I had an epiphany while grading some Intro to Lit papers recently: Students do not trust their ability to make connections.
This is by no means an original observation. But while grading those papers – and thinking about this post – I finally understood my undergraduate advisor’s admonition that I needed to learn to trust my intuition more. I always took it to mean a distrust of reason, a distrust of analysis. And I was totally unfair to my advisor, because that’s not at all what she meant.
What she meant was that I wasn’t trusting myself when I saw connections. Continue reading “Creative Thinking, Analytical Writing, and Intuition”