This thought record, or “journal,” offers you the opportunity to record the range of insights and emotions evoked by our assigned materials and in-class activities. in particular, its purpose is to foster critical reflection on the internal logic of those materials, to cultivate synthetic thinking about the ideas we encounter in this course, and to afford you time and space to connect them to your life and vocational journey more broadly. that is, it aims to add “branches” to and to strengthen your neural networks as you compare and contrast, agree and contest, express joy and anger and discomfort, and insert the class’s materials squarely into the context of your own lives. i alone will evaluate these briefly at the midterm and in detail at the end of the course. i encourage you to bring any thoughts, questions, and concerns evoked by your journaling to our discussions. this is not required, however, as i will keep your journals in the strictest confidence. yet, it is my hope that in class, too, you will feel free to express yourself openly and honestly, without fear of recrimination, an increasingly rare possibility in our digital age. there is no “perfect” journal or one “right” way to structure your reflections, precisely because learning is not a linear process or “exact science.” rather, what i will look for is that your efforts engage in some way the four areas of kolb’s learning style inventory (concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation). in particular, your journaling will include, on the aggregate (i.e., not every entry needs to do all), the following five dimensions : 1. The making of regular entries thats how thought development overt ime; 2. therecordingofthematerials’mainargumentsalongwithanyotherassertionsthatyoufind compelling or suspect or that you wish to flag for future reflection; 3. thecriticalinterrogationofthecourse’smaterials.thatis,youmovebeyondthereporting of arguments into comparing and/or contrasting to our other “texts” and outline how and why agreements or disagreements emerge. you should also here be able to explain where and why you agree and/or disagree with the “text.” this latter analysis is also related to dimension no.