I'm guessing that most of you could easily answer the question "are you good at English" right now. Questionable grammar aside, that's actually a pretty terrible question. It assumes that your skill is easily measured by grades you've gotten in the past and interest you may or may not have had in books you've read before.
What you're going to learn with me this year, whether in 8th or 9th grade, is how to be a critical thinker. This means that I'm going to teach you not only what certain vocabulary terms mean or how to write an argument essay, but also what it means to look at absolutely anything in the world and see it as a text you can question, pull apart, and find meaning in. Songs, paintings, video games, Tik Toks... believe it or not, you can analyze all of them.
Critical thinking basically means that when you look at something, you don't just accept it at face value. You figure out if what you're looking at is accurate, what the creator might have meant when creating it, what your interpretation of it is, what kinds of biases might have influenced it, and so on. Critical thinking means that you have to question the things you experience and consider what kind of impact they have on you and the world around you.
Some of you have been assigned specific summer reading, while others have been asked simply to read something over the summer. When we start up in September, we're going to talk about critical thinking in different ways. For now, I'd like you to think about different ways you can be critical of something you read, watch, listen to, or otherwise experience. What sorts of questions do you ask?
