My First Impression of Critical Thinking Class Essay

My first impression when I went to this university was very positive. The person I spoke to secure made me feel completely at home because he said when I started as a mature disciple and thats what I wanted to hear. He asked me just about my experience so far and treated it as though it was whatsoeverthing important, something worthwhile talking about and interesting and then he gave me chance to prove myself although I didnt cast sour the conventional qualifications, to prove myself by doing a written piece of writing which gave me access to the course.Quite pleased because I felt I was intelligent abounding to get onto a course, intelligent enough further non educated enough, I didnt have the certificates to prove it and this was my chance to do so. Ive no way of knowing actually to be h singlest Ive nothing rightfully to comp be it without I guess that obviously with the engineering and those sort of sciences you do need to show that youve g iodin through the steps, ye s I can imagine in that respect would be the difference, yeah..My course is the corresponding a general introduction to socio-economic, political, regular(a) psychological studies and as you go through from one family to the next you can concentrate more on the nations that you find you are interested in barely you dont regret having done other areas which you werent particularly fascinated by because its building blocks and you build on the decision one before you go onto the next one. I tack together it really exhausting forge fitting think fitting 6 subjects in one year is quite a lot to fit in. It would be straight-laced if it was just 5 perhaps but thats life. The deadlines are really hard work but I suppose youve got to have them so thats okay.I chose to study full- prison term so I cant really complain. I find the university itself a sort of alienating environment. In the subroutine library it is difficult to concentrate there are always people chatting, letti ng doors mission and so on. Its loosely minor practical things like the long two bus journeys that I have and the fact that there is nowhere to instauration yourself. You cant make yourself a coffee you havent got a room of your own, not even a locker. You have to carry everything there and back every day and pay 82p for a drink, like a shopper going round town.You cant find anywhere to have a nap if youre tired and I love catnapping it just revives me instantly. Study rooms get really hot. The food canteens are not as redeeming(prenominal) as Id expect but its great I could stay all day reading in the library its a fantastic resource. There is just so much there and I think of it as an archive as time goes on the more and more, the older stuff gets more and more important the fact that its still there because if you compare it for example with the internet theres fill of stuff on the internet but its all pretty current.The old stuff hasnt necessarily been archived, it c an just be switched off. lack of grass roots involvement, choices and accountability alin concert you are treated more like a consumer than a participant but with no customer function hotline. Youve very much pursual a series of chosen paths like levels in a computer game. The choices are just which subjects, not fundamentals like where, when and how to study its not a democracy, its an institution. Its not what Id expected coming from the unforced sector where every giving medication is run by a committee that the grass roots can wrap up and appeal to.You can even put yourself forward to join the committees. pupil Unions just not the same, to me thats like being invited to be a critic in the audience, not to have a dispense in running the show. Here they ask for one student rep from our group just one why not all of us? why not an open forum meeting every hardly a(prenominal) months to feed all our comments big and small through to the management. Why not a pinch bo x at least? Where is the annual report to students? Where s the accountability? It was a surprise to find my course entirely full of 18 year old white kids they all look the same.There must be less than 5% mature students which is a shame. The youngsters are so docile in the classroom, like sheep, they never challenge anything, they just dont know loads of stuff like recent British history, politics. Of course, its easier if youve lived through it but I dont think some of them even listen to the news. I feel sorry for anyone just studying the National Curriculum. The mature students mostly got kids, like me, Ive got teenagers, some also work, have other activities, some are even doing other courses at the same time, they know how to push themselves. nonetheless so, a lot feel unconfident at the university.They just dont get whats required of them, at least for the first year. I was a mentor when I started my second year for an adult in her first year. She said I really helped in l ending an ear and explaining things. Mentoring is a really intelligent system. I wish Id had one when I started. Co-operative work, team work, committee skills. The whole emphasis is on developing you as an individual. You impart be pursue a researcher, not a team. We are also carefully told how to avoid plagiarism but people are afraid to actually work together in fact, university doesnt teach team work in general.It could. In reality there are vital committee skills some graduates wont make do across till they get to the workplace, making them look naive. I mean practical things like meetings, having agendas, minutes, standing orders and so on. In the voluntary sector Id been used to organisations having good, well worked out policies and procedures which are publicly available documents. Here, the nearest we got was one session on ground rules in an introductory course which was never repeated, reviewed or built upon. Value and experiences, using skills and building your self -esteem.Something I got from training as an adult trainer was an appreciation of good methods in bringing out what people already have as a starting point for education. Lectures are obviously pretty much one way but seminars dont have to be. I was taught to be a facilitator not a teacher with the idea that the group works together towards a result. The process of doing this is educational. It builds up self-esteem because everyone contributes their input is valued. Their previous experiences in life and skills and attributes in group work come out. There is no time for that here.Seminars are mostly just tutors trying to get kids to talk about what theyve understood from the text of some great intellectual man whos likely dead now. Perhaps that is just in social science, I dont know. Social justice, rights, respect, equality and diversity all these things are central to the objectives in the voluntary sector. I am sure they are here in the mission statement for the university but the reality is different. The staff seem to be century% white. I am on a course which must be about 98% white. Why arent people screaming about that? Where are the anti-racism posters around the place?Its as if no-one wants to stir up agitation for a change. One good thing is that here in working-class reciprocal ohm Yorkshire the university does open its library doors and other facilities to everyone although it doesnt make a point of advertising the fact perhaps they think that would cause trouble. Perhaps theyre not proud enough of the fraternity focus part of the mission. Activism, forums, notice-boards. I was expecting university to be a hive of student activities like it perhaps was in the 1960s but its not, as many people have said. The student societies are, to say the least, not high profile.This is a shame because its such a larn experience for peoples skills trying to organise something. One reason is that there are so few lively, open notice-boards where activities can be advertised. The few existing notice-boards are glass-covered, its not obvious if theyre for student use and people secretly try to slide notices through the glass where they just stay there for months curling up. Split between several campuses theres no feeling of a sort of open forum for stalls. Its as if a vital source is missing. True engagement with the community.Before Id started at university Id seven years or more with the credit unions which is part of the voluntary sector. It has its own culture perhaps, but it has good principles and tools which are used. Principles like diversity, equality, co-operation, mutual respect, rights and social justice, user management, community management, local provision and grass roots basis and a critical awareness of power structures. Democracy, self-esteem building and capacity building, accessible facilities with childcare if necessary, environmental awareness, accountability and sustainable progress.Useful tools include the use o f ground rules for meetings, experiential learning, valuing peoples own experience, avoidance of jargon and good policies and procedures. The Hallam volunteering project has an signal track record and its obviously a step in the right direction. It gets students out of the ivory towers or out of the pub and into the community for some real-life experience. But I wonder how this impacts on the organisations they work with. There is such a thing as institutional memory and I wonder whether theyre having a good or a bad experience with student volunteers in those organisations.The local voluntary action organisations could advise on this but I never heard much about Hallam volunteering when I worked in the voluntary sector. It may be a false impression but they seem to come for one-off projects, then go away to write up their experiences. For the full-time volunteers and clients of others in the voluntary sector it must feel a little bit like being experimented on I think. Id like to think that students could be prepared with an idealistic visionary missionary statement in their minds about the voluntary sector perhaps a course on community work, its principles, its forward-looking ideals.The voluntary and community sector is historic it is immense, it is something Britain should be proud of. If this vision met the hard reality of imperfect organisations, over the years something would rub off for the organisations as well as the students and it would be a bipartisan learning experience. There are many hard-working development workers in most fields who would be grateful to show the ropes and get some real student volunteers if they came along with some grounding like this. The vision I would have of being a self-directed learner would be spending hours in the library and hours on the internet looking things up.With the guidance of an essay title, perhaps a list of resources that are recommended, web-site links, books by key writers on the subject but not an open brief, definitely working towards an agreed or a set title and writing an essay about that. Yeah it would be nice, it would be nice to have a completely free hand in setting an objective and working an open-ended way to collect data. The nearest Ive come to that type of experience is in the final year dissertation but even that is within you have to choose within a subject area and then within that you can almost by negotiation choose your wn title for the essay or piece of work.I think Ive found it quite liberating to be released from the confines of writing an essay an essay is rather like, well I suppose that is the whole discipline of it narrowing your words and your thoughts round to one and a half thousand words, certain format, very strict yeah, thats difficult, it is an art in itself but Id much rather be doing something open-ended given the freedom and the flexibility to determine the limits myself.Yeah, Ive seen people walking round with cameras, with questionnair e sheets. It seems as though Im guessing, I might be wrong, but it seems as though theyre following year after year the same pattern so I imagine that cohorts of students come round every year and ask the same passers-by the same series of questions. In the first year or two of university is certainly following orders, like following a worksheet or following what youve been told to do.In my particular field Id like to be more in contact with other people discussing working on the same areas. I think I like websites and Id like to think, for one example off the top of my head, that I was working to a cumulative sort of website where we were each contributing pieces of work in the areas that were interested in which would build up as a resource over several years so that new students could come along and be shown this website look at this as a resource and contribute and discuss with the people currently working on the website.Thats just one idea. Other things that make studying inte resting would be student publications which were not reviews of pubs and bands and so on but on the topic so perhaps if the university had a tradition of contributing to the journals. There is a large, massive range of journals which are great to read and very intellectual and some universities I think have this tradition of contributing and I havent seen anybody at undergraduate level making a contribution you can do.