A break

Lately, I have been thinking about taking a break from blogging now until university starts again in mid-September.

First of all, I want to prepare properly for the second year of university, because now the grades are really important, and I suspect it will be harder than last year. I want to analyse the mistakes I made in the first year, research what they will expect of us this time, and design a strategy to meet those expectations as efficiently as I can. First year was more about testing how far I could reach with only half-hearted efforts; I came really close to a so-called two-one grade, which is the second highest, but now I want to be serious about excelling.

Second, from mid-August, my good friend Hanna will come back to Sweden, so I want to spend as much time as possible with her and Tim, because they will stay here the whole of next year, so will see even less of them than I did last year. Therefore, I basically have until mid-August to make most of the preparations for university.

Third, I want to make a serious effort to get my creative writing started again. I have been half-thinking about some ideas since last summer, but barely got started. But, with my plans to study more intensely and to exercise more, I won’t have much time left for creative writing if I also keep two blogs running. However, I will probably leave the writing to commence for real until after the start of university, so I can judge if I really have the time.

My intention is not to stop writing for any of these blogs, not at all! I will probably throw in a few casual posts per month, writing when I feel inspired or when something noteworthy happens. What I am taking a break from is the efforts to write regularly. So, in a sense, the posts in the near future will only be special ones, haha!  

A thought on corruption

Briefly skimming through the website of Sida (Sweidsh International Development Cooperation Agency), I mostly noticed what is written about their policy against corruption.

Expecting some genius method to prevent or detect corruption, I was quite struck by the simplicity of their measures. Basically, their policy seems to involve nothing more than firm non-acceptance. Or, as they put it:

Always prevent

Never accept

Always inform

Always act

This got me thinking: maybe that is the most sensible way of dealing with corruption? Maybe an absolute policy of non-tolerance for such fraud is effective enough?

I have not given the issue of corruption much thought, so I have no musings to share, but this idea grabbed my attention. From the top of my head, I would link corruption with personal gain – unfair personal gain – which is something I strongly believe is the purpose behind far too many actions of far too many people, influential or not. As such, I think corruption is yet another of those bad bad things that need to be prevented; another one added to the list that seems to never end…

(I have to end this post here, because we are suffering an awful heat wave here, so I cannot think straight, even less write anything sensible…)  

Inspiration spiral!

As I was looking through inspirational pictures on a Facebook page called El Tren de la Vida, I thought why not share some of them on this blog? They are in Spanish, but I hope to be able to translate them well enough to spread their essence. The page is full of pictures, and (although most don’t say much, really) maybe I’ll share some more another time. As for the name of this post, Inspiration spiral, I thought it sounded nice and with the potential for a nice metaphor to develop out of it… I have no particular idea in mind, but I’ll take the chance and maybe something will come up eventually, haha!

Many of these thoughts may seem obvious to you. When I present something that is obvious to my mom, she loves to exclaim, arrogantly sarcastic: ‘Oh, my son has discovered lukewarm water!’ I understand it makes you feel wise and good about yourself to say things like that, but it really just makes you obnoxious to us ‘less experienced’, who actually gained useful insights from things like these. Don’t judge others for their lack of experience; instead, try to share your invaluable experience with them!

The first picture is about engagement and personal development, the latter being something I hope I have emphasised the crucial importance of already (e.g. see the second post on open-mindedness).

The text reads: Never stop because you think it is too late… … it is never too late to improve. I can read two main messages here. First, being short of time is no excuse to stop trying, but rather a reason to try to do it faster, i.e. to work harder. Second, you can always improve, always change – there is no time when it is futile to strive to be a better person.

Although this is mainly cheap rhetoric, I agree quite strongly with the message. Although I have thought many times that ‘I don’t have time’, lack of time is really only a signal to get started right now! Unfortunately, it takes tremendous self-discipline to realise this and follow the principle. I only hope that having had my eyes opened now, the thought will come to mind whenever that silly excuse is trying to ruin my productivity and drag me down into a swamp of laziness and self-satisfaction.

The second one relates to this as well.

 

It says: There is no lack of time, there is lack of interest. Because, when people really want, dawn becomes day. Tuesday becomes Saturday and a moment becomes an opportunity. The first sentence is really what captured me. We often say we don’t have time about things we are not keen on doing, but when it comes to things we really are interested in, we can make time for it, usually by skipping something else, usually something we should be doing instead, but just don’t want to. It is about how we prioritise in life, and that is up to you and only you. However, depending on what we prioritise, there will be consequences, and when we decide on what to do, we should really weigh the pleasure of doing what we want against the consequences of not doing what we should.

Nothing strange, right? But it is worth thinking twice about this before falling to any temptation. We tend to be dangerously biased toward short-term gains, and have an impressive ability to ignore – or simply not see – long-term costs. (And we still scratch our heads in surprise when the capitalist economy collapses, or when the friend you always put on hold to play with others suddenly doesn’t want to talk to you anymore.)

The message of the third picture may be interpreted in several ways.

The sign the tree is holding reads: Asking for help for my family in the forest. I think the main message is that the forests are in danger. Deforestation is a serious problem in the world, not only because it accelerates global warming by releasing carbon dioxide (when the wood is burned) and destroying the things that can sequester the carbon dioxide from the air, but also because it devastates natural environments for more animals and other plants than we can imagine – in other words, throwing the areas into ecological chaos.

An additional interpretation may be that the lone tree in the middle of what looks like a shopping street of a city, pleading for help, may represent a beggar or a vagrant (homeless person) – the forest equivalent of a beggar or vagrant. The forest its his home, where its family and friends are. The forest was taken from it when the humans built the city street; or the tree was taken from the forest as a seed and planted in this unfamiliar environment.

A third message, one that might conflict with the second, comes out when you ask why the tree is asking for help for its family. Does it have a good life in the city, but is concerned for its family; or does it know that it there no hope for itself, but it can at least ask for a good life for its family?

Picture number four relates to Hanna’s and my open-mindedness project.

The text says: Before you judge people you should first know their motives for acting that way. The message of the text is clear and, of course, extremely important. However, what really excited me was the message of the picture (also in relation to the text under it). Whoever sees her standing with a paper bag pulled over her head, with the words “Don’t judge” written on it, will instinctively ask why is she doing that. A few might just think ‘bah, she is just crazy!’ and not thing more about it, but I think most would try to understand the reason behind this rather unusual demonstration. The words on the bag give one straight answer, but then you wonder: if she doesn’t want to be judged, why is she doing something so silly? Why not just wave the words on a wooden plank? Why do something so out of the ordinary? To get more attention? Is she an attention-junkie? But we cannot see who she is, and she cannot see if we are paying attention to her. Why is she doing this?

You understand, that gesture cleverly invites you not to judge her. By doing something so confusing that it is difficult to judge without trying to comprehend the motives, she is making the people seeing it be subconsciously open-minded – or at least, staring to get there. 

The final one is something I definitely ought to take to heart myself, for the purpose of this blog and these messages I want to reach out and inspire with.

It says: The world changes after your example, not your opinion. Trying to convince people to act in some way only because you think it is the right thing is not at all as persuasive as if you would show that it is right by acting that way yourself, so that others can see for themselves why it is a good thing. By showing, rather than telling, that it really works, people will trust you more. If they too follow your example, and share it with their community, also they will take it up, and spread it further.

Many people might say they don’t believe what they have not seen with their own eyes. At least you can hear that a lot on television. (By the way, that is a rather hypocritical statement, since I can bet my right hand that these people believe the Earth is round, that it revolves around the sun, that tiny microscopic organisms and viruses make you ill, that the clouds thousands of metres up in the sky are made of floating water particles, and many many more things we take as common knowledge in this era of science. They probably also accept that 1 + 1 = 2 without having a clue of how it is proved… I think you can see where I am going. People who say they only trust the evidence of their own eyes usually do it to deny the existence of God and other supernatural beings, but don’t realise how limited our eyes really are… not to mention how easily our eyes can be fooled by illusions or drugs!) Although I doubt many go to that extreme, I believe that most of us would trust actions above words, especially when it comes to motivating others.

I know from own experience with instructing beginners in karate that they are far more willing to struggle with a difficult exercise if I do it with them. Of course, I always try to combine display with encouraging words, but judging from the difference from when I only talk to them, I am confident that it is the actions that spur them the most. In addition, when they see that I usually struggle less with the exercises than they do, I include words to explain that it is because I have done the same thing many times before, and it gets easier the more you do it; this encourages them even more!

So, rather than nagging to your peers about how you think they should live, live that way yourself until they realise what a good idea it is! But be careful not to think yourself to be a paragon in everything. Be open to find good examples in other people as well, and be open to learn from them too!

Open-mindedness: Post 5

 The next post in our project about open-mindedness, written by Hanna, and, as usual, also published in her blog: A Little Blog About Words.

In this post I would like to talk more about the opposite of open-mindedness: Ignorance. Why does ignorance exist? What causes a person to become close-minded and why do we develop prejudices? I think that we need to understand the answer to these questions to be able to prevent that we ourselves become close-minded and to have a chance to try to get rid of any negative pre-conceptions we might have.

I think that the core emotion behind close-mindedness is fear. The majority of our attitudes and beliefs are created during our childhood, before we have many personal experiences to base our opinions on. We become open to things we are familiar with, while our attitudes towards other things to a large extent depend on what people we look up to have told us about them. If we are told by our parents, the media or other authority figures that something is dangerous or bad, we will in most cases accept this and incorporate it in our own ideas.

Sometimes we are aware of our attitudes and have reasons for them; For instance, my parents don’t drink any alcohol and when I was little I was told about the negative sides of drinking from a young age. This resulted in that I formed a very negative and judgmental attitude towards drinking and anyone who devoted time to this activity. I knew why I had this opinion and I took pride in it, but as a consequence I became more close-minded. This scenario is applicable on any type of prejudice, although in many cases the attitudes are formed subconsciously. If you for instance grow up in an environment where everyone comes from the same country and the only things you hear about foreigners are negative, the risk is high that you will feel intimidated when you meet someone with another background. Whether you are aware of it or not, you are likely to develop racist attitudes.

The way I see it, becoming open-minded involves a process of reconsidering your childhood outlook on life. To be able to do this you need to educate yourself and challenge as many of your prejudices as possible. Doing this will both allow you to base your attitudes on informed decisions and hopefully show you that many of your deeply rooted childhood fears are irrational. Acknowledging this is only the first step of course, if you have believed in or been scared of something during the majority of your life, you won’t be able to change that over a night.

However, if you on a rational level know that you don’t need to feel the way you do, that it doesn’t make sense, then you will eventually be able to defeat your close-mindedness! My negative attitude towards drinking remained for many years until I was in my mid to late teens. What made me finally change this idea was seeing that my own friends were drinking. At first this made me feel uncomfortable, but then I realized that it wasn’t as scary as I had always thought and that drinking alcohol didn’t automatically make you a terrible person. I think understanding this has given me a much healthier attitude towards drinking.

When we are trying to make sense of the world, especially as children, it is easy to organize the world into good things and bad things. Such “black and white” thinking is detrimental to open-mindedness. After all, name a group of people who have never done anything bad!? And who is perfect? NOBODY! … Or everyone… depending on how you see it. In this matter I am in total 100% agreement with the excellent musician and comedian Tim Minchin who illustrates this exact point in his song “Cont”:


With that I would like to finish this post by reinforcing Mr Minchin's point: Try to base your opinions on how people act towards you rather than on which group in society they belong to!

Here we go again!...

It is about time to start writing regularly for this blog again. I have been lacking inspiration for a long time, as I had feared would happen, but now I have to shake up and get down to writing something. The golden rule for all writers that are short on inspiration or motivation is to just write something down; staring at a blank sheet of paper, or empty Word document, is rather pointless. 

For some time, I have been thinking about changing the focus of this blog slightly – not turning it in a different direction, but narrowing it down a bit. The more I consider it, the more I am convinced that the main reason we have all these global issues is that humans are selfish – by nature, some would argue. Therefore, I want to write to inspire selflessness, solidarity and sacrifice (not in the ritual sense!).

I believe many problems could be solved or eliminated by just changing our ways. We have already achieved wonderful things by starting to think and act differently, such as abolishing slavery, reducing colonialism, and, to some extent, disarmament (at least compared to the 20^th century), in many countries. Of course, there is still much to be done, but we have fought for it successfully, as many are now fighting against poverty, famine, sanitation, etc.

Most of the good we have achieved has not come from scientific advances, I believe. Indeed, science has granted us many wonders, such as incredible medical development, and extended global communication through computerised technology. But, oppression and violence has been reduced by combined efforts to change the then-present order of the world. In the past centuries, slavery and war was how the world worked, but we realised that this is wrong, and fought to change it. Today, money-hungry companies rule the world instead of armed forces. This is still far from ideal, but an improvement at least, I would say. A simple metaphor would be that we have changed the currency from bullets to coins; but we should keep striving until it is love that makes our world go around.

I think poverty and famine could be broken by sharing. Easy to say, I know, but it is really not that difficult to do either, not at all as difficult as it might seem to us. If you find it hard to share, think about how much you probably already are throwing away for nothing. The less we waste, the more we can afford to give. (Cheap rhetoric, but it works!)

Less waste also means less strain on the environment. We humans put enormous pressure on our environment, not only by inefficient use in the poorer areas, but also by excessive use in the richer countries. Maybe the rich do not have to give their earnings to the poor, but if they devoted some of their resources and knowledge to helping the poor develop their lives, and at the same time refrain from excess, we might be on to something that works well for both parts and the planet we share!

This is what I want to convey to you, out there. This is a mentality I want to share and inspire, a way of life I believe to be sustainable and good for everyone. I want to do this because I believe it can be done, and I hope you share my thoughts and hopes. I hope we are all willing to keep changing to make this world a better place.  

Open-mindedness: What is 'being open-minded'?

We have emphasised the importance of being open-minded about the life choices of people around us, that we should accept that others live different lives, and that we should never judge them for it. However, I feel there is more in this world that ought to be approached with an open mind. Part of being open-minded may be acknowledging that there are many ways to be open-minded!

In this fourth post, I want to expand our meaning of ‘open-minded’ and show the vast amount of life aspects that we should be open-minded about, as many as I can think of. There are situations where being open-minded may enrich your own life, and situations where you can make life richer for people around you by approaching them and their views open-mindedly. In other words, being open-minded can help yourself and your peers; it can make the world a much better place!

A dictionary definition of ‘open-mindedness’ is “willing to consider new ideas; unbiased”. I think that this is a good description of the strict sense of the word. However, when I think about being open-minded, especially in these posts, I mean being open to differences. Maybe that is something else; there is probably another word for it. But this is how I personally interpret ‘open-minded’. Maybe these two meanings can be combined into one, somehow?

By ‘being open to’ something, I mean being willing to accept, and assimilate something. This means both recognising its validity and being willing to learn from it. So, it is roughly the same as ‘willing to consider’, as the dictionary definition states.

New ideas will be different from previous, by definition – they would not be ‘new’ otherwise – so the ‘new ideas’ part could easily be included in the more broad word ‘differences’. So, my choice of word is simply broader; it is inclusive rather than exclusive – there is no contradiction.

‘Unbiased’ basically means unprejudiced. (Bias is defined as “prejudice in favour of or against one thing, person or group compared with another, usually in a way considered to be unfair”.) It is a good candidate for a synonym of ‘open-minded’. The word ‘unprejudiced’ also conveys the meaning that open-mindedness focuses on the first time you encounter a new idea or opinion – that is when it is the most important to be open. After, you may already have good reasons not to be willing to reconsider the idea – though it would never hurt to be open to re-evaluate your judgement!

Let us now try to combine these into one single explanation: ‘open-minded’ could be said to mean willing to consider and assimilate new ideas, opinions or views free from bias.

Of course, you are more than welcome to comment with your own input of what you think it means to be open-minded! Please share! This is only what I think, and maybe Hanna agrees with most of it… Our explanation is not the only one! We acknowledge this as we strive to be open-minded.

I hope we are all satisfied enough to move on to slightly more specific ways of being open-minded. However, on reviewing the post this far, it seems it will become too long if we include the examples. I will conclude here, but promise to follow up with the rest in a new post very soon! I hope next time will be able to inspire you cherish open-mindedness as we do, and make it your goal as well! 

This post was also published on Hanna's A Little Blog About Words. 

Skill... what is that anyway?

I first wrote this post for my paleoblog Weird & Wonderful, but the more I wrote on it, the better it seemed to fit nicely here as well. I find the points made about education very important, especially if we want to make a better world for the next generation! 

One of the things I noticed during my first year in the UK is that there is an almost ludicrous emphasis on skills. At least among the academics, much of what you hear is all about having skills, skills, skills and skills…

I must admit that I find this both amusing and a tad annoying. There is more to life than being skilled, in my opinion. Not saying that a solid set of skills is not useful or desirable, but this nagging about skills is extremely off-putting for me.

But, rather than judging too hastily, I thought maybe the problem is just that I do not know what they actually mean by ‘skills’. I had a good idea of what the word means and implies, but was not sure if I actually understood every aspect of the term.

So, one night I finally got down to looking it up (haha), and, when I got absorbed into the various divisions or types of skills, before I knew it, I found myself doing surprisingly keen research and even taking notes! Naturally, this had to be made into a post on this blog. It does not have much to do with paleontology, but rather with professional life in general.

Before we begin, I just want to mention that this clearly shows what type of academic I am. I found learning about skills interesting because of the many theoretical groupings of types of skills and the implications their respective demands and values have on education theory. Nothing of this has made me more eager to gain any ‘skills’; that does not appeal to me in the same way. I am a theoretical person, not practical.

What on Earth is a skill, then? What is it really?

A dictionary definition of ‘skill’ is “the ability to do something well; expertise” or “a particular ability”. The same dictionary defines ‘ability’ as “possession of the means or skill to do something”. So ‘skill’ becomes the possession of the means or skill to do something well… Great.  

‘Expertise’ is moreover defined as “expert skill or knowledge in a particular field”, from which I gather that any expertise is a form of skill, but any skill is not necessarily an expertise.

Regardless, this seems to lead nowhere, except that ‘skill’ seems to be a very broad term, suggested by the repeated mention of “something”.

Luckily, Wikipedia rarely disappoints: “A skill is the learned ability to carry out pre-determined results often with the minimum outlay of time, energy or both.” This immediately becomes much more interesting.

Although may not be overly keen on agreeing with the need for a skill to be learned, at least most skills would be. This implies that the skills must be acquired throughout one’s life. This effectively excludes innate talent, if you agree. This might make statements such as ‘Mozart was a skilled composer’ a bit tricky to justify. I believe few would disagree with the claim that Mozart had a natural talent of knowing what sounds good in music, so that may not be a ‘skill’. However, he was not born with practical knowledge of the standard procedures of how to structure a composition, in particular the language used to communicate it. That was a skill he obtained through dedicated learning and practice. So, he was skilled, but was he skilled in any way different from any other composer, who also must have learned the same skills? Are all composers not skilled? Skilled to a different degree, perhaps? Maybe we should adjust the statement to ‘Mozart was a talented and (highly?) skilled composer’.

Wikipedia’s definition also fleshes out the “something” from the dictionary version: the aim of the skill is to reach a pre-determined outcome. The skill works toward a goal, a goal that is defined in advance. It is not just doing anything, but carrying out focused tasks. I furthermore interpret this as implying that the type of skill may be determined by its purpose; different skills have different respective aims.

Examples of such pre-determined outcomes could be: accurately measuring the weight of an object, scoring above 100 000 in Angry Birds, convincing a friend to try a new dish, writing a good essay under 750 words, crossing the street without being injured, reading any novel by Garcia Marquez without crying (of boredom), etc.

This also means that trivial things such as picking your nose, walking to the toilet, signing a piece of paper, and asking for directions; these are all skills as well.

It seems this definition still is rather vague. It narrowed the ‘something’ down to ‘a purpose’, but it cannot exclude the trivial examples from above. We need something more, something to distinguish what most mean by ‘skill’ and any ability to perform any set task. Even the addition of the usual ideal to carry out the task with minimum time and effort fails to make the separation. How can we define ‘skill’ so that picking your nose is not included? (Note that I am making the implicit claim that picking your nose isn’t a skill, but that may very well be discussed… and disgusting…)

I have no answer to this question at the moment, but if we carry on maybe something will crop up eventually. Let us now look at the various groups of skills. It is human nature to organise the world into categories; by generalising about these categories, we can handle the vast complexity of the world in a simplified manner. That is why I find such groupings interesting and important to be familiar with.

Skills can be broadly separated into domain-general and domain-specific skills. Domain-general skills are useful in a broader situations or contexts, or useful across various different situations, while domain-specific skills are applicable only to a very specific situation. Literacy would be a domain-general skill, while the ability to identify a Gryphaea species (a type of extinct mussle, see Fossils) is a domain-specific skill, as you focus on the features that are unique to that species – being able to recognise those features will not help you identify any other species, as they will not possess them. Naturally, there are many grey areas. Many might say that speaking the lingua franca English is a domain-general skill, but what about speaking Swedish, which is only spoken in one country (and a few communities around in Scandinavia)?

This classification only separates skills into two categories, but there are more, independent ways of grouping skills (just like you can group people into left-handed and right-handed, with those who have lost their main hand in the grey area, but there are many other ways of grouping people, e.g. nationality, political leaning, eye colour, etc.).

Another contrasting pair of skill groups are basic skills versus higher-order thinking skills. Basic skills are learned by direct instruction, independently from other skills, and without larger (philosophical?) contexts. They are facts and methods learned one at a time, one after the other. All you need to learn these is someone to tell you how to do it; it requires no input from you other than being receptive and able to replicate. Examples include literacy, speech, counting, and basic algebra methods. They seem to make up the fundament of one’s knowledge and abilities, and the rest is probably built on this base.

Higher-order thinking skills, in contrast, include judgmental skills such as analysis and critical thinking, and creative skills such as problem solving and… well, being creative. These are much “more difficult to learn or to teach but also more valuable because such skills are more likely to be useable in novel situations” (Wikipedia). Novel situations refers to situations other than those in which the skill was learned. In other words, higher-order thinking skills are skills that are applicable to more than one situation. This may be related to the domain-general skillset, but these are separate groupings, although they may show a lot of overlap.

It has long been assumed that higher-order thinking skills cannot be learned without first gaining the necessary basic skills, but modern cognitive research seems to have challenged this notion. However, I doubt you could learn thinking skills effectively without first knowing a language (it may be possible, which is a truly fascinating idea to consider hypothetically: how would you think if you did not know any language – not even your own made-up one? what would your thoughts be like? images? or something else?).

I think the point they are making here is that you only need the most basic of the basic skills in order to gain higher-order thinking skills. You do not need to read the musings of Aristotle to reach similar conclusions; if you are faced with the same problems, you might solve it the same way as he did. Thus, higher-order thinking skills may be taught by presenting only the problem, and letting the students find the solution themselves.

This is of course much more challenging to teach and learn successfully; it requires a considerably greater input from the teacher as well as the student. However, since it has been shown that higher-order thinking skills can be learned without extensive knowledge other than the essentials such as language and basic logic, it is possible, and in my opinion highly desirable, to begin teaching them already at elementary school.

I cannot emphasise enough how strongly I feel that these thinking skills are invaluably important. I am not only talking about academics here; anyone’s life may be improved by applying effective thinking to one’s situation. We are faced with problems that need to be overcome on a daily basis; the more efficiently we can solve them, the better.

Therefore, I am distraught that there was little or no attention toward such skills during my year at the University of Bristol. This makes their endless nagging about skills even more upsetting. This first year was intended to provide us undergraduates with a solid knowledge base before progressing into the second year, so it seems they prioritised plain knowledge over thinking skills. They consider that more important at this point. Fair enough, I can accept that. But it made me rather disillusioned with the quality of the teaching. There was so little effort to stimulate us to think on our own. They never got tired of telling us to read and learn more about what they mentioned in the lectures, but there were no instances that I can remember where they asked us to evaluate a theory or method or anything of the like.

Ironically, it seems they applied the approach I mentioned for teaching higher-order thinking skills to teach us the basic skills. They would give us five samples of rocks that many of us had never seen before in our lives, and tasked us to describe and identify them. They were kind enough to give us a handout with descriptions, but rock identification is too subjective to be explained by some vague words on a sheet of paper. It ended in a complete disaster and the teachers were disappointed with our results. They told us to make more effort the next time.

I feel it is a shame that there was no emphasis on thinking skills. What I find even more lamentable is that there seems to have been no attention toward them in England at pre-university level either. From what I have heard and seen from my peers, it seems their abilities to evaluate and think critically are poorly developed. A good friend even seems offended when I question big science theories. She argues that they were made by scientists who are much more intelligent than I am. Of that I have not doubt, but she clearly missed the point of critical thinking: it has nothing to do with intelligence, but with challenging the fundamental reasoning and assumptions of an idea; it requires logics, not intellect. If the students do not even fully comprehend what critical thinking means, they will find it difficult to start doing it when push comes to shove.

I am not trying to say my higher-order thinking skills are superb. I have much to learn, and I know this because I understand what these skills encompass and what they will require of me. But, at the same time, I also deem them indispensable to my life, and want to develop them at every opportunity. And I wish for more opportunities!

Wondering about the pre-university education of my peers in the UK, I remember how I struggled in Sweden from year seven through nine in the natural and social science classes.  Even though I remembered everything the teachers said in class, I never got more than Godkänt (a pass) because I could not think independently. Since the first test, they told me I need to learn to analyse the information in class in order to score a higher grade. Although I had consistent top grades in most other subjects, and though I put considerably greater effort into the natural and social sciences, I was stuck on Godkänt for about two and a half years, because I could not for my life figure out what I needed to do. No one explained how to analyse; they just made it clear that I had to do it.

Miraculously, it all changed in the last term of year nine. I still don’t know what ‘clicked right’ in my head, but something did, and finally I was able to analyse. Still, I did not know what I was doing right; it seemed I just scored higher grades. Even today, those years confuse me, but I remember having struggled hard, facing the fear of not knowing what to do, of working blindfolded, and somehow eventually prevailed.

If I had not learned to think independently, whichever way it happened, I would have struggled even harder in high school. International Baccalaureate has little emphasis on independent thinking in the individual subjects (except perhaps the literature courses, and surely in philosophy), but their so-called ‘core subjects’, which all students must study, irrespective of what other subjects they choose, place considerably more focus and demands on independent thinking and intellectual development. It is from these core subjects that I feel I have learned the most valuable thinking skills.

This makes me eternally grateful for the pressure my teachers in year seven though nine put on me, and, in retrospect, I honestly wish it had started earlier. Still, better late than never. And that is why I am concerned for my fellow students at university. I hope I have just misjudged them and that they have not shown evidence of their thinking skills because the course has not stimulated it!

Realising how long this article has become, and feeling I could go on about this for pages more, maybe it is best to stop here and leave the thread open to be followed up later. Although I do not feel much clearer about what a ‘skill’ really is, at least I have convinced myself even more that it is the higher-order thinking skills that I want to develop. Regretfully, I fear it will not be a welcome sentiment at university, but you now know my feelings on this issue, and have no intention of giving up on them!