Gregoric Thinking Style

Based on the Gregoric Thinking Style test that I took prior to the start of Phase 0, my thinking style score was tied between abstract sequential and concrete sequential with the other two thinking styles only a few points behind. The score was based on a list of adjectives that you were supposed to choose from to best describe yourself. Personally, I thought the test was pretty subjective, given that A) choosing words to describe yourself has more to do with self-perception than with actual cognitive patterns that a person exhibits, and B) a lot of the listed words were not mutually exclusive (choose between "imaginative" and "responsible"? What if it's both?) Like I said, not a particularly objective test.

So I took the results of that test with a grain of salt. Nonetheless, I have come to observe a number of different things about my learning and thinking styles over the course my life and especially within the last few weeks. It's funny, I always thought I was a linear thinker. I thought that I like to have things presented piece by piece. That sounds like "sequential" thinking, right? But I've learned from pairing with others that "linear" may still be too strong of a word to describe how I think.

Here's what I am learning about how I think: I've always known I want to see the "big picture" first, or else the rest won't make much sense to me. On the other hand, I sometimes can't see the big picture without understand the small details. It sort of seems like others are better at seeing just one star, and I want to see the whole constellation. (That might be a terrible analogy because it would be pretty difficult to learn constellations based on the locations of individual stars first.) That's how lost I can feel sometimes when I'm learning something new.

An example of this what when we were beginning to learn some Javascript concepts this week. In order to really get an understanding, I had to actually write some Javascript code in its actual context, interacting with HTML and CSS. Now it makes more sense to me than when it was just the theoretical "this.moveRight" exercises we were initially doing. I am definitely a heavily kinesthetic and visual learner, so doing something hands-on and then getting the visual feedback from my work (like how the web page appears) makes a lot of sense to me.

My biggest learning challenge with Phase 0 is reading new material. I think some people are surprised by my difficulty with reading because of my general ability to write and do well in school, but it has always been hard for me. Somehow even reading the instructions for the challenges can feel like I'm reading complete gibberish and processing none of it. But here are a few things I have come up with to accommodate this difficulty:

1. --For each challenge, make more concise lists for myself of what I need to do (what I need to actually turn it, what to call the necessary files, or what resources to navigate to).
2. --Try to turn off the voice in my head that's like, "You're doing it wrong." That voice makes everything take way longer. The truth is, there probably are some parts of all of this that I'm doing wrong. But I know that I'm trying really hard. And my goal is to learn as much as I can, not to make my work 100% error-free.
3. --Come up with questions before doing challenges with peers. Make sure I understand the expectations of the challenge, get a general concept of what needs to be done and how I might work on it with another person.

I'm trying to have the "growth mindset" rather than the "fixed mindset". I'm already seeing how I've been trying to adapt in a few weeks in order to get everything done. Part of that comes down to accepting that information will not always be presented to me in ways that are easy for me to pick up. But that's okay. There are so many available resources. The great think about coding is that there are a ton of people on the Internet who want to share their knowledge about it! I start out with the resources from DBC, and when something doesn't make sense, I look it up through this magic genie wizard machine called Google.

I'm still hoping to expand my learning and thinking styles beyond their current scope. Peer pairing helps with that, because I see how other people process information and proceed with the challenge. They don't always get things right, which is great news! I like seeing how other people take risks, get things wrong, and come out with more knowledge because they trusted that the gaps would be filled in and their misconceptions would later be corrected. That's probably the biggest way I need to expand. I think adopting that sort of mindset would not only subdue some of my current fears, but would ultimately also help me to make progress with learning in new ways.