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Things that Have Meaning to Me /Everything Else is a personal project exploring my own history as a student. In two bound books, the project juxtaposes the school notes I’ve taken at two different times in my life. The first book, Things that Have Meaning to Me, contains handwritten notes, scrawls, and sketches that I made during the past year while thinking through this thesis. Many pages were cut down from large sheets of butcher paper, craft paper, and card stock I had pinned to my studio wall. About a hundred pages long, the book is overprinted with three “looping” pages that read Things that have meaning to me/I examine/and build on. The second book, Everything Else, is closer to a thousand pages, all excised from the painstakingly neat and comprehensive notebooks I kept in high school. Those pages are overprinted with the message Everything else/I ignore/or forget. As a kid, my goal was to master the information I was given. My own thoughts and experiences did play much role in my learning or my motivation. A part of me is proud of the labor represented in those endless perfect pages. But I’m struck by their colorless automaticity, in contrast to the looser, more colorful, more dynamic (and yes, messier) notes I took while working on this thesis. To me, Things that Have Meaning represents how authentic learning should look (and feel).