Critical Thinking
        Philosophy

DRAFT - 01/04/2007 - Copyright - Chris Storer

EXERCISES

"Practice Makes Perfect" goes the old saw, and as with many cliches, there is a grain of truth underneath the superficial simplicity. Practice of any activity does work to improve our ability to accomplish the ends of that activity, but there is no guarantee that the specific activity being practiced is the best one to accomplish the end-in-view. If the activity is one that gets in the way of our goals or has bad side-effects, then we will perfect a problem.

Doing exercises and other forms of practice must be monitored and evaluated so that they are done correctly. This is one of the roles of a coach, but we can learn to become our own coach if we have good models to compare our activity with, and if we learn to pay careful and focused attention to the right aspects of an activity so that our evaluation is accurate and relevant.

EXERCISE PRACTICES

Most of the assigned exercises in our text come with suggested responses. There are other On-Line Exercises you can also do. You should think through, and write out your responses to one or two exercises at a time, checking your responses against those suggested to get a clear idea of what is expected, and referring to relevant notes and readings to clarify your understanding of the new concepts and the skills you are expected to be developing. Take the time to study them carefully and compare your responses to those in the text.

Do not look at the suggested responses before you make a real effort to respond on your own. If you don’t understand the exercise instructions, reread them and look up the meanings of key terms used in presenting the instructions. Our text has both an index and a glossary to make quick reference easy, and , of course, specific exercises, while building on prior chapters, tend to focus on the new material in the chapter where the exercise is found.

Also, use the Glossary of Critical Thinking Terms and other available readings.

Talk with others.

If you are in a class with a listserv, ask questions there.

And especially, bring questions back to your class for discussion. The chances are very good that others in the class had the same difficulties and the practice of trying to ask the question and make the problem clear adds a very important element to the benefit of exercise. We need to be able to be clear about what we don't know before we can make progress in learning.

Note that your responses may be more or less different from those suggested but may still be good responses. Think through what was suggested carefully and compare it to what you have written.

If you do not understand why the suggested response is different from yours or are unclear whether your response is just a reasonable variation of the other, be sure to bring up the questions with others, in class, or on the listserv. It may be that you have misunderstood the exercise or it may be that your response is simply a different interpretation or further elaboration of the exercise and is perfectly acceptable. It may even be that you are more right than the authors of our text. They sometimes get it wrong and there are occasional misprints in the text. As I said, we are all fallible.

If you find that you are doing the exercises fairly well, skip ahead to ones at the end of the exercise set (look for the harder ones to test your abilities), or move on to the next set. But remember, the goal is to increase your understanding of the concepts you are learning and the skills involved in applying these concepts to both your critical reading and critical writing. The work will be of no value unless you focus your attention on the ability of language to be precise and detailed, while also remaining open to the broader context that influences interpretation.

Again, work only one or two examples at a time before you check to make sure that you have the right idea. Your critical abilities cannot improve without feedback to show where you are right and where you need improvement. Your own evaluation of your work, comparing it carefully to related work, is an important part of your overall critical thinking skills.

And remember, when you feel that you are not getting it right but don't understand what is wrong or how to do it right, bring up your questions and the specific examples in class or on the listserv.

This, more than anything else, is the purpose of class time, and it is my purpose as your coach (instructor), but I can't help you if you don't tell me where you need help. The mind is much like a muscle in this respect. If you work it to its limits and really try to do more than you can, it will improve until you can do that task easily and move on to more difficult and complicated tasks.

DRAFT - 01/04/2007 - Copyright - Chris Storer