Think

One of the more influential classes I took in college was a rhetoric class for my degree plan. It was not an easy class, I did not make an A, and quite frankly the professor and I weren't buddy buddy. (I don't think he was buddy buddy with anyone because of how difficult his class was.) However, I've learned some valuable lessons that have helped me think critically and analyze....everything.

The very first assignment we received in his class was an editing assignment. He handed us a four-page school publication he wanted us to edit. He told us to look through the article and find as many errors as we could. He didn't tell us what kind of errors, how many errors, or what pages to find the errors on. He gave us one week (I think) to work on it and bring back our list of mistakes. The majority of us were quite bewildered and intimidated. Were there 3 errors? 5? 10? I searched long and hard and tried to pull out all my previous writing knowledge to pore over this assignment.

On the due date, we brought back our homework and started asking each other how many errors we found. I had found about 25 I believe and was feeling all right. We turned in our assignments and focused on a different subject for class. The next class, he handed back our assignments, graded. I made a C. My 25 errors merely scratched the surface, and not all of them were even correct. How many errors were there actually? Over 70. I don't remember the exact number anymore, but there were A LOT. He gave us a printed sheet listing every single error in that publication and the reason why it was an error. I definitely thought I was headed for failure.

I think I scraped by with a B+ in his class. Or maybe it was just a B. Honestly, it doesn't matter. I've got my degree and diploma, and nobody ever asks to see them for proof. Sadly I don't remember a whole lot besides this assignment from his class, but the ways in which I apply this critical thinking are innumerable. I look at situations from multiple facets and think before I accept anything at face value. The point of his assignment wasn't to see how knowledgeable our grammar was (although that was part of it, being an English rhetoric class), and honestly it wasn't to see if we could find all the mistakes. I think he intentionally made it that way. The point of this assignment was to teach us to think and pore over each and every word on that publication and question - is something wrong here?

In some ways this just makes me a skeptic. I'm fine with that. I'd rather be the skeptic who overthinks things than the passive person who accepts without question and is duped. There's been one particular news headline for the last few days I'm sure we've all heard and read about by now. I won't mention it specifically, but I haven't said anything about it. Why? Because I read so many different articles, some siding with one side, others siding with the other. I'm not going to pick sides, but I have come to a conclusion about the situation in my own head after reading multiple articles and gathering bits of facts from each one, and we'll leave it there.

As far as I know, the professor still teaches this course at my alma mater. I hope he still gives this assignment (or at least one similar, because I've kind of given away the shock factor here if anyone taking the class currently is clever enough to find this blog...), and I hope his future students remember it just as I do.

And I hope he still brings bagels. The bagels helped.