I will always maintain that making kids in middle school write essay responses to "critical thinking questions" without thorough, explicitly open-ended in-class discussion before hand does infinitely more harm to turn them off to learning than television, video games, or that damn new rock and roll music has ever or will ever do.
@DensetsuNoGomez What kind of question do you mean?
@DensetsuNoGomez Serious. I can think of a couple of different particular types you could mean and want to make sure I know which is being referred to.
So you'll have to forgive me for my poor memory for specific examples on account of the fact that I heavily avoided answering them but I'm talking about the kind of question that usually took the form of "What is your opinion about this specific part of the text? Do you think X? Why or why not?"
I mean first off, let's establish something: academic work is *work*. It requires effort and exertion and there's a big open question about, you know, giving kids material too sophisticated
for them to really get anything out of, but that's a tangent.
I personally always hated getting these kinds of questions to answer in school not only because I just felt like I was being bombarded with questions, but also because I felt like I was being asked to summon up an opinion out of nothing. 90% of the time, my brain was in either Absorb Information Mode or Perform Mastery Mode, and real talk: I *don't* feel like I was taught critical thinking skills until college...
and *even then* I only learned them as well as I did because I flipping decided to major in Philosophy.
I'm not any kind of expert on pedagogical theory or child development and an anecdote is not necessarily a data point but I think its undeniable that "critical thinking skills" is one of the areas where the whole system of contemporary k-12 education is designed against fostering it.
And I don't even say that in a lefty-pinko-commie-rage-against-the-neo-liberal-machine way.
There's a reason adults get annoyed when teenagers start interacting with them the way Socrates interacted with dudes like Euthyphro
@DensetsuNoGomez :nod: So basically, you feel like critical thinking needs to be taught via discussion, and you didn't have enough of that to make the questions meaningful?
@DensetsuNoGomez I'm realizing as I say this that the amount of discussion I had in my HS lit classes was probably a lot more than is typical.
@DensetsuNoGomez I was lucky to have a good teacher and small class size.
Class size is a *profound* issue.
I went to a "well" funded public school in Northern California, and for my English classes, it was often more of a battle of even getting as many of the kids as possible to *give a shit* about the books they were supposed to read. I did have one teacher who was fairly good at provoking class discussion, but only if a student was able to really bring a fairly well formed opinion to the table already, which I mean, I could do.
But I also wasn't down to clown with her super-combative attitude towards apathy (which wasn't even *directed* at me), so make of that what you will.
@DensetsuNoGomez Yeah, that's very different from my experience at a tiny charter school. For half of one year we had individual students leading discussion on a topic of their choice every friday.
@DensetsuNoGomez This charter school, I later heard from a teacher, was in violation of the law by silently dropping applications from students that they thought looked liable to underpreform.
You were *profoundly* lucky although yikes at that other thing.
Public school has a very broccoli morality to it in a lot of places; if it tastes bad, its probably good for you. If its boring, its probably good for you. Public school is in a war of cultural difference against the outside world, but *not* in the gross reactionary sense its often accused of.
@starkatt The fact that, if you go to public high school, you have to get all the way to a 4-year college to finally hear a teacher say "No yeah, Star Wars *is* actually worth taking seriously" in some way, whether that's from Campbell or even just a good creative writing department, *that's a problem*.
I feel like what isn't communicated is: this is a different kind of question. There is literally no right or wrong answer in that we are not looking for a specific morsel of information. What we ARE looking for is that you've put some effort into understanding why you think what you think.
And that is *sophisticated as fuck* and when the whole rest of the experience geared against that...yeah.
@DensetsuNoGomez Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
@starkatt
Are we being serious or are you doing what I think you're doing?