Critical Thinking: A Dish Best Served With Simplicity

When it comes to critical thinking, I have to admit I find myself doing it more than the average person. At this moment I'm being critical of myself for even saying that because I realize that I just made up a statistic about the average human being. It would be smarter to say I find myself critically thinking and analyzing things...a lot. I tend to critical think about things that don't need critical thinking. For instance I could be walking down the street and notice an old man sitting at a table by himself sipping a hot coffee. I would try to analyze him, trying to figure out his story. Why was he sitting alone? Was he ever married? Has he been going to that coffee shop for a while?

My idea of critical thinking is thinking about something and really cutting it down to the core. I take an idea, or concept, or even a sentence in a book and I cut it to pieces, layer by layer like an onion. If I were to compare critical thinking to something I would compare it to the job of a chef. When they find a delectable dish that they would love to recreate, they think about the different flavors that are combined in the dish and what could possibly be in it. Then they think about ways that they spend time thinking about how the dish could be cooked to perfection; you could bake it, broil it, grill it, etc. When critically analyzing something in a book, you cut it down separating what type of rhetorical devices can be found in a paragraph. When you find a metaphor, or what you think might be a metaphor, you look for the hidden meaning, or, for the sake of the cooking analogy, you look for the hidden way of cooking the piece of work. To clarify, the way you look at the chosen paragraph or stanza in a poem is how a chef would look at that special unknown dish. The way you take it apart, noticing how wonderfully the author has combined their rhetorical devices and what types that includes would be how the chef finds the different ingredients used to make that dish. They way you would focus on what might have prompted the author to write the piece is how a chef would focus on how the cook decided to create it.

This is me critically thinking, just some food for thought. If it seems like rambling, than your right, that's what it is. When I critically think, all these thoughts just fill my head like the why, what, when, how, who, where, questions. It's like my mind just wants to continue adding to my critical thoughts once I get started. That brings me to the end of this blog. If I can get anything out of this class, I would love to be able to take control of all of these thoughts and organize them so that instead of rambling on and on about something, I am able to understand them and talk about them more easily without confusing anyone.