thinking-chunk 6

"Our capacity to think,except in the service of what we are dangerously deluded in supposing is our self-interes, and in conformity with common sense, is pitifully limited."
-R.D. Laing
R.D. Laing is trying to prove that you may know what you are thinking or what you are interested in, but none of that really benefits you. And what we as people have been taught to think is common sense, is "pitiful" and limited.
So basically, what we may view as being intelligent and smart, may actually just be barely what should be the norm.
"I don't know, that's just how I was taught" was an answer uttered by many during this unit.
We began the unit by doing math problems, showing how we solved them, then discussing what makes us think to solve it this way. These are the elementary things we have been taught along the way. We do not truly know what these things are or how they truly work, we are simply repeating the steps we are told to memorize. Our teacher claims that that is what is truly pitiful. That the act of just going to our Math classes simply because we are told to, is pitiful. But I wonder, what am I supposed to do instead? I cannot leave the class, or else I fail and get in trouble with teachers and principles. Were I given the choice of going to math class or not, I would not go to math class. I don't think that learning the functions of lines is necesarry to my essential being, so why be excited for that class? Why go into that class to do anything other then memorize the equations?
R.D. Laings entire argument is that we don't think about things that are really beneficial to our daily lives. I agree because I couldnt care less about functions because I never think about such things unless I am being forced to go to math class. So what is pitiful: Going to your math class, to truly understand how a function works and how these math problems really go, even though you won't ever think about it in your daily life, or going to your math class because you are not given any other option,and you simply memorize the problems because you see no point in spending time understanding the problem completely because you know you will never think about it again? Which is more worth while?
To better examine our thinking, in class we would workwith riddles and try t