Critical Thinking and Language Metaphorical

Critical Thinking and Language

Metaphorical Observations in the Hospital:

Working in a hospital is often extremely rewarding but just as often, it can be frustrating and depressing, depending on specific occurrences and interactions with patients, coworkers, and hospital administrators. Appreciative patients who progress toward recovery and cooperative coworkers make for a rewarding shift; unappreciative patients, worsening symptoms, and uncooperative coworkers can make the day feel endless as though the nursing station clock is standing still. In some ways, whether one has a day full of positive experiences or negative experiences is completely out of one's hands, much like the weather dictates a good or bad hair day.

Some of the specific tasks of Nursing Assistants can be unpleasant because they involve cleaning patients who have soiled themselves and their beds, necessitating full- body cleaning by hand, much the same way one must care for an infant. Many of those patients suffer from various forms of dementia, making it difficult for them to communicate or cooperate with the most basic elements of their care, such as simply swallowing pills. Often they exhibit what is called "Sundown" syndrome, because their cognitive abilities decline as darkness falls, as though their comprehension level is somehow linked to the sunset, fading out at night and rising with the sun in the morning. Physicians also contribute to the Nursing Assistant's working environment. They can be so busy with matters of life and death, that they sometimes seem like they have side-blinders on when we try to get their attention to remind them about comparatively less important matters such as ordering pain medications for less critical patients. Naturally, patients take their frustrations out on Nurses and Nursing Assistants.

The Importance of Language Diversity and Critical Thinking:

Language and language diversity play critical roles in the critical thinking process because language is the primary way that human beings communicate their thoughts, ideas, and desires to others. In my vocational occupation of nursing, language issues are frequently capable of empowering clinicians and caretakers to perform essential medical services, or of severely limiting our ability to do so where language barriers prevent patients and medical providers from communicating efficiently.

Likewise, critical thinking skills are important in communications related to persuasion because effective argument requires logical comprehension of issues and the ability to understand varied points-of-view (Copi 1998).

Language and Language Diversity in the Critical Thinking Process:

Language skills are crucial to the critical thinking process because in order to think critically about issues involving others one must first understand their positions and attitudes about those issues. Most anthropologists consider human language to be one of the most essential mechanisms behind the evolution of primitive human ancestors into Homo Sapiens (Wenke & Olzewski 2007), as well as behind the development of early human cooperative societies.

By definition, therefore, wherever language differences exist between individuals who wish to communicate, their ability to bridge the language gap will determine whether or not they will be successful. Society is becoming ever-more ethnically diverse; consequently, language barriers arise more often and in more contexts than ever before.

Diverse language skills enable individuals to communicate complex thoughts, because the alternative without multilingual abilities is to reduce most communications to rudimentary gestures and hand signals that are just not effective for communicating complex ideas (Wenke & Olzewski 2007).

Critical Thinking in Persuasion:

In human beings, cognitive development occurs in stages with fundamental differences in the specific intellectual concepts one is capable of understanding at various chronological ages (Gerrig & Zimbardo 2005). For example, the concrete operational stage only develops in late childhood. In fact, some of the most complex reasoning abilities related to anticipating consequences of choices develop fully only after the transition from adolescence to adulthood is complete (Gerrig & Zimbardo 2005).