My new mantra

Way back in January at a campus teaching workshop, a specialist in something-or-other told a bunch of faculty members that our students won't be aware of the importance of critical thinking unless we keep reminding them--and that, in fact, we should print the phrase on every syllabus and mention it frequently in every class. I suggest a series of classroom posters: "Have you hugged your critical thinking skills today?" "This is your brain. This is your brain on critical thinking skills." "When life gives you lemons, make critical thinking skills."

Okay, maybe I'm being a little facetious, and maybe critical thinking is so serious a topic that joking is not permitted. That, at least, is what one of my colleagues suggested today. We were in a committee meeting discussing a topic that touches only tangentially on critical thinking, and when someone suggested that we should revise a particular document so that it wouldn't use the word "critical" three times in the first three sentences, I piped up: "But if we say 'critical thinking skills' in class every day, our students will be geniuses!"

Everyone laughed...except one colleague, who found my levity misplaced and offensive. "That's not funny," he said, setting off on an impassioned plea for serious attention to critical thinking. "Critical thinking is nothing to laugh about!" he said--and he meant it.

Well, yes, but it's Friday and it was my second meeting (out of three for the day) and I've got to laugh at something so I won't just lay my head down on the table and weep, and if there's nothing funny about the claim that merely reciting the mantra "critical thinking skills" will improve our students' critical thinking skills, then I need to find another line of work.

Love means never having to say you're sorry for joking about critical thinking skills.

See? I said it. Don't you feel smarter already?