THINK

While covering the subject of writing in our literacy class we discussed our selective reading of William Zinsser’s book, Writing to Learn. This is the paragraph that highlighted for me an important observation:

“Back when some of us were concerned about why Johnny can’t write,” Professor McRostie told me, “a psychologists put it to us that Johnny can’t reason, and I’ve been preoccupied with that thought ever since. The first two books I assigned last term were, the Art of Thinking, by Vincent Ruggiero, and Reasoning, by Michael Scriven. This is the generation that has spent fifteen thousand hours watching television, and its attention span is short. I’m challenging my students to find their powers of reasoning.”

I mentioned to my peers that we no longer seem to have time to really think things through… we are all so busy just tasking like the proverbial squirrel. It made me think that it is a societal issue, isn’t? The magazine Darwin (darwinmagazine.com) has an article titled: “The Value of Thinking” with a subtitle: Ideas are not in short supply. But thinking them through is not valued enough. They recommend that managers should encourage their people to:

• Talk about the need to think
• Invite people to think
• Learn from thinking

As teachers we ought to do the same of course, but the whole thing reminded me of the wisdom of the past. If you are a history buff (which I am) and a computer aficionado (which I am) do you remember who else actually had embedded into their corporate culture the motto: “think”? Do you remember the company?

Well it was brought over from a company called National Cash Register (NCR) back in 1914 to a new company called Computer-Tabulating-Recording-Company by Thomas J. Watson. That company was the forerunner of today’s IBM.

Do you think it is an accident that they named their laptop computers: IBM Think Pad?

And now you know the rest of the story….