My morning was taken up with my Primary Ethics class first thing, followed by a morning tea with the Ethics coordinator and other Ethics teachers at the school. The coordinator tries to have one of these every school term, so we can catch up and have a chat and swap war stories about our classes. We have a new volunteer teacher starting next week, and he was there, so we were all giving him lots of advice on how to handle the kids.
My class this morning was a lot better behaved than they have been. I’ve let it be known to the kids that I will send them to the front office – after a couple of warnings – for misbehaviour. This has tempered a lot of the most disruptive behaviour, and they’ve started settling down a lot faster after spontaneous discussion breaks out (as it often does). Last week was better than the week before, and today was better still, and we got a lot of good discussion in.
This afternoon I mostly worked on writing a new batch of Irregular Webcomic!, as I’ll need to photograph a batch early next week to keep the buffer full.
The weather is still cold and rainy here. Fortunately the forecast for Sunday is okay, as we have a special lunch planned… but more about that later.
New content today:
That’s it? I was looking forward to finding out whether — in the opinion of grade schoolers — we’re responsible for our actions or not.
Ah, sorry… Yes, the class mostly agreed that even though our actions all have causes, that we have to be responsible for them. They argued that you can’t leave murderers and thieves just run around free because they’ll do it again, and providing a punishment is actually giving people another cause to consider – and so make people less likely to do bad things.
Guess I’m not off the hook then. Thanks!