Learning Something Different

Most people have a favorite animal.  Usually people's favorite animals are something like a dog, bear, or a penguin.  My favorite animal is different than all of these.  In fact, I doubt anyone would ever guess it.  My favorite animal is a sponge.  I decided this was my favorite animal when I was in middle school.  I hadn't really had a favorite animal prior.  We were learning about the different animals in science though and when I was reminded that a sponge was an animal I decided that was my favorite.  I like the fact that it is commonly mistaken as a plant and that it is not well known.  I thought it was cool how simple it was, but that it was still complex enough to live and be considered an animal.  I like jellyfish for this reason as well.

I like learning about random and unusual things.  This is another reason why I like sponges.  It is an unusual animal to have as a favorite.  I like being unique in this way.  When I took speech in high school I would find random people that I had never heard of before or did not know much about to do speeches over.  A couple of the people that I found were Jessica DuBroff and Paul Winchell.  Jessica DuBroff was a seven-year-old girl who was attempting to be the youngest person to fly an airplane across the United States.  She ended up crashing and dying.  Paul Winchell did pretty much everything possible.  He was the voice of Tigger, along with some other characters (like one of the birds from Fox and the Hound).  It was actually Paul Winchell that came up with Tigger's saying "TTFN ta-ta for now."  He also came up with a prototype for the artificial heart, owned a T-shirt factory and ran a fish farm.  He proposed to Congress that using Talapia (a type of fish) could solve the hunger problem in Africa.  Paul Winchell was also an inventor and got patents on many different items, including a fountain pen with a retractable tip.  The thing he was most famous for was for being a ventriloquist.  I was amazed by all the things this man did.  I found him because he and I share the same birthday.

I think some of this can be proof that I am a self-motivated learner.  I want to learn about new and different things and in this case, I used my speech class to do so.  It was more fun for me to do research on something or someone that I knew little about and I enjoyed informing my class about the cool things I discovered.  I think they found it interesting as well because it was not a topic that is done frequently.  Often such topics can get boring to listen to because they have been done so much.  I try to feed my desire to learn what I want while still meeting the requirements for the course.  In my mind, that fulfills the characteristics of someone who is both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated.