Ready Made Non-Thinkers

Here I am - sitting at my computer - waiting for my wife to come home after she worked the late shift tonight. When she gets home, we will have dinner. Yep, I am the cook - but not the preparer. Nope, my wife has that distinction. On her lunch break, she came home and got everything prepared so all I had to do was turn on the oven at the right time, and put in the main dish so it could bake for the right amount of time. I even put on the timer to remind myself to check on it after the correct amount of time of elapsed.

This isn't to say I am opposed to cooking. I can get around a kitchen pretty well - especially Chinese food. I just prefer my wife's cooking over mine. She has a gift for it. She knows how to prepare a tasty meal on the tight budget we have. She even does it in a way that helps us to stay on our diet. I need to lose some weight. I have toes, but that is about all I see when I look down. I assume the toes have feet attached to them, which are in turn connected to my ankles because they (my toes) don't get left behind anywhere when I walk.

I am grateful for my wife's ability to cook, and I tell her so often. As I was putting the main dish (a hamburger casserole) into the oven, I was thinking how glad I was to have a ready made dish of food to cook and later on (after I finish this post) enjoy with my wife. How easy my life is - my wife has things ready for me to cook. If she was too tired, we would simply pull something out of the freezer and put it into the oven - again a ready made meal.

Hmmm - we do live in a ready made world nowadays don't we? We have easy bake meals, easy make drinks, easy make entertainment through the Internet, TV, and easy to obtain movies that are even mailed to us thanks to NetFlix and Blockbuster. We even have ready to make ideas sometimes.

Ooops. How did that serious note get in here? Could it be due to the fact that I am a teacher of middle school students who has had a long week? Could it be due to the fact that I feel that in all of this ready made world we live in, we are hindering our own creativeness sometimes?

I think about my students - and see them asking for answers that - with a little bit of research - they could find on their own. I see some of my students failing open book tests and quizzes. I see students in college who beg their teachers for the test questions so they know exactly questions will be on the test? Then I see them struggling to pass the test anyway. In our ready made world - have we made it so easy to do things that we shoot the ability to think things through and figure out solutions to challenges?

I am not against making things simpler. I just wonder if we are making things so simple we are failing to inspire real thinking.

My wife is home - time to go eat the meal she had ready made for me to pop into the oven. That is - after she took the time to think through which ingredients to put into the dish in their appropriate amounts and decide where to put the instructions where I would find them.

Again - Hmmmmm. For us to have things ready made for our ease - someone needed to think it all through. So, do I want to be a thinker or a Non-Thinker? I'll have to think about that. Right now - it is time for dinner.

Keb