Critical Thinking + The X Factor: The Real Tao of Steve

The passing of Steve Jobs last week impacted me in more ways than I imagined. I think that we’ve all come to expect his innovation and gadgetry and take for granted the many tools he’s provided that have become essential to our daily lives. But reading the columns from his friends and admirers, and watching his 2005 Stanford commencement speech, I realized how much of a maverick and revolutionary he was, and how much of a nonconformist! In his own words (paraphrasing Robert Frost), he took the road less traveled by and that made all the difference.

Why this hits me so hard is that Jobs was not only a critical thinker on the deepest of levels but he believed firmly in pushing boundaries and turning commonly held beliefs on their ear. He literally thought outside the box and created computers that reflected that aesthetic. He was always thinking “what if?” and then working with his dynamic team to make it possible. He wasn’t afraid to fail, or to be well-ahead of the curve, and because of that he fell on his face more than a few times. But he succeeded far more than he failed, and, as he said himself, his failures or seeming mis-steps were key to his future triumphs.

The lessons from Steve Jobs’ life are those that we should be teaching our students today. We should be teaching them to be creative, to push the boundaries, and to think outside the box. We should be emphasizing critical thinking above all else and teaching students to follow their instincts. While I’m all for logic and reason, there is something that we’re losing when we emphasize those to the detriment of that unnamed factor that separates “genius” from “average.” All the logic and reason in the world would not lead to the invention of something like the iPhone or iPod. That took something else; and thank goodness Steve Jobs listened to it (as he put it, ‘your gut, heart, karma, destiny, or whatever you want to call it’).

In our small way, we are trying to do that with Gleeditions. We are pushing the boundaries of what’s possible with digital texts, and we are promoting critical thinking skills by always returning students’ focus to the text itself so that students can deeply consider what is being said and why, and then apply that to the bigger picture. While we don’t claim to be in the same realm as Steve Jobs, we are proud to be on the same wavelength.

So, here’s to Steve Jobs and his amazing life and legacy. And here’s to all of the educators out there striving to provide more for their students to think about than rote memorization. And, finally, here’s to the hope that we become a nation of critical thinkers who will follow our hearts, rewrite current rules, and create the next wave of incredible literature and inventions.

No Funds? Get Creative!

With all of the funding cuts to education we have to ask ourselves how we can maximize student learning outcomes with the limited resources available. Increasingly, I think that means we turn to digital texts and material and try to utilize them to their fullest potential, thus actually adding value for our students.

This year I am taking that idea to a new level in my classes—and especially in my composition and critical thinking course. I am not just using Moodle as an interactive platform, but will be creating a student-content-based online blog/newspaper. The idea is to show students how writing is a real world activity, how it impacts society, and how all of us can learn to express ourselves clearly and forcefully in order to make the changes we want to see in the world.

While I will be using some traditional books, I am also planning to use free online texts from the Gleeditions Common Core selection. Because they are scholarly editions, nicely formatted, searchable, and free, I can assign a variety of short stories, essays, speeches, poetry, and drama that I have either already planned to use or that, because of the way the course develops naturally, suddenly fit into the content and our discussions. By going digital in this way I can be extremely flexible while saving students money on textbooks. A win-win!

These are challenging times for educators and students alike but we need turn this dilemma into an opportunity to think outside the box and get creative. We have this amazing tool, the Internet, at our disposal and we can utilize it in so many dynamic ways. We now have the potential to not only “go with the flow” of our classes and add reading or supplemental material as the tide shifts, but also to engage students in a setting they are already extremely comfortable in.

I hope that traditional books never disappear, and I hope that education will one day—very soon—get the full funding it deserves. But because of the outrageous cost of textbooks and the uncertainty about funding at present, I am gladly plunging into cyber space head first. I am excited about the possibilities and would love to hear how others are tapping into this tremendous potential.

Please share your ideas here and help all of us turn those blank checks into real money for our students!