At the risk of sounding like I am tooting my own horn, I feel like I am pretty solid on all of the Habits of Mind. I consider myself an avid learner. In fact, when we took the StrengthsFinder inventory at my school, my highest strengths were Input, Learner, Strategy, and Intellection. I am usually successful in learning what I want to learn. But, that last sentence is kinda the key.
While we were reviewing the Habits of Mind together, I was taking the Faces of Learning inventory. Why? Because it’s something I’ve heard about but never had time to explore...so my curiosity got me. AND . . . I have read so much about Habits of Mind that I couldn’t quite make myself completely commit to our activity. I can’t say that anything revolutionary happened in looking at my Faces of Learning results, but it did point out my weaknesses as a learner: spatial thinking, movement control, and time management. I knew when I hit Geometry that spatial thinking wasn’t my thing, but I should have known years before when everybody else could tell the difference between their right and left hand, and I couldn’t. I couldn’t even use the L trick with my thumb and pointer finger because that was also directional. Movement control has been a pretty apparent weakness for me since childhood: I couldn’t fathom how everybody else hit that tiny ball with that tiny bat. What I like to do today for exercise, lifting weights and walking, is within my comfort zone. I branch out sometimes, like with yoga, but I just have to go in knowing that I will be the worst person in the room. In terms of time management, I always get my stuff done on time, but it’s not because I did so in an efficient way; it’s because I worked twice as long on it as everything else.