Now we come to a particularly important point in education (at least for me). I have math anxiety. It has caused me great difficulties in learning math beyond the basic steps and I have a very negative attitude towards math and math teachers in general (no offense, but it seems like I had a lot of bad math teachers). I decided that I would add a section on this page devoted to math and math anxiety in the hopes that math teachers would be able to better help those who suffer from math anxiety, and those sufferers can also find some help with their problem. So I dedicate this part of the page to math teachers and math anxiety sufferers wherever you are! ;-)
I hear the words critical thinking being tossed around a lot in the educational community and I just have one question: What is critical thinking? I'm not exactly sure, it seems to depend on who you ask and why. I have pondered this question for some time and discovered that I was critically thinking about critical thinking! (Kind of gets you all warm, fuzzy and metaphysical, doesn't it? see my philosophy page ). Anyway, I have come to the conclusion that critical thinking is a number of things all having something to do with logically approaching a problem and then discovering the various solutions available for that problem. This is because many problems in our world have multiple solutions that can be considered "right" and many that can be considered "wrong," and critical thinking attempts to address solutions to these kinds of problems. Of course I don't know that I'm any more right about this than you, so I'll just have to let you explore some links and find out for yourself! ;-)