Earlier this year (2024), I had the chance to facilitate a workshop on a topic I’d spent a LONG time reading about and researching. I felt ignorant about it, so much so that I started out studying logic, what constituted logical fallacies, types of bias, and more. It was great because I was finally learning about something I’d ignored or done as little as I could over the years. Maybe I did that because it was uncomfortable, hard, and a pain.
Need a way to teach critical thinking and problem-solving? Learn to tackle problems and make decisions. This session offers strategies to assess ideas and arguments. Discover resources to teach middle schoolers about fact-checking and critical thinking. View my session resources and presentation online, Critical Thinking Made Simple.
Engaged in an Activity
But a lifetime of experience made me want to explore this all the more. Critical thinking, I’ve found, is a bit like writing. If you’re not engaged in the activity, you’re not a writer or thinker. Fortunately, writing is one way that critical thinking can be done, and that’s something I’ve done for years. Of course, I still mess up. One way I did was how I went about setting up this blog.
The Sword of Damocles
You’re probably familiar with this story. Impending doom hangs over your head by a thread. In my case, it’s the fact that I moved my www.mguhlin.org to point to mguhlin.micro.blog, but in my effort to clean out content, I nuked the micro.blog it was pointing to. Not once, but twice. I suppose I shouldn’t have acted on that impulse that said, “Do it…do it now!” while watching television on the couch after a day’s work.
Now, I’m waiting for my www.mguhlin.org to point at a website that doesn’t exist. Let’s hope that will be easy to recover from.
In the meantime, I’ve fixed the issue with a new domain (mgblog.org) that points to my new site, mguhlin.microblog.org. We’ll see if it works. But it’s obvious that some System 2 thinking should have taken place. I probably could have written everything down to see if this was the way to go.
Critical Thinking Processes
In spite of knowing about several critical thinking processes, I skipped them all to do what I wanted. I went with my first impulse and that wasn’t a wise choice. I’m looking forward to thinking things through a bit more. Look before you leap, of course.