Critical Shrinking

Seven years ago or so I attended a conference on critical thinking.  These were my notes. 

A monk asked Yueh-shan: “What must I think about in zazen?”  Yueh-shan said: “Think non-thinking.”  “How can I think non-thinking?”

Yueh-shan said: “By non-thinking.” Zen Mondo

                                        

I climbed into a plush chair in the last row of the auditorium and the keynote speaker from Scotland looked tiny: 

“A thinking child is a learning child”

I remember thinking when I watched the Three Stooges what would happen if I poked my brother in the eyes with two fingers, or whacked a big toe with a claw hammer, or put my sister’s head in a grip vise, and wondered…would I be here today if there wasn’t a little bit of law and order in the house. 

 It’s a good thing I sat close to the exit. The auditorium’s balcony ceiling sticks so far out ahead of me like a huge maroon tongue with tiny white spotted bacteria.  I saw half the screen that descended from somewhere above the stage and upon which the lady from Scotland showed transparencies on a portable OHP she snapped closed and carried off later.   No IT training over there for this transparent generation of teachers?  And look, about 133 scattered about are rapidly writing down everything she’s saying…ok, I will too.

“Write down five things that you think of when you think of the word thinking”

1. Me’s thinking I drove 160km an hour because I thought it would take two hours to get to Sharjah’s City Hall.  Instead I arrive right on time and wolf down stale pastry and instant coffee with chalk powdered cream to hear someone I didn’t originally plan to see and now …

2. I’d like to know what in God’s name the two local ladies two rows ahead of me are feverishly writing page after page.  I think, therefore, I think. 

      3. What the hell do I think of the word thinking when I think about it?  Does this have a little circular reasoning feel to it, a tinge of yingy yang twang:  think about the word thinking, and think about thinking of things we are thinking of, things you see, to think up, or thoughts we thought of, that is, the word think. I think I need a drink. 

Activity Memory Creative Intelligence Language

Well, I’m a bit slow this weekend morning and before I know it she gave us this piece of intrigue:

“In England thinking skills have been incorporated into the national curriculum”

I’m new to this discourse.  Why is England doing this at all?  Students today aren’t thinking like they used to? The facts state math and reading and writing skills are falling across the board and the thinking skills hypothesis is an admittance that many are not thinking the way they ought to be thinking because…

No passion so effectually robs the mind of all its powers of acting and reasoning as fear

Edmund Burke

 

Teaching thinking skills in the Middle East require an arena of freedom to present multiple options in problem solving at the earliest stages.

 

1.  Circle True or False

 

Thinking skills are innate in each of us.  It is the environment that nurtures, destroys or completely rewires thinking skills.  We learn because we want to.  We don’t learn when we don’t want to, or we don’t learn when we can’t or won’t.  And when do we want to learn and when do we not want to learn and when can’t we learn?  Can we ever not learn?  Well, that kind of depends now, doesn’t it, on a lot of changing variables, and what we’re defining these days as “what is learning?” and this color is kind of irritating to read after a while.

 

2.  Circle True or False

 

If it weren’t Thursday morning and a holiday to boot, I wouldn’t have been the most casually dressed attendee in the big hall.  It’s a good thing I’m still in the back.  I think I’ll take my Tevas off. 

“The Spanish school children know immense pieces of information.  But what is all that knowledge if they don’t use it?”

 

If children have the information and aren’t using it, it isn’t therefore a question of attaining the skills to think, which one needs to simply activate the information they aren’t using.  How many teenagers thirty years ago in the United States never used their thinking skills but today are educated and hold respectable jobs and live respectable lives, relatively speaking.  The woman’s observations seem like a back-handed compliment if there ever was one.  What the Scot has she got with her neighbors?  What are the kids doing in Spain with all their information, betting on football?

The OHP’s are absurdly small, even at 15 font, and I’m 1200 yards away from the basketball court size stage, so I wonder if she knows people far away can’t see her visuals. Wouldn’t a lap top have been easier?  While I wondered and pondered, an American woman suddenly appeared and squeezed by me. I laughed in a barely audible loss of wind because I looked out ahead and there was fifty-seven yards of empty chairs since the two local ladies left. I can’t see the screen back here.  I crouched down like I was looking up for a foul ball:  “it says Bloom’s thoughts of cognitive education, and it spans the transparency like the Dead Sea Scrolls in six font.  Didn’t you read Mr. Bloom in Grad school?” Is the world becoming cognitive free?

“Please look at the following:

Dog--Duck--Frog

 

The odd one out?  Why?”

All can swim

All breathe

I’ve eaten all of them and yes, enjoyed each one

I’ve never owned a dog, duck or frog.

 

I’m getting to think this lady is some kind of European-animal racist.  She harps on the misplaced Spanish and has something out for three...ok.  The odd one out.  Oh, a dog has fur. Ok, and a duck has a bill, and a frog has, what, an STD? 

 

“A simple activity generates the wheels in a child’s head.”

I get it, that’s great.  I’ll have to try it with my own occasionally creatively minded collection using VTL words with six and seven syllables.

 

“Brain friendly activities

Brain unfriendly activities

Alternate the focus so you are brain-friendly”

 

Well, I’m all for brain friendly activities, but if a young mind out there in the classroom is here for reasons that aren’t hers or his in the first place and if all motivation and persuasion hasn’t convinced them that a second language is for the better of the nation and for personal growth, we’re gonna have an unproductive activity regardless of all the bells and whistles I use to wake them up.

“We can train our ways to think differently.  Experiencing the world and interpreting it require we are open to change.”

And I’m open to experiencing a different world and resisting the unnecessary conformative in a society that lets change change.  The history of critical thinking in this country is in its infancy.  For the first time in many families education is making a significant play for the future of the people.   A culture of critical thinking hasn't existed because there never has been never a need for one in the classroom.  All testing and development of a new curriculum for today’s students must consider the earlier it is implemented the better chance the nation will see the next generation ready to enter the university and become active members of their society.