Matt Cordery

My Personal Renaissance
Business 1050

My personal renaissance has been cyclical. I took a three year break from the
time I graduated high school, and beginning college here at Salt Lake Community
College. After one semester, I decided to go on a mission for the church that I attend.
What that meant for me was that my second semester of college was five years after I
graduated from high school. Before this class, I did not understand the term,
"renaissance". Explained simply, it is an occurrence, when a civilization has risen out of
a time where it did not progress, or learn. In that rise, it comes to a state where critical
thinking is projecting the civilization to progress by not being idle.

This course has been an addition tier to my personal renaissance because I have
been in my own personal dark age concerning education. It has seemed that challenges
waited until this semester to surface. The world has to operate, and it keeps going,
regardless of being a student or not. For me, I needed to make a choice to stay in
school, or take another break to address the life circumstances that surfaced. The first
week of class was the most difficult. I did not want another gap in my college career.
The first reading that we were assigned in this class, is what helped me recover from
that dark mindset of possibly taking a break.

The reading is called "Critical Thinking", by Edward G. Engh. After reading it, I
felt that there was no way I could take another break. I was enrolled in the same course
but with another professor. After doing some research, I found out that Edward G. Engh,
was a professor at Salt Lake Community College, and he taught the same course. I
quickly emailed him, and transferred over to his class. Let me explain why this reading
allowed me to quickly make a decision to not let a dark age mentality handicap my
education.

This whole course, is about critical thinking. Learning what critical thinking was,
allowed me to recognize times when I have done it, or should have. Many "ah-ha"
moments surfaced from this text. The first one was the definition by Professor Engh:
"Critical thinking is error detection." Having a mentality to judge or decide whether
something is true, or valuable to an individual is a powerful mindset. Especially in the
business world. The reading mentions: "It allows humans to see danger as well as
opportunity." Throughout my life I have always tried to think outside of what I was being
told, to see if I wanted to believe them or not. I would not say that critical thinking is
second guessing, but more of second processing, that sometimes may go onto a third
and fourth process of thought. When thinking like this, the human mind can come up
with different end results, rather than the one that the mind thought of first. If everything
in life happened on the first thought reaction, there would be no lottery, or casinos.

Since life is hardly predictable at times, critical thinking is necessary to protect

oneself from habitual error, damage, or idleness. The next part of the reading that
opened my mind was that there are two main types of error. The first being that one
does not accept that something is true, when indeed it is true. An example would be an
employee walking in ten minutes late for work, and is confronted by the boss for being
late. The employee stating to the boss that he came in at the right time, and was not
late. This is an error because the worker obviously was late, but does not accept it as
truth. The second type of error would be accepting something false as truth. In a new
situation, would be a person believing that they have a pencil in their pocket, when in
reality they do not. But at some point they had put a pencil in their pocket, and it fell out
or the did not remember removing it. Simply, the pencil is not in their pocket anymore,
so their belief is false.

When I learned about the two types of error, I wanted to determine which ones I
was making. Later on in the reading it talked about Self-Correcting. It felt like I was
self-correcting with my own mind by recognizing the errors I had made, and what type
they were and how I could fix that. Self-correcting is more of having a truth until a new
fact proves it to not be a full truth, or proves another situation more true, so that
becomes the new rule. Changing and not sticking to the norm is necessary in this
situation. All of the change that occurred at the beginning of this semester, I had to
choose to correct my errors of thinking to pause school.

There is a part in the reading that mentions that a developing society needs a
youthful brain. This is what made me realize that if I quit school, I could become rote,
and not develop personally, nor contribute to the development to the society around me.
The longer that one lives, the more biased opinions are developed. A younger brain that
is learning has more opportunity to learn and question. Rather than a that is just the
way it has always been my whole life, attitude. More of, well, I could see how it could
be this, or that. Ideas need to be tested and fresh minds bring new ideas to the pool of
what decisions are to be made and what effect that will bring about. A lot of the time, the
new ideas will contain nonsense, and need to be tested up against real life, in which
nonsense is filtered out by testing or trying. An older mind might not try, assuming the
result will not be positive. I needed to keep my young brain stimulated by new courses,
new knowledge.
 Finally, what made me stay in school was a self realization of not blaming others
for my desire to stop attending school. A topic on the reading brought up that one must
study their own errors, rather than the errors of others. Was life outside of school the
real reason I wanted to put it off? Was I dismissing my own lack of wanting to work and
study? Yes absolutely. One I realized that I desired education more than my lack of
desire to study. My mentality changed. Yes life happens, but it seems like when people
do not critically think, life just happens to you. Living happily seems to be more of a
striving to progress. That is error detection. That is opening new opportunity. That is
what makes me continue on in my business degree.