Back to Ethics

It’s Wednesday, which means Ethics teaching day. I walked to the school – which is a bit of a hike, and very hilly. The kids told me that last week they didn’t have a substitute Ethics teacher, so I did the final lesson of the Homelessness topic with them.

One of the scenarios today was about and 8-year-old girl named Jenny, whose mother and father lose their jobs, and can’t afford their rent any more, so they move to a caravan park, and then after a while the bills pile up and they can’t even afford that, so the family ends up sleeping in their car. The question: Did Jenny’s family choose to become homeless? Or did they have no choice in the matter?

The first kid to answer said it was the parents’ fault, because they must have done something wrong at work to get fired and lose their jobs. As someone who lost my job earlier this year, because the company was closed down, I had to bite my tongue. Fortunately some other kids mentioned that people can be made redundant and companies can shut down, so no, it probably wasn’t their fault. I think some of the kids have had their assumptions challenged during this topic!

I walked home via a longer route, passing by the post office depot where I had a package waiting to be picked up. It’s weird – when I have to pick up a package sometimes it’s an one of the nearby post offices, sometimes it’s at the other post office, and sometimes it’s at the further away postal depot. There seems to be no rhyme nor reason to which place I have to pick it up from. Oh, the item was a Kickstarted roleplaying book that I backed almost a full year ago – so it was good to receive that! And my total walk was close to 9 kilometres.

I got home close to lunch time, and spent the afternoon mostly cleaning the house. Oh, and this evening I played the first game with my wife of Walking in Burano that I picked up at Spiel in Essen. It’s very strategic for a small game. My wife beat me 61 points to 53. But it was only a learning game, so the result doesn’t count! 😉

New content today:

6 thoughts on “Back to Ethics”

  1. The ethics course seems to be a good one. At least the kids seem to think about things.

    What roleplaying book did you get?

      1. It seems like a nice book. I have the Dungeon Crawl Classics basic game, but haven’t had time to play it, so haven’t looked at the other books and adventures.

  2. here there is still public housing for people that meet the criteria – it’s hard to get and the quality of the apartments is appaling, but most people are not on the street.
    we do get vagrants – but they’re usually illegal immigrants or other people without proper documentation. It’s a shame – what the governemt policy is doing to those people. instead of letting them get jobs and support themselves, they are supposed to report to a control office twice a day – how are they supposed to get money to pay rent…
    you should teach them about a class of choices that aren’t really a choice – “give me liberty or give me death” is not really an option for most people – Kanya West should have learned that when he said “slavery was a choice” – yes – stay a slave or die trying to escape…
    Those immigrants have a choice – stay at home and starve – or get drafted to the army or get shot – they chose to try to get elsewhere – but since there’s a whole line of broken countries on the way – they can’t go north the proper way.
    really sad, and a lot of people prefer not to know.
    You might want to raise the question about who is to blame when 1 country ruins another, and all the people run from the broken country to the 1st one… that one might be a touchy subject…

    1. I’m not free to introduce my own material to the Ethics course. All of the teaching material is supplied, and approved by the Department of Education. An Ethics teacher in this program was dismissed a couple of months ago for breaching these rules.

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