Day 8 Behind the Eight Ball

It's more that difficult to post every day. I have been working on course syllabi for Delta College and had a 3-day 50th anniversary college reunion thrown into the mix. Excuses, yes, I know. Have I been thinking? Yes! Will get back to this soon. Maybe 365 isn't going to be consecutive days. Just sayin'...

Day 7 Thinking About Shakespeare

I just completed my syllabus and companion class web site revisions. Generally speaking, my purpose in teaching Shakespeare is to excite students to the point of madness and obsession. I mean this. I love Shakespeare (almost every play), and strive to give students a theatrical setting in which to read five plays produced in 1599. I focus on Shakespeare the playwright, the man with a 10 percent share in a theater venue and company, a man with dollars to raise and seats to fill. That's why we read the plays out loud. But because we read in class (and I don't lecture, I provide running commentary) some students do not read before class. They come to class and wing it. As a result, I restructured my syllabus to emphasize the homework reading assignments and prepared Socratic questions for a 10 minute random start to every session. Then I developed study guides for each play and assigned a 2-page paper based on any question in the guide. All of the new material has the Intellectual Standards at the core.

As for the challenge Artez set for me, which is to contemplate the Intellectual Standards, the new material clarified my thinking, made expectations more precise and will deepened the student's engagement with the plays. I mean I can lead a horse to water...

The Intellectual Trait I practiced today was perseverance. As a follow up to my op-ed piece in the New York Times, I appeared in Capital Public Radio's program "Insight" along with Stockton Symphony's Maestro peter Jaffe and Spoken Word Diva Tama Brisbane, founder and director of With Our Words, to talk about the arts in Stockton. Though our city is bankrupt, we focused on the positive and made a collective commitment to continue to advocate for and to nurture the arts regardless of the financial setbacks we are facing.

Capital Public Radio Segment on the Arts in Stockton after Bankruptcy

Day 6 What Would Shakespeare Do and Comments from a Conference Attendee

Day six isn't over and I am pounding the keyboard, reworking my Shakespeare course syllabus and thinking about more effective questions.

I also received an email from Artez Briseno, who teaches critical thinking to military personnel, and am including his comments here. He set me up with a challenge within the challenge. My brain's in critical thinking boot camp.

"I took a look at your blog and will enjoy going back over the next year to see how CT is hopefully not only more understood and witnessed in your everyday life but hopefully how it progresses as well.

I think the one that stuck out the most so far was from Day 5. I knew a lot of young men with lifted trucks from my high school in Central MO. that became Fire Fighters, Police Officers, Teachers, and yes, an EMT. I know a few that volunteer in multiple youth organizations across the US in an attempt to assist with adding even just the least amount of stability to a troubled young child’s life. If it’s one thing that I have found that will get me in trouble more often than anything else is the act of making unwarranted assumptions. When I think about it though, I find the worst part about it is that it rarely negatively impacts those around me directly, but it limits my own growth potential, possibly preventing me from helping those around me now as well as in the future.

Might I make one request? Dedicated one week to each of the CT standards. Make an attempt to find all the ways you can apply and identify that one throughout your life for seven days and write about it. I would really enjoy that!

Enjoy your blog. What a great idea!

V/R

Artez Briseno

F3EAD Course Manager/Instructor"

Day 5 Things People Say

Spent the day in San Francisco, participating in the sports ritual of "us" and "them," them being the Dodgers, and we, the Giants lost...swept, as it were, over the weekend, right under the rug. OK, so we're tied, us and them, for 1st place. There's plenty of season left and plenty of emotional up and downs to go. I am grateful that team competition supplies us with a good dose of healthy thrash and bash, a whole lotta yelling and fist pumpin' but no blows (at least in baseball ((most of the time))). Still, not a lot of thinking going on in my head, and I will refrain from picking on any of the players, considering their performances today.

I didn't really do ANY critical thinking today, unless I count asking critical questions of my daughter-in-law about some recent gossip. I named the situation, she gave me some feedback that countered what I had heard. My views rocked back from teeter to totter and then balanced enough so I could get off. It helps to ask questions so you don't continue to work off bad information.

I wouldn't call this Type A critical thinking, just staying in the groove. I wasn't sure what I was going to write about today, and then one of my Facebook friends laid this out: "I just saw a guy in a raised truck with tires almost as tall as I am. I KNOW he's an ass-hole. That may seem presumptuous, but it's not."

He got a lot of agreement. He noted that no one disagreed with him. I'd say, we better be careful about this "us" and "them." I can't say a whole lot about monster trucks, monster boats, monster houses, monster jobs...but people have them. I'd feel real weird if that monster truck kid in the front seat was actually an EMT and kept my heart beating during some unspeakable trauma. Pick your own scenario. Fact is, the monster thing pushes your buttons. Why? Think about it. Just sayin'.

Day 4 Personal Finances

The stock market continues to make me crazy. When I began the 401 (k) process, I thought, "How can the market go haywire when baby boomers (the snake in the python) make up such a huge target market?" Well, I underestimated the power of the real players. It doesn't matter than millions of boomers have their retirement accounts tied up in Wall Street. Wall Street doesn't care about us. We're fodder in a money making machine, and Wall Street is all about making money for the big boys. Pardon me if billions and trillions don't roll outta my wallet.

Anyway, Fred and I are getting spooked. We have some real dollars tied up in our retirement. Some dollars can't be taken out with out tax implications. About 1/3 of our portfolio is liquid. What to do? We're convinced the world markets are only going to get worse before better. We'd also like to reel in some of the growth, if possible, and not be left holding the bag (or empty sack) if things go really haywire in the world.

We also have three grown children, two of whom are married and looking to buy their first homes. All this is food for thought. Do we pull out cash and invest in real estate for the family? This makes up ask what our purpose is, what questions arise from such a purpose and, of course, what the implications would be. If, for example, we pulled out our liquid assets and bought a home in the town our oldest son is looking at, we couldn't buy his "dream" home. It would have to be an investment purchase that we could flip. But he and  his family could live in it and be closer to some of their goals.

We could spend part of our liquidity on a garage, since we live in a 1902 Victorian with none. That "purpose" has been on our list for years. The questions that arise are: What value, if any, will a garage add to the bottom line? Do we build it anyway because we need to protect our cars, other assets?  Do we instead repair fences (which we'll probably not be able to interest our neighbors in) to the tune of half the cost of the garage?

Questions, questions. Critical thinking is paramount. We have a wonderful family. We want to continue to support our family members with our financial assets when possible and still retain retirement capital. But our retirement is far from secure in today's market. Maybe family real estate is the answer. Believe me, we have a lot of thinking to do that matters not only to us, but to the future of our entire clan.

Day 3 Thinking About Comics

Once I'd decided to start this blog, I had to recap days 1 and 2, but here I am today with scads of newspapers spread about. I begin the thinking about thinking today when I read "Pearls Before Swine," one of my favorite comic strips. A waiter asks the goat what he'd like to drink. The goat replies, "Break down some grain in hot water and let a bunch of fungi eat it and then give me their waste products." The rat next to the goat yells, "It's called beer, (expletive)!!" The goat turns to the waiter and says, "I like to be precise."

So I cut it out, make all the MLA documentation notes (for later) and start in earnest to see how many comics I can find to illustrate Elements of Thought, Intellectual Standards and Intellectual Traits. At this writing, I have 12 so far (and a big stack to go through) that cover: assumptions, statements, illustrations, clarity, purpose, and fallacies of reasoning. I plan on using these with my English 1D: Critical Thinking (a college sophomore composition class.)

Thinking about your thinking is like this picture my husband Fred took at Thetis Island, BC. You have your conscious mind and your unconscious mind, and you can explore both if you walk out on the dock.

Day 2 Driving Home to Stockton...

After the conference closed, I packed up and chose to take Highway 24 back to Stockton. I veered off the highway at Ignacio Valley Road, a road I used to take in the 1970s to Lafayette and Berkeley from Stockton, where I was attending the University of the Pacific. Immediately I noticed how slow (as opposed to how fast) the road was now that the community had built up. I kept thinking my next turn would be on Marsh Creek Road, but at Clayton, memory corrected me.

Built up or not, driving the route was a powerful "then and now" experience. In terms of critical thinking, I was updating my "database." I "knew" the route, but I was relearning my learning, very important for our generalized understandings about most things. I must constantly hit "refresh." I think, too, that thinking about my thinking kept me from negatively viewing the route because it had changed. Noting the change and bringing myself up to date was more interesting.

Day 1 At the Critical Thinking Conference

Two days of Richard Paul's tutoring and I have an ah-ha moment. I am in Berkeley, at the smashing Claremont Hotel, swimming in the Oxford Tutorial and listening and reasoning my way through the Elements of Thought, Universal Intellectual Standards, and Intellectual Traits. Monday, July 23, an op-ed piece I wrote for The New York Times appears. All my liberal colleagues and arts advocates praise me. (Feels great).

But I get slammed by a detractor. For once, I don't get mad. In fact, I don't even get flustered. In my reply, I asked him to clarify what he called my "discombobulated writing" because I, in fact, want to sharpen my thinking. He responds! And says on rereading the piece, it's not as bad as he thought. We dialogue through several more emails. By asking my opposition to "clarify" his thoughts for my benefit, we created dialogue.

Op-Ed Piece in International Herald Tribune, NYTimes affiliate...