While many educators call for having students use reflective journaling in the classroom as both a way of getting students to engage in content matter and as a way to help the students find some level of personal connection to content material, research shows that many students see reflective journaling as merely busy work and, consequently, fail to receive any learning enhancement from the activity. On first glance this seems to be an unfathomable paradox, especially when one notes the variety of studies by instructors touting how they believe students find reflective journaling interesting, fun and meaningful. While this may be true for some students, there often remains a large core of students who find journaling assignments to be annoying busy work. How might one understand this seemingly paradoxical situation where many instructors see having students keep reflective journals as an effective tool for teaching and the view held by many students that such an activity is simply a nuisance and useless? In this article, the author examines a rather recent psychological model on human temperament developed by David Keirsey.