Critical Thinking

This is Jamie, the author of our first entry on chapter 5, when she was about 5 or 6, and her little sister was about 2 or 3. She said this is her mom's favorite picture of the two of them; can't say as I blame her!
Happy reading!

In this chapter, I read about children learning how to think critically. What stood out for me were the three different principles related to how children learn to trust “providers of information” (p. 213). The first principle states “Cooperate with kin” (p. 214), and this principle made me think of my childhood when my second cousins would babysit me till the late hours of the night while my parents worked two full time jobs. Since my parents were working all the time, I learned to trust my cousins with everything: taking me to school, feeding me, helping me with my homework, and answering any questions that I had.

The second principle is “Cooperate with other people who cooperate with you” (p. 214). This reminds me of all the many years I had spent as a child doing physical therapy to help my walking since I was born with mild cerebral palsy. I remember leaving school every day at lunch time and getting on a bus and heading to what I liked to call the “physical therapy school.” When I would arrive there they would check my weight and height and ask me if I had been doing my daily exercises at home. If I said, “Yes,” that sometimes would mean that I would get to go home early or I would learn something fun after I did my exercises. But if I said, “No,” they would tell me, “Jamie, if you don’t cooperate with us then how are we going to help you keep your legs strong? We need you to cooperate so you can go home early every day and learn something fun instead of learning these exercises all the time.” Then I would have to stay longer that day and learn the old exercises and the new exercises and not have any fun after. So trust me, I learned very quickly how to cooperate with my physical therapists so I did not have to stay late at therapy every day and we could learn something fun.

The third and final principle that I connected with was “Cooperate with people who are cooperative in general, whether with you or someone else” (p. 214). Growing up as a child with mild cerebral palsy was not easy. I was always in and out of hospitals because of surgeries and physical therapy. It was also very hard to make friends with kids my age as well because they thought I was weird and awkward because I walked differently than them. But the positive side of having cerebral palsy is that I learned to be a very easy going, fun loving kid and made friends and understood adults better than kids my own age. So I learned to cooperate with my doctors, nurses, and physical therapists more because they knew me. I would always be seen playing with the nurses on the playground when they were on their breaks and because I was so cooperative with them, they actually helped me make friends my own age in and outside of the hospital.