a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment by thenewgreen
thenewgreen  ·  3659 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: What's the Purpose of College?

Most people know what it is to be thoughtful, at least that is my take on it. The problem is that most places don't expect "thoughtfulness" of us. Even much of higher learning these days is dominated by a "finish line" mentality that doesn't promote thoughtfulness or genuine accomplishment as much as it promotes task oriented behaviors and accreditation.

    Can thoughtfulness be taught
Sure it can, but most adults have already learned this lesson. Case in point, way back, several reddit migrations ago, we had a number of users come in on a "circle-jerk" wave. Most of them hightailed it out of here, but I noticed that some of them stayed. The ones that stayed, started off acting like jackasses, but once they realized that Hubski (the community) asked more of them, they rose to the occasion. The most thoughtful people can be assclowns, if they're in an environment that begs for assclownery, and vice versa.




ButterflyEffect  ·  3659 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Most people know what it is to be thoughtful, at least that is my take on it. The problem is that most places don't expect "thoughtfulness" of us. Even much of higher learning these days is dominated by a "finish line" mentality that doesn't promote thoughtfulness or genuine accomplishment as much as it promotes task oriented behaviors and accreditation.

Here's a debate I've been having with the professor of my capstone course. We're doing chemical processes related to oil and carbon chain cracking and all of that fun stuff, and it's very similar to what we did last semester for our Design with Constraint course so far. Granted, in 5ish weeks it's going to transition to in-depth design but right now it's the same exact kind of thing we did last semester. My argument is that there is a lack of soul and thought provoking situations in making us spend half the semester doing the same thing we spent an entire semester doing, his argument is that practice makes perfect. I believe that both of us are right but there's a more interesting underlying point, and it's what you've brought up. This is entirely a task oriented project, there is no thinking outside of the box, there is no applying principles outside of humanity or trying to imbue a sense of yourself into what you're trying to accomplish.

And I think that's why I don't like engineering so much, because it strips away the soul and leaves you a problem solving machine that is there to fix issues for somebody else or improve an existing process. There's not much room for creativity, there's not much room to leave a piece of yourself in the project, and there's certainly not enough to risk anything in the end. This was rambling, I just feel that most of "classical" (mechanical, electrical, chemical) engineering suffers greatly from the "finish line" mentality.

There's actually a question here and that's does the pursuit of systems optimization and engineering result in a reduction of soul and creative solutions? Does it remove the "thoughtfulness" from any perspective that is not analytical? Am I right, is my professor right, or are we both right in our own ways?

lil  ·  3659 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Most people know what it is to be thoughtful
That's true, of course, because humans have thoughts. Our heads are thought-full. The problem with my original questions in this post is that I did not define "thoughtful," but I know I mean more that full of thoughts.

One of the books in my teacher-training program was called "Teaching for Thinking" by Louis Raths and Selma Wasserman. This book suggested that there were different types of thinking. Some thinking activities were considered more advanced or more complex than others.

The book said that, in schools, often simpler thinking skills such as memorizing and regurgitating memorized material were rewarded while more complicated forms of thoughtfulness, such as searching for relevant material, classifying information, analyzing data, comparing alternatives, drawing conclusions, and a whole list of other thinking skills needed attention. I imagine that is still true in some classrooms.

To me, thoughtfulness involves much more than having opinions. In particular, thoughtfulness involves looking for and questioning underlying assumptions, especially our own.