Critical Conversations – January 13

For the first blog post, I chose the prompt from the textbook. It says to pick one of the 5 guidelines and I chose #2. The second guideline is “Recognize the difference between opinions and informed knowledge”. For me personally, I find that it can be quite hard, I trust a lot of opinions. Even though informed knowledge is different than an opinion, people can still mistake it as an opinion. If I hear an opinion from someone, I find it very believable to an extent. Obviously, if I know a lot about a certain topic, I know when things are opinions or informed knowledge, but if I don’t personally know too much about a topic, unless they say it is an opinion, I don’t always know. I need to start asking people if it is just an opinion or informed knowledge. I think it will be challenging for me because I personally don’t do a lot of research on certain topics that some people like to talk about, or I don’t stay caught up in the news or politics. I will challenge myself to do more research on things I’m not so knowledgeable in. I will meet it by becoming more knowledgeable in politics, news, sports, etc. I think I will gain knowledge of knowing the difference between an opinion and informed knowledge. I will gain being able to hold a conversation with someone without being clueless about what they are talking about. Talking about all this teacher wise, I will need to know when a student is stating their opinion or they have informed knowledge. Even talking to other teachers, it is something I need to get better at for conversations.