Learning to Think by Julia

Learning to Think by Julia - July 2016 Scholarship Essay

Thinking. Something so universal and ordinary. Or is it?

It was in my Introduction to Film class in High School that I learned that most students, and maybe even most people in general do not think as much as we imagined. This is the lesson that my film teacher taught us throughout that whole year. Believe me, I understand the irony of having a film teacher stress the importance of thinking and pondering in a class where you watch movies the whole time, and honestly tend to veg out and not have a single thought in your head. But that fact is honestly what made it so easy to listen to his message in the first place.

As we go through life we feel constant pressure to stick to the status quo and follow the newest trends and beliefs of that time. This is honestly quite simple to do because it does not require us to think. We just blindly follow whoever is leading. Not thinking even applies to school believe it or not. We have grown up in a system where we memorize information to pass a test. I even remember sitting in my high school classes where it was rare that a student would ask the question why. Why does this work? Why do we solve the problem this way? Why does this react with that? Or even, why do we have to know this? On the rare occasion that someone may ask why, or even a question in general, the teacher’s usual response was "Oh, you don't have to worry about that, it won't be on the test."

Here, once again, we blindly follow. We learn the information we are told, we memorize and cram it somewhere into our heads to remember for the test, then it’s gone.
Thinking. Not as common as you thought huh?
That leads us back to my film teacher's lesson. He started us off with thinking about movies and production. On our film tests he would ask us questions that we never discussed in class (What!?). These questions would be something such as why does the director have a constant theme of yellow throughout the movie? What kind of mood does this create for the movie? Or a question such as why did the director leave the film open ended? These questions were honestly tricky at first. These were things he had not directly told the class the answer to and it really required us to think outside of the box, and honestly just think about it in general.
He would slowly start to introduce class conversations that weren't movie based, but meant to get the class thinking on a different level. He would tell us something that happened on the news or a new bill that was going to be introduced into Congress. I remember him telling us about a bill that was soon going to be passed in Congress and he would tell us the basics that were released to the public, then ask "Sounds like a great idea right?" and most of us would agree. But then he would go on to tell us that he read the whole bill and that there were numerous things hidden inside that bill that the news wasn't covering and that nobody was talking about. These hidden items were things that in hindsight, were just bad. He would then go on to reiterate what he had told us all year. "My goal for this class is to teach you how to think. You're going out into society soon and you need to be able to see both sides." He would talk about not always following what society told us was the correct thing to do and that we should be doing research and making that decisions for ourselves. Thinking obviously applied to school as well. He would tell us to not just memorize information but to understand it to our best ability, to ask questions about how things worked and why they worked the way they did.

Now, going into my sophomore year of college, truly thinking about the world around me, what I am doing and what’s going on the world, has changed my perspective on a lot of things. I know try to learn both sides of a news story and as much background information as possible. I try my best to ask those "why?" questions in class. I can see that the status quo has flaws and that there are different paths that are healthier and happier. This turnaround is because a teacher cared enough about his students to truly get us to think. He broke us out of the shells society had molded for us, and showed us a new world, that may be tougher, but all around more complete.