Critical Thinking Personal Experience Essay Cristal Seabrook-Delgado University of Phoenix Pamela Adams March 9, 2014 Over the years, I had developed my critical thinking skills to allow myself to be prepared for the best and the worst of a situation. In my past life, I was not afforded the ability to not be prepared for every situation. I mentioned this to my husband and he reminded me how he is always working to improve his critical thinking skills. He reminded me of a time when he was 16 years old and his critical thinking skills were lacking. At 16 my husband was trying to find his way in life and decided the best way to do this was to figure it out on his own. This is what most people would consider the hard way. This decision …show more content…
The goal of most parents is to ensure that their children live to see another day. When he was younger, he always emulated his older brother. At 18, his brother was out living the life that most parents dreaded and my mother-in-law wanted none of that for my husband. She would lock him in the house to ensure that my husband would not leave to spend time with his brother. My husband was under the impression that he was a prisoner in his own home and that his mother was holding back from his brother. He saw that his brother was always wearing the latest clothes and driving fancy cars. He felt that is brother was free, having fun and living the life he had always dreamed …show more content…
Although locking him, in the house was not the best way to ensure his safety, she was attempting to keep him safe. This experience did not prevent him from wanting to be like his brother, it did cause him to start to want to think about the entire picture before making a decision. He because to enhance his critical thinking skills, he began to think about the pros and cons of a situation. He started to consider why people, in this situation his mother, were reacting a certain what about a topic (i.e. his brother). He also began to consider how this reaction and could affect him is he decided to adopt of ignore it. His processed changed because before he was only concerned about how his decision would impact his right now. Would decision lead to more fun than he was having right now? Is it something that he could get away with right now or would he get caught before he could truly enjoy it? Now he considers how his action effect his future. As he has gotten older, critical thinking plays a more important role in his
In the short story “The First Born Son” by Ernest Buckler a father named Martin has an objective to have his son David live and grow up on a farm like he had. Unfortunately, as David grows up, he soon realizes that he is not suited for the farm life, and develops a wish to live in the city. David struggles with the farm life and Martin finds himself having troubles living with his son when he discovers David’s wish to live the city life rather than the farm life.
Going through the same thing every day can be comforting and change can create chaos in the everyday routine. After the youth leaves change will set in but will change the outcomes of the activities that occur. Some parents will enjoy the free time that has been presented and others will fade and not know what to do. Older generation parents have readjusted before and have had to change their life to incorporate the youth coming into their life; some transitions were easier than others. Some of the parents find that moving out of their community is not the way to change the pace of life that is occurring. Yet the change of moving would create a drastic change of pace; some of the parents in Ellis tell Carr and Kefalas, “They fear that the outside world will expect them to change too much of who and what they are” (21). Making a change would require something that most parents don’t have, and that would be wanting to leave. Most of the older generation are content with the life they have; yet the ability of having a change of pace is enticing.
When trying to define critical thinking you might run into some challenges along the way. Critical thinking is a widely used yet vague term that is practiced by different people in a variety of locations throughout the world. Critical thinking is a strong virtue for the majority and the worst enemy for others. Needless to say without critical thinking we would be nowhere close to where we are today pertaining to our technological and social endeavors.
namely the simple fact that inner-city teenagers have had few, if any, adults in their lives who gave them unconditional love, taught them right from wrong, and reared them accordingly (6).
For example, a teacher could perfectly pass on the necessary knowledge to a student to pass a test and advance to the next level or class. But if that same teacher could nurture critical thinking skills to that same student, she would be giving his a true education that he will carry forever. Memorizing facts is a great skill, don’t get the wrong idea, but this skill has a limit to short-term time spans if the knowledge is not used constantly. With critical thinking this is not the case. An individual will be able to assess the validity of the information provide or that he has gathered and apply this information to solve any problem given. This will allow you to process information and take more logical decision. “A person with critical thinking skills is capable of upgrading his own knowledge and can easily engage in independent self-learning. He can find connections between diverse streams and pieces of knowledge and can assess the value of the information he acquires.” 1 This tells us that an individual with critical thinking skills is capable of judging to a certain extend what fragments of information he needs without being distracted by whatever information he will not find useful. With critical thinking, an individual and improve himself time and time
In believing that “today’s cities play a different economic role than they did in the past,” Kotkin argues that “At best, Jacobs’s compelling portrait from 1961 is something of an anachronism,” meaning that her lessons are out of place in the current era (Kotkin). Kotkin pulls in details from researcher Gary Evans saying, “Families in urban apartments today… generally have far weaker networks of neighbors than their suburban counterpart, a generally more stressful home life, and significantly less ‘social support’” (Kotkin). Kotkin further implies that Jacobs is outdated when quoting her mentioning how suburbs are not a good place to bring up children (Kotkin). Today the general consensus is that cities are not a safe place to raise a family and that the city is just as stepping stone towards career advancement that will eventually lead a person to a domesticated suburbia lifestyle (Kotkin). “Jacobs… instinctively hated where families were in fact headed: the suburbs” claiming that “neighborhoods like her own... [were] ideal places where locals watched out for each other” (Kotkin). Many families flee cities in hopes of finding a safer community for their children. “[I]n 2011 children 5-14 constitute about seven percent in core districts… [which is] roughly half the level
The most compelling data that we have shows the change in our American family structure. Day there are alarming number of children with mental disorders and children being raised in single parent homes has increased. In both areas it is shown that we need more preventive care (Petersmeyer 1989). Other statistics are equally troubling: each day in the United States, 3,600 students drop out of high school, and 2,700 unwed teenage girls get pregnant (Petersmeyer 1989). As a society we have a responsibility to our youth to help them become strong adults. My grandmother was always telling me that it takes more then the immediate family to raise a child well, if a child is to be rear well it takes a whole community contribution.
While the semester is over and the deadline has expired, I thought I would write this to express my true intended thoughts.
Chris had just been promoted as an Executive Assistant for Pat the CEO, Chief Executive Officer, of Faith Community Hospital. Pat had given Chris her very first assignment on her first day of work as an executive assistant and that was to gather information so that Pat can present the issues to the board of directors. Faith Hospital is faced with issues that needed attention and the board of directors must be notified of the issues so that a solution can be remedy to help the hospital stay in business.
Critical thinking is a significant and essential topic in recent education. The strategy of critical thinking skills helps identify areas in one's courses as the suitable place to highlight, expand and use some problems in exams that test students' critical thinking skills.
...homes, their jobs and their sense of security. In 1943, Psychologist Abraham Maslow stated that “people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs” and I believe, if these basic needs are not met, or lost, we will have a generation of parents and children that lack motivation to reach their higher levels of self-actualization. I believe it is imperative that families have contingency plans in place to meet their own needs in these times of natural disasters and economic downturns. Families need to reach out to their communities and form “extended families”, that will be in place should the government fail to respond in a timely manner.
My father was raised in the in-between generation, born in the years immediately before the end of World War Two, what they call the “silent generation”. A generation with one foot firmly planted in the 1940′s with the other placed unsteadily in the 1960′s. He was blessed, or some would say cursed, with an independent wife, one with the expectation of working and not content to be kept at home. His children were raised in the sixties and seventies, challenging times for parents with the traps of drug use and pre-marital sex, neither of which I believe Dad had been prepared for in the lesson plan his father had given him.
Knowledge is generated through critical and creative thinking. Creative thinking is something new or original that is created with value. Critical thinking is a type of thinking that questions assumptions and validates or invalidates a current belief or something that is said to be previously true. Knowledge is created through the culmination of generally accepted assumptions and creativity. How do you separate general assumptions and creativity? These two types of thinking can be easily separated in regards to concrete or realistic ideas compared to abstract or original ideas however to generate new, acceptable knowledge critical and creative thinking must interact together. The questioning of established beliefs with the creation of unorthodox new ideas will expose the most beneficial knowledge for the world.
In his essay Critical Thinking: What Is It Good For? (In Fact, What Is It), Howard Gabennesch explains the importance of critical thinking by drawing attention to how its absence is responsible for societies many ills including, but not limited to, the calamity in Vietnam. Yet, at the end of his essay, Gabennesch also mentions that, despite “the societal benefits of critical thinking, at the individual level, uncritical thinking offers social and psychological rewards of its own.”(14). Similarly, it is these rewards that, like the bait on a fishhook, often make individuals hesitant to engage in critical thinking despite the resulting harm to both them and society.
“The essence of the independent mind lies not in what it thinks, but in how it thinks.”- Christopher Hitchens. Critical thinking is an important skill for people to possess. It allows us to hear a statement and analyze it based on logical reason and the existence of fallacies. I say that this is an important “skill”, because it takes practice and knowledge to be able to justify the validation of a particular statement and to remove your personal bias opinion of it. “The whole purpose of reasoning, of logic, is to arrive at the truth of things”. In this paper, I will discuss how the topics introduced at the beginning of this class connect to the current topics and I will talk about how taking this course has changed my personal views and way