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Thinking Critically about Critical Thinking - Public Books

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A t Loyola University New Orleans I teach a seminar on David Foster Wallace—a class I designed at the urging of several students. One day late in the semester we were tackling Wallace’s very short story “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Four students in the class immediately and enthusiastically declared that they had read and discussed this story in their Introduction to Creative Writing courses, several years prior. I asked what they had learned about it, and not one of them could produce anything beyond a rather equivocal answer: “I think it was supposed to teach us how to tell a story.” I pushed them to recall the specific lessons the story held for beginning creative writers. I asked what sort of textbook this story had appeared in, and one student described the book, mentioning that it was “the kind of anthology with a list of critical thinking questions after each piece.” My ears perked up. What sort of questions were these? No one could remember any of them, even in the most g

A t Loyola University New Orleans I teach a seminar on David Foster Wallace—a class I designed at the urging of several students. One day late in the semester we were tackling Wallace’s very short story “Incarnations of Burned Children.” Four students in the class immediately and enthusiastically declared that they had read and discussed this story in their Introduction to Creative Writing courses, several years prior. I asked what they had learned about it, and not one of them could produce anything beyond a rather equivocal answer: “I think it was supposed to teach us how to tell a story.” I

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