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?
Are we being serious or are you doing what I think you're doing?
@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...
@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?
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.
