Savvy Women

Troy Headrick
The American University in Cairo
Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
contact@savvy-women-magazine.com

I want to begin this blog by asking women with school-aged children a direct question:  Do you think your kids are receiving a good education?

I want to follow that up by asking educators:  Are your students getting the sort of schooling they need to succeed in work and life?

Linda Elder, president of a nonprofit organization called Foundation for Critical Thinking and author of “Are You a Critical Thinker?” (which appeared in a recent issue of The Christian Science Monitor), believes that the teaching of critical thinking skills is vitally important today because we live in a world that is plagued by many problems that require fresh problem-solving approaches. On the current state of the teaching of critical thinking, Elder writes:

Everyone thinks; but we don’t always think well. In fact, much of our thinking, left to itself, is sloppy, distorted, partial, uninformed, or prejudiced. Yet the quality of our life and all of the decisions we make depend precisely on the quality of our thought. At present, the act of thinking is virtually ignored (emphasis added).

Elder then defines “critical thinking” as

…self-guided, self-disciplined thinking that aims to take the reasoning we all do naturally to a higher level. It is the art of analyzing and evaluating with the goal of improving thought. When making a decision, it is the difference between weighing information to come to a logical conclusion and making snap judgments without understanding the information.

As someone who’s been in the teaching business for a heck of a long time, I can say I agree that we need to teach critical thinking, but I don’t think the “establishment” will ever get fully behind the idea of teaching it until it is ready to accept the large societal changes that will come when more of us think this way.

What, exactly, do I mean by this?  Well, let me begin by saying that Elder’s definition of “critical thinking” is very vague and superficial.

Critical thinking is actually this:  It is the questioning of all firmly held beliefs.  (In fact, critical thinking means accepting nothing at face value.)  Critical thinking is the development of rigorous methods of inquiry that begin with the following argument:  “All things are to be rejected (or viewed skeptically) until proven true.”

In practice, critical thinking
•    Is antiauthority (and thus “threatening”)
•    Is fundamentally “radical”
•    Scares the political establishment (and all sorts of “establishments”)
•    Promotes analysis over immediate compliance

Critical thinkers, in other words, are not mindless automatons who accept all rules without question.

I want to conclude by calling for ideas about how our educational system can be improved.  Is critical thinking the answer?  Or would you fix the system some other way?  (Maybe you would like to take issue with me saying the system is broken and needs fixing?)

Please post your suggestions or send them to me via email (contact@savvy-women-magazine.com).

Take care and happy thinking!

Troy Headrick
The American University in Cairo
Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
contact@savvy-women-magazine.com

I am an American teacher who lives far away from the place I was born and raised. Once a year, whenever the days grow long and hot, my nightly dreams change. I begin dreaming about airplanes. I often dream that I climb aboard one and then go up and up into the clouds. When that behemoth with wings lands and I’m back on terra firma, I’m in a place I recognize and surrounded by faces that belong to people I know and love.

But travel is not only about being reunited with friends and family. Often, while moving through space and time, I have the opportunity to meet new people. The purpose of this blog is to share two photos of a very interesting person I met not long ago on one of my journeys. The pictures were taken by Greg McElwain, a friend and fellow traveler. Even though I spoke nary a word with the woman shown in them (except through a translator) and spent a very short period of time in her presence, she left a lasting impression.

I met this woman while traveling, though not by plane. I met her during a brief stop on a bus trip I took a few weeks ago with a number of AUC colleagues. Our destination was a resort on the Red Sea in an Egyptian town called Ras Sidr (sometimes spelled “Ras Sudr”) on the Sinai Peninsula. To get there, we had to drive through a tunnel that passes under the Suez Canal. Once we’d popped up on the other side of that man-made waterway, we stopped at Oyoun Moussa, an apparently uninhabited and inhospitable site in the vast desert.

All of a sudden, while we were milling about outside the bus at Oyoun Moussa, this wonderful Bedouin woman appeared of out nowhere. She was selling handmade bracelets and wondered if we’d like to become buyers. She was standing right next to me, and I looked down into a face that was wizened but beautiful. I asked Sherine Zaki, an Egyptian friend standing nearby, to translate. She spoke to the woman whose answers to my questions came in a soft, susurrant Arabic.

A number of us bought her pretty jewelry, and then I asked if she’d mind posing for a photo or two. She seemed very pleased that I found her so interesting.

Several minutes later, while we were rolling down the highway again, I couldn’t help thinking that I’d just met a woman who was physically tiny but also larger than life, someone straight out of a fairytale, perhaps the Mother Goddess of the Sahara.

A number of questions came to mind as we made our way along. How had she survived all those years in the desert? What had her life been like?

I imagined that she must have had some incredible stories to tell! It’s unfortunate that I’ll never get a chance to hear them.

Troy Headrick
The American University in Cairo
Maadi, Cairo, Egypt
contact@savvy-women-magazine.com

The computer keyboard is a delicate piece of equipment. It has zero tolerance for liquids of any sort being spilled, poured, or even dribbled on it.

I learned that lesson this morning when I drooled on mine while watching this video. As soon as I did so, the monitor sort of flickered and then an ominous warning box popped up that said “IMMINENT SYSTEM FAILURE AHEAD!” Luckily, this “imminent failure” was not so imminent. In fact, it never took place.

Shortly after I dried the thing off with a paper towel, I felt a wave of nostalgia wash over me. That’s because I’m a little more than a month away from flying home to Texas, that Lone Star State and the Mexican food capital of America.

I have this friend named Georgina from Albuquerque who also teaches as AUC. Not long ago, while eating lunch together, I said to her, “Hands down, Texas has the best Mexican food.”

Mid-bite, she replied, “No way! New Mexico does it better!”

“Come on,” I retorted, “when was the last time you heard the term New Mex-Mex? Never, right? That’s because it doesn’t exist. The Mexican food in Texas is so good they had to invent a new term to describe it, and thus ‘Tex-Mex’ was born.”

Georgina had no comeback to that.

I’m such a Mexican food nut that sometimes, when I’m back on one of my yearly visits, I plan my whole day around the trip I have planned to one of the Tex-Mex restaurants in Big Spring, the town where my mother lives. For my money, La Posada, over in “North Town,” is Big Spring’s finest. In Georgetown, the place my father and stepmother call home, there’s this eatery called Dos Salsas that is absolutely to die for. In either one of those places, I’m very likely to order the most deluxe plate on the menu, something that comes with a taco and perhaps two cheese enchiladas and a tamale. Of course, it goes without saying there’ll be big piles of refried beans and Mexican rice on the plate as well.

At this point in the blog I’d like to make a recommendation: If you’re ever down in Texas, you just have to sample a bit of authentic Tex-Mex. It doesn’t matter where you choose to do so. Even the smallest of towns, places so doggone tiny they don’t even have a single stoplight, have at least one such eatery. And as soon as you step through the front door of such a restaurant, just look for paintings of bullfighters on black velvet and absurdly large sombreros hanging on the walls. If you see gaudy décor like that, you can bet the farm that the food is going to be muy bueno.

Now, getting back to the video and Yolanda Navarro’s Houston taqueria, Villa Arcos Tacos. Not only is Yolanda a very savvy businesswoman, she comes across as something of a philosopher as well. She names “quality, consistency, and personal attention” as being key to the success of her place.

I’d say those things will help you succeed in just about anything, including making the meanest tacos around.