intelligence has been something that has be super interesting to me since I was introduced to it. I distinctly remember when it happened too, I was always a fan of the YouTuber VSauce, and I remember during lockdown, YouTube decided to make his exclusive YouTube red series Mind Field available for free. It was so captivating that I watched all three series in two days. One of the episodes that stuck with me the most was the one on chimpanzee memories, and how their sequential memory is so good that they can be flashed a bunch of numbers and instantly remember the pattern, to upwards of fifty numbers. This is something that is effectively impossible for humans, and even if they take all the time in the world to memorize it. You can even try the test for yourself here: https://humanbenchmark.com/tests/chimp. Your animal intelligence blog was one that I absolutely loved to read because of that, and the analysis of all of these other examples of animal intelligence that I never heard of.
In relation to the rest of your blog, I definitely agree that Top X lists can be really repetitive, and yes I made a few of them myself. I agree with all the redeeming qualities for them that you mentioned, but I think the most important part of them is the quality of the commentary. I believe Top X lists are really easy to make, so some people do them just to pump a blog out and call it day, but there are many incredibly interesting ones that were posted. One that stood out to me was definitely Matthew’s on his childhood learning curves just because of the commentary.
Silly mistakes still definitely are the worst.