Crickets and Metacognition

evidence of me camping. no one wants you to know this, but you can make ramen anywhere in the world as long as you have a camp stove

Cheep cheep. Chirp chirp. Cheep cheep cheep. Chirp chirp chirp. I was camping and the damn crickets wouldn’t shut up. I kept having deep and profound thoughts that needed to be written down, but I had no pen or paper in my tent, nor did I have my phone. It’s called being off the grid. Now the only thought I can remember is “cheep chirp I hope these damn crickets shut up.” At one point they did shut up. Then it was a little too quiet, and I started thinking about my deep thoughts and how I couldn’t remember any of them. Thinking about thinking. Metacognition, as my new classmates in grad school like to say. Never have I been in a room with so many people saying the word metacognition. In fact, I had to look it up the next day when I was at the park watching a man in knee pads and an American flag bandana run circles on the curb between the field and the asphalt. That’s embarrassing. The fact that I had to look it up, that is. Whatever the knee padded patriot was doing isn’t embarrassing. That’s just Brooklyn, baby.

Anyways, I hope they still let me be a teacher even though I had to look up the word metacognition. Of course, after I looked it up all I could do was think about thinking about metacognition. Is that meta metacognition? If I thought about thinking about thinking while wearing Meta glasses would that be meta meta metacognition? How meta can cognition really be?

When I think too much I get anxious. When I am outside and thinking about how happy I am to be outside, that’s pretty good. Or when I see a cool bug. Crickets are not currently on my cool bug list because they are very loud (see above). If I’m thinking about how happy I am, is that metacognition? Is happiness a thought? What is the difference between a thought and a state of being? How you’re doing, where you are, always use the verb estar. Estoy feliz. Claro. Pero también estoy pensando sobre cómo estoy feliz. What's the difference between a thought and a feeling? If I feel myself thinking, is that metacognition?

See, this is why I prefer my cognition to be not meta. What my brain does or doesn’t do is its own business. I don’t need to think about all that. Instead, I want to think about writing this, about how on a not insignificant level this is performative, and I am writing this because I feel like I should post something. I am writing this because I want to show off how much fun I have when I go camping. But also I’m writing this because I really did hope that if I started thinking about those crickets keeping me up last night my deep and profound thoughts would come back to me, and I’d write something so wonderful that everyone would say wow, she really is quite good, isn’t she? I thought I’d write “cheep cheep chirp chirp” and then hit the ground running with a piece that was meaningful but not preachy, funny but not unserious, genuine but not too revealing of any of my true inner thoughts. After all, my thoughts are for my brain to think about. If you are thinking about me thinking, is that metacognition or is that just psychology?

My deep and profound thoughts are only suitable for public consumption after a rigorous cleaning and censoring process. You do not want or need to know about the immense smallness I feel when I look into the sky, see no stars because of light pollution, and have to imagine the universe above me, trust that it is there, allow myself to remember the flagstone under my Costco socks with the holes in the toes, and a blanket on the trampoline at 1 AM. You do not want or need to know that it makes me cry if I think about it for too long. So instead I say,

I looked for the stars and saw

nothing but a memory:

the red ground burning my feet.

Poetic and digestible, just for you. For me, I get to think about why staring into space makes me feel so strange, and I get to think about why thinking about that makes me sad. Metacognition.

An act of remembering, maybe.

Or maybe it’s just a concept in education that I will continue to think and learn about until one day I am qualified to teach.