Metacognition: Jane Eyre Mash-up

     When my teacher said that we were to do something unorthodox and liberating for our next project, I was genuinely excited. I was tired of squeezing my creative juices into stories or essays. I was tired of paper. So then we were assigned this "mash-up" project at the conclusion of the modernist classic Jane Eyre. At first, I was utterly confused on the task at hand.  I'm not completely sure what threw me off about this assignment, but I think it was the fact that mash-ups tend to be extremely unconventional, whereas Jane Eyre appeared to be the most conventional. The project seemed to clash against the "included in almost every single high school curriculum" kind of book that Jane Eyre is known to be. Well I disregarded this concern and our group dived headfirst into this project, thinking "at least it's not another essay". However, I could have never realized that this assignment would be just as mentally stimulating as any other project that I have ever worked on.

     Mash-up. The words insinuate an almost chaotic composition of elements. Stumbling mostly in the dark, our group did just that; we composed chaos. We took a bunch of elements that had something to do with Individualism (our main theme) and literally mashed them together. We were unable to find a way to cohesively string together these elements in a satisfactory way. This got pretty frustrating as none of us could agree on anything, but in our defense, who can during chaos? What our project needed was a guide line, a kind of railroad track to keep our elements and progress in order. Our information needed to flow.

      I found inspiration in the art-form that I had gotten tired of: stories. I realized that a successful mash-up tells a story, just in a completely different way. In a story, everything isn't chaotically presented at once. Instead, things are revealed in a gradual manner. There are plot twists, character developments, plot developments, and insightful dialogues that individually deepen the story and raise it to new heights. If we treated our mash-up in this manner, I knew that we would actually accomplish something in the time that our group worked together and eventually reach success. We reanalyzed our project, and decided to solely focus on our subtitle about individualism, "Passion liberates a free spirit". Instead of finding elements that solely commented on the generic theme of Individualism, we adjusted these elements to accentuate our take on the matter.

      The ordering of our elements turned out to be vital to our mash-up's message. Once we knew the story we were going to tell, our elements eventually just fell into place. Although it took a while for our group to get on the right track, I was generally satisfied with our collective thought process throughout this project. Although we encountered the occasional hiccup, we worked with each other and challenged each other to make mental leaps in order to solve the problem at hand. This mental evolution that occurs as a result of work is an immensely satisfying feeling. Although much time was wasted assembling a chaotic mess of a mash-up, the mental payoff made the entire process worth it. Who would have known that a "Mash-up" would incur a sense of clarity within me.