Critical thinking is a crucial asset for students to tackle any obstacles, especially in university. On the 14th of October, the Kuen Cheng High School Counselling Department invited Mr. Kong Hoi Yoon, Lecturer of University Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), to share with Senior Middle 3 students his knowledge on the topic.
Have you encountered a top scholar who had not put much effort into studying? How did they achieve such commendable results? They have most likely applied critical thinking in their studies, says Mr. Kong. A person with critical thinking skills understands the links between ideas. Take the following example:
The illustration above shows a trigonometry graph expressed as dance moves. Not only can students memorise the graph formation, they can also have fun in the process.
Next, let us take a look at the illustration below based on the poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant”. Six blind men give distinct answers after feeling a different part of the elephant. It shows that humans tend to take their partial experiences as a whole truth, and their perspectives as the only reality. Their perceptions are very limited. On the contrary, people with critical thinking will look from different angles and maintain an open mind when solving a matter.
What is 17+17? Usually, people would answer 34. But if you look from a different perspective, it looks like the Chinese character 鱼 (17 as the ク, + and 17 forms the 田 , = as the bottom line for the bottom part,). See? Even boring mathematics can be interesting and fun if you look at it from a linguistic perspective.
Look at the image above. Who is afraid of whom? If you read it normally from left to right [太太怕我 (My wife is afraid of me) ], the answer would be the wife. However, if you read it in the right-to-left traditional Chinese method [我怕太太 (I am afraid of my wife) ], the answer would be the persona. There is also a third answer, which is “they are afraid of each other”. Different people have distinct opinions on the same matter, but the third answer combines the two opinions to create a mutual and agreeable answer.
Then, there was a brief introduction to UTAR. More information can be found on their website at https://www.utar.edu.my/. Once again, we appreciate Mr. Kong for the meaningful and engaging session. We should keep the essence of his talk in our everyday doings: “When facing a problem, we should apply critical thinking by looking from several perspectives to reach an objective and unbiased conclusion.”
