Critical thinking…the awakening of the intellect to the study of itself.
When I first signed up for the class, I wasn’t too sure what to think about it. I had heard the term Sociology before and had a loose understanding of what exactly it might mean, but I didn’t have the confidence to say that I definitely had a grip on any in depth meaning behind the study. Like I had said in my introduction post, I felt that this could be a good class to take in order to further myself into becoming the teacher that I want to be. A better grasp on the variety of people and their society would hopefully give me a better understanding when it came to my time in front of a classroom. What better way to connect with your students then to be able to see where they may be coming from? But as the class progressed, I came to realize that I knew more about Sociology than I thought I did. Through my courses in Anthropology (one race!), Psychology (human behaviour), Intro to Education (critical thinking), Human Geography (human behaviour), and yes, even Political Science (women inequality), I had already covered a vast majority of the topics that came up within the class room. But the most important concept, at least the most important to me, was the ability to be a critical thinker.
I find that I do have the ability to be a critical thinker. It is still a rather new concept in my life, the defined label; I have always had the natural ability to think about what another person in the situation might feel like, or ask to know their side of the situation so that I could have a chance to see where they are coming from. The difficult part is not letting my own emotions and opinions get in the way of working through a situation or argument civilly. I’m working on that. There is no singular concept that I can impose this idea on. As I had mentioned before, I had covered many of the topics that we have learned in previous classrooms, looking at them from all different angles. But I did enjoy our discussions on the norms of society and the fact that society is a human creation, not something that had already been established that we just happened to pick up.
As a critique of the whole class, though, I found it very difficult to work on the blogs, as is evident in the fact that I have only a couple of submission where there should be thirteen. I did not know, coming into the class, that the majority of the workload would be fuelled by self-motivation. For myself personally, if I do not have a blaring reminder that something needs to get done, I find it goes to the back of my mind and filed under “might not be that important”. This is not saying that the blogs aren’t important, as they do help a person in grasping the readings they have done, but it never had a chance to be brought to the forefront of my mind. My suggestion, for future classes that might include students similar to me, is that there be a reminder at the end of class that certain blog entries are due and need to be completed as soon as possible. Maybe even request a hard copy so that there is a guarantee that the work had been completed on time, which would also aid you in keeping track of who was participating and who was not. It will hopefully spark that inspiration needed to work on the blogs that I failed to have even in the last couple of weeks when I could have created the entries under false pretenses that I had already had them done when they should have been completed.
For the most part, I enjoyed my time in class as it did spark some inner reflection on some matters and helped me with assignments from other classes, giving me a better understanding of some topics and issues that happened to overlap with my other courses (e.g. human trafficking). Thank you for a fun semester and I hope to see you around campus some time.
