Sometimes, when we look into a mirror, we’re making sure everything is presentable, just right.
That seems like a bit of a trap to me – for one thing, you could only know ‘just right’ if you had some standard for measure, which seems like a recipe for perfectionism. You might also simply fall into seeing what you want to see. But what may be worst of all is the risk we take for granting our own self-assurance to the judgment of others.
On another day, that may have just described school, but setting that aside, I think it’s still fair to say that a mirror, like any household item, has its pros and cons.
Another way to characterise that look into the mirror is a search for flaws. In a similar way, this also seems to me like a risk since now we’re adopting a frame-of-mind for spotting what is wrong and applying that to our own self-esteem. It’s like practising how to be critical, with you as the practice dummy.
If you combine these two looks – the one, for self-assurance, and the other, a search for flaws – it almost seems no surprise those times we encounter hypocrisy… then again, isn’t there just something about people, that we seem to excel at paradox? I’m sure the psychologists have plenty more to say on this although I’m also sure those are details no one would credibly seek in a blog post. So setting that aside as well, I think it’s still fair to say the search for flaws seems pretty easy to adopt precisely because nobody’s perfect. Everyone’s a critic.
All that seems pretty ‘con’ when it comes to mirrors, so maybe let’s finish with a ‘pro’: we might conceivably look into a mirror for healthy self-appraisal, a more balanced search that weighs itself somewhere in between flaw and assurance, in order to learn and grow. That kind of look inherently grants itself placement among others, which seems honest to me, and humble too.
For me, this featured post from drowningintheshallow looks into the mirror for just this sort of self-appraisal, and by emphasising the ‘thinking’ bit of critical thinking, it credibly raises the level of discourse.
One last thing, although I wonder how many academics and teacher educators seek on-line blogs for credible detail… to this list of words oversimplified by popular usage, such as ‘traditional’ and ‘critical thinking’, I would add ‘self-reflection’.
Like I said, we seem to excel at saying what we want to say.
The Rhetorical WHY 