9A How Do I Think Critically?

Critical thinking is a word I have been hearing almost everyday in Inquiry and Media since the first day of school. Not knowing too much on what critical thinking is about, I looked up the definition and found that Critical Thinking is a process that leads to skills that can be learned, mastered and used. After reading this definition, I know why critical thinking is so important to college students. In order to be successful throughout college you need to be able to think critically to learn and master the material that is being taught in all of your classes. After college when students begin to venture out into the working world, they can look back and use the critical thinking skills that they learned in college and apply those skills to their job or career. Not only is critical thinking important during a student’s years in college, but it will also benefit those in their future jobs or careers.

Critical thinking is more than just learning the material to do well on a test or exam, its about understanding the bigger picture. Throughout high school, I struggled in almost every math class I took. Many classes friends and I would wonder why we have to take algebra or trigonometry if we were never going to use it in our desired career. Looking back and thinking critically about math, because I am now enrolled in a math class, that math teaches us how to process through problems and end up finding a solution. Maybe I won’t ever need to know the square root of a number in a future job after high school, but the process and the problem solving skills I learned in math are what I will actually use in the future.  

Southern believes learning the skills to think critically is so important that they require first year students to enroll in a critical thinking course that is incorporated with their Inquiry class. Media in everyday life is the class I am currently enrolled in. In this class we examine many different kinds of ads. Not only do we notice the obvious important concepts of the ad, we also dig deeper and look for the hidden meaning that we would normally look over. Last week we were asked to choose one company who we believed expressed a strong sense of ethos (arguments based on emotions). In our presentation, we were required to choose an advertisement from that company that related to their ethos. When we talked about the advertisement, we had to do a thorough analysis of everything that was present in the ad. Not only did we have to choose an ad, we had to think “outside the box” and dig deeper for a meaning. This process is important. This class is teaching me to not just look at the obvious, what is important requires a little more thought and examination.

Learning how to think critically will help me with the rest of my time here at Southern and in my future job or career. The skills I am learning in my classes will benefit me in the long run. Thinking critically is hard work, but with a little practice I believe every student can learn the necessary skills to become an expert on critical thinking.