Thursday, October 9, 2008

Today’s Agenda

1) Get out your homework. Go over it and underline the most important points.

2)  What are the elements of changing your mind as they are shown by Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice. What are the elements of changing your mind as you have found them in your own experience?

3) Group Discussion

4) Class Discussion:

 

The experience of changing your mind:

 

• Someone showed me a different way of looking at things, that made more sense to me than my old way.
• Someone showed me I was being inconsistent.
• Someone told me I was acting as if I believed something different from what I said.
• I learned how other people have thought about this matter.
• I heard how someone famous did this differently.
• Someone else conceded a point, so I did too.
• The person who explained it was nice and helpful.
• I realized I wasn’t a child anymore and needed to stop acting like one.

 

THE MOST IMPORTANT CONCEPT YOU WILL LEARN AT UNIVERSITY

Critical Thinking!

What is it? How might I use it?

Critical thinking is the basic goal or value of a college/university education.

• It’s called “critical” not because it criticizes or puts down a person or idea, but because it is so important, “critical” in the sense of “vital,” “crucial,” “essential.”

 

• It is also called “critical” because it is critical of itself – one is observing one’s own thinking to find ways to improve it. And critical thinking is what college invites and asks students to change their minds toward.

 

• When we are thinking critically, often we look at a topic from more than one point of view – hence for example the value of diversity at a college or university, or the reason for studying history or philosophy – and we develop new ideas that are better than our old ones. We examine our assumptions, or the consequences of our beliefs.

 

• We monitor our own thinking, and hold it to a higher standard than ordinary. And there is more to critical thinking than these activities.

The next step in our unit on academic literacy is to find out what critical thinking is like in the university, and what we can accomplish when we think in ways that can be called “critical.”

In a college or university, critical thinking is necessary in every discipline, and it is not the same in every discipline.

Critical thinking in biology is not entirely the same as critical thinking in psychology, though sometimes they may be similar, and either of those differs from critical thinking in history or business administration or health care. 

We start with observation in science.  It’s probably not obvious that observation requires critical thinking. The passages for today will help.

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Passage One) Professor Agassiz: a 19^th-century Morrie!

Let’s consider this passage together

Our “Morrie” is a 19^th-century biologist named Agassiz. Agassiz was as famous as a teacher as he was as a biologist – a kind of scientific Morrie, though quite different in personality, who influenced several generations of American scientists.

One of his students who wrote about Agassiz was Samuel Scudder, whose account has been titled in recent years “Look at Your Fish!”

 

We will read this together

The point of the reading Scudder  is to note that Agassiz had a way of getting his students to observe and think, in fact to observe critically and think critically.  His students learned to pay attention to how they were observing as well as how they were thinking. He made them open themselves up to the unexpected, to items that didn’t fit, to the idea that there was more in front of them than they could see at first.  This kind of critical thinking isn’t special to science, but it is essential to science.

 

For homework: a journal entry on a similar but in some ways contrasting account.

Nathaniel Shaler, who also became a very famous scientist, wrote a shorter account of beginning with Agassiz. (In his passage, he reveals he has some similarities with Elizabeth Bennet! Shaler had begun studying what we now call “Classics,” but before the time of this passage, he had changed his mind and decided to try biology. His emotions are probably the most interesting element. Focus the journal entry on similarities and differences between Scudder and Shaler.

What does Shaler think he learned from Agassiz?  How does he count the cost?  What are the benefits he finds?  2 full pages.

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