Critical Thinking Blog #1

Critical thinking is the process of using your mind to do reflective thinking to analyze and evaluate information. It requires a lot of thought and assessment. Critical thinking is a form of judgment where one judges what to believe or what to do. I read an article about the absence of critical thinking in education. Instructors are so caught up in teaching the obvious "what to think," or the subject matter rather than "how to think," the correct way to understand and evaluate the subject matter. I have realized that in classes I have taken in high school, the absence of critical thinking was relevent. In math and science classes I was taught equations and facts, which got me through the course, but nothing to back those up. It is easy to memorize something, but it is a whole different level of learning when you have to reflect on what is given to you and actually understand where it came from to judge whether you believe it.

A situation where I had to use critical thinking was the recent presidential election where I had to make a responsible judgment between the political candidates. The election is huge and it is so important to make a good judgment and have a clear understanding of both sides of the election. This decision will ultimately affect one's life enormously. When it came down for me to make my final decision, I used reasonable, reflective, and skillfull thinking to make my decision. I used reason to judge whether each candidate was capable of the job at hand. I also reflected of life experiences that the candidates have had. Critical thinking is necessary to make decisions and judgments like this, decisions that will color the rest of our lives.

A time where I did not think through something critically would be in my calculus class where I was given a problem to solve on the whiteboard in front of my class. When I was given the problem I immediately knew that I needed the quadratic formula in order to solve it. I plugged the numbers into the memorized formula and calculated the answer. Nonetheless, I came out with the correct answer. Here again we see the "what to think" rather than "how to think" circumstance. Not once during this math problem did I need to have a reasonable and reflective judgment.

The word "Intellectualism" carries a sort of negative connotation to me. When I think of an "intellectual" person, I think of a boring, emotionless, close-minded smarty pants. Intellectualism to me seems that it is based solely on facts. I feel that that knowledge is deeper than that. Emotion plays a key role in worthy knowledge.

When I hear the word "logic" the phrase "you can't argue with logic" pops into my mind. Logic carries positive connotations to me and to the greater extent I can say that I agree with that statement; you can't argue with consistency.

"Reason" reminds me of "cause and effect," wherein reason would be the cause that will ultimately lead one to come to a conclusion. This term has positive connotations to me. Reason is a type of thought; it requires thinking. While some may argue, for me emotion is significantly linked to reason and stands for good argument.