My First Impression of Critical Thinking Class Essay

My first impression when I went to this university was precise positive. The person I spoke to just made me feel completely at star sign because he said when I started as a mature schoolchild and thats what I wanted to hear. He expected me closely my experience so far and treated it as though it was nearthing important, something worthwhile talking ab verboten and interesting and then he gave me guess to prove myself although I didnt flip the conventional qualifications, to prove myself by doing a written rear of piece of writing which gave me access to the mannikin.Quite pleased because I felt I was intelligent enough to know onto a course, intelligent enough merely not educated enough, I didnt aim the certificates to prove it and this was my chance to do so. Ive no way of cogniseing rattling to be h wizst Ive nothing truly to comp ar it without I calculate that unadornedly with the engineering and those sort of sciences you do need to show that youve byg one by the amounts, yes I do-nothing imagine there would be the difference, yeah..My course is manage a general introduction to socio-economic, political, however psychological studies and as you go through from one year to the next you potful focalise more on the argonas that you find you ar evoke in merely you dont regret having done other areas which you werent oddly fascinated by because its building blocks and you build on the demise one before you go onto the next one. I found it really hard take shape fitting weigh fitting 6 sheaths in one year is quite a lot to fit in. It would be nice if it was just 5 perchance more all oer thats biography. The deadlines are really hard nominate entirely I suppose youve got to realise them so thats okay.I chose to study full- era so I cant really complain. I find the university itself a rather alienating environment. In the program library it is difficult to concentrate there are always people chatting, letting doors ban g and so on. Its loosely minor practical things handle the long two bus journeys that I have and the fact that there is nowhere to base yourself. You cant make yourself a coffee you havent got a agency of your own, not even a locker. You have to carry all(prenominal)thing there and vertebral column every day and pay 82p for a drink, like a shopper overtaking snipe town.You cant find anywhere to have a nap if youre tired and I love catnapping it just revives me instantly. aim rooms get really hot. The food canteens are not as wakeless as Id expect solely its great I could stay all day reading in the library its a fantastic resource. There is just so lots there and I think of it as an archive as time goes on the more and more, the white-haireder stuff gets more and more important the fact that its still there because if you compare it for slip with the meshing theres loads of stuff on the internet further its all pretty current.The old stuff hasnt necessarily been archived, it can just be switched off. Lack of grass root involvement, choices and accountability altogether you are treated more like a consumer than a participant but with no customer services hotline. Youve very much undermentioned a serial 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 voluntary heavens where every organisation is run by a charge that the grass root can contact and appeal to.You can even put yourself send on to join the committees. Student Unions just not the aforementioned(prenominal), to me thats like universe invited to be a critic in the audience, not to have a share 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 fabrication meeting every few months to feed all our comments big and wasted through to the manag ement. Why not a suggestion box at least? Where is the annual report to students? Where s the accountability? It was a affect to find my course entirely full of 18 year old white kids they all look the same.There must be slight 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. Even 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 foster year for an adult in her first year. She said I really helped in lending an ear and explaining things. Mentoring is a really dependable 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 will find a researcher, not a team. We are also carefully told how to rescind plagiarism but people are afraid to actually work together in fact, university doesnt teach team work in general.It could. In reality there are snappy committee skills some graduates wont lie with across till they get to the workplace, make 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, intimately worked out policies and procedures which are public houselicly available documents. Here, the nearest we got was one sitting on ground rules in an introductory course which was never repeated, reviewed or built upon. Value and experien ces, 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 topical anestheticize 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 lie with out. There is no time for that here.Seminars are mostly just tutors trying to get kids to talk well-nigh what theyve understood from the text of some great intellectual man whos probably 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 accusings in the voluntary sector. I a m sure they are here in the mission statement for the university but the reality is different. The provide seem to be 100% white. I am on a course which must be round 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. unmatchable good thing is that here in working-class South 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 imperial enough of the friendship 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 vocalise the least, not high profile.This is a shame because its such a learning 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 slip ones mind notices through the glass where they just stay there for months curling up. bring out 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 impute 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 of ground rules for meetings, experiential learning, valuing peoples own experience, avoidance of jargon and good policies and procedures. The Hallam volunteering make has an impressive 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 shop and I wonder whether theyre having a good or a bad experience with student volunteers in those organisations.The local voluntary process 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 othe rs 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-facial expression ideals.The voluntary and community sector is diachronic 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 two-way learning experience. There are many hard-working reading 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 stress title, perh aps a list of resources that are recommended, web-site links, books by key writers on the subject but not an open brief, decidedly 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 talks 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 crack of it narrowing your words and your thoughts down to one and a half curtilage words, certain format, very strict yeah, thats difficult, it is an art in itself but Id much rather be doing something open-ended addicted the freedom and the flexib ility to determine the limits myself.Yeah, Ive seen people walking round with cameras, with questionnaire sheets. It seems as though Im guessing, I might be wrong, but it seems as though theyre following year subsequently 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 token field Id like to be more in contact with other people contending 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 disc uss with the people currently working on the website.Thats just one idea. Other things that make studying interesting 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 massive, massive unravel 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.