Tag: ethics

Ethics of human rights

It’s Tuesday, which means a new topic in my online ethics classes. This week we started on human rights. I spent this morning writing the lesson. I’m using a summarised version of Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas as the introductory story to set up the discussion. (You kind of need to know the story to understand the following, so if you don’t know it, either go spoil yourself at the linked Wikipedia article, or ignore the next paragraph.)

After summarising the story, I asked: Is the city of Omelas fair to everyone? Most of the kids this evening gave the predictable, expected answer (“No”), after which I ask them to explain why they think so. But one kid said: “Well, it depends how they pick the kid. If someone just walks down the street and picks a kid they see, then that’s not fair. But if it’s done by spinning a wheel or something, then that’s fair.” I pursued this further by asking if it was fair in the sense that everyone is treated the same? The kid said, “Well… you could make it fair if the kid was released after a month or so, and they used a different kid. So everyone would have a turn being the one who has to suffer.”

The weather here has taken a very wintry turn. Yesterday evening we had a storm front come through with 110 km/h winds, causing some minor damage across the city. Today has been very windy and bone-chillingly cold. Tomorrow is expected to be even colder and with stronger winds. Across parts of south-east Australia we’ve had snow down to altitudes as low as 600 metres, which is unusual. The good news is that there hasn’t been much rain.

In other news, our electric kettle seems to have broken. That’ll be annoying until we can get a new one. We’ll have to boil water to make tea on the stove, like savages…

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It’s good teaching kids

This morning I started a new topic with my face-to-face ethics class at the local school. We’re doing a few weeks on the topic of human rights, although much of the material actually concerns the question of whether animals such as chimpanzees should have at least some of the same rights as humans. We started today talking about past use of chimps in medical and other experiments.

I continue to be impressed by how good this class of kids is. I haven’t had any behaviour problems with them more serious than them fiddling wth pens or rulers or something while listening. Today’s discussion got fairly lively, but not out of control, as the kids were eager to share their views, and built on what others were saying. It was overall a really good session with them.

And tonight I had three more online classes with the language topic, which is really fun too. One of the fun questions is asking them about emojis: Is it okay to use emojis when texting a friend? Would it be okay if an author used emojis in a novel? Almost all of the kids say the first is fine, and even has advantages because you can express emotions that are difficult to show otherwise in text. But on the other hand, almost all of them said that putting emojis in a novel would be terrible and shouldn’t be done. Their reasons were mostly that a novel is meant to be “serious” and emojis aren’t appropriate.

Although interestingly there were one or two kids who were at either extreme as well. One said that emojis shouldn’t be used ever—not even in text messages—because there’s potential for misunderstanding. And a couple said that emojis in novels would be fine, but they did balk when I pressed further and asked if emojis should appear in newspapers, or government reports, or scientific research papers.

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Thinking critically about language

Today I wrote my lesson for this week’s ethics classes. It’s more of a critical thinking class, rather than ethics, about language. A sample:

In our world there are many different languages, around 6000-7000, depending on how you count them. Some languages like Spanish and Italian are closely related, and speakers of one are able to understand a bit of the other language. Some like English and Japanese are totally different, and can’t be understood at all by a speaker of the other unless a person learns them.

• What sort of problems are caused by different languages?
• What advantages are there to having many different languages?
• Is it good that there are many languages, or would the world be better if there was just one language?

…

Words change meaning over time. Not too long ago, the word “literally” meant something that actually happened. But now it’s common to hear people say things like, “I literally died laughing”. They don’t mean they really died – in fact they mean the opposite, that they didn’t really die. Some people get upset that people are using the word to mean a completely different thing.

• Is it okay that people start to use words to mean new things that they didn’t mean before?
• Is there a “right” way and a “wrong” way to use language, or does it not matter as long as people can understand you?

I ran the first three classes tonight and it’s a really fun topic, with a lot of really interesting and varied comments from the kids.

At lunch today I took Scully out for a walk. We stopped at a Vietnamese place where I got a pancake stuffed with bean spouts, pork, and prawns, served with mounds of fresh salad. It was really good, and possibly even healthy.

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More busy, but stuff achieved

I think this is just generally a busy week. I’m squeezing in some of my usual activities, and today managed to bake bread, go for a 2.5k run, make some comics, cook vegetable soup for dinner, do some planning for my upcoming trip to Europe, walk Scully a bit, run three online ethics classes, and do my face-to-face Primary Ethics class at the local school.

The face-to-face class this morning was the final one in the topic on Challenging Authority, and it concentrated on the story of Rosa Parks, which some of the children were familiar with. (I should point out that American history is not really taught in Australian schools – they get Australian history instead, naturally. So I didn’t really expect any of the kids to have heard of Rosa Parks.) It was a very interesting discussion, and most of the kids were clearly very engaged with the topic. I continue to be impressed (and amazed) at how well behaved my class is this year. In my 6 years of teaching this, I’d say this is probably the best behaved class I’ve ever had.

The apple pie I made the other is mostly eaten, and is very nice both cold, and also reheated.

Oh, if you weren’t aware, there’s a federal election coming up here in Australia on Saturday. We’re being bombarded with campaign advertising and it’s starting to get annoying, but it’ll all be over soon.

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Super incredibly busy day

So busy I don’t really have time to post much. I spent a lot of time looking for hotels and train trips and making bookings, for our trip to Europe at the end of June. That meant a squeeze on my time for everything else I wanted to get done today, which also included writing my new ethics class for this week, and teaching the first three classes. We’re doing “Buying & Selling part 2” this week – a follow-up to a class I did last year, which had so much material that a second class could be done with all new material. I in fact wrote close to two lesson’s worth of new stuff, so I’ve split some out into a part 3 which I can do later in a few weeks time.

And there was a bunch of necessary housecleaning and dog walking and stuff. And I’m tired and need to relax this evening…

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Thinking about conspiracy theories

The class I run on Outschool is actually “Critical and Ethical Thinking”, so it’s not always about purely ethics. This weeks topic is more of a critical thinking exercise, as we discuss conspiracy theories. I wrote the lesson today, ready for the first few classes this evening. We talk about Flat Earthers, moon landing denial, and anti-vaxxers. That gave me enough material for plenty of questions to ask the kids, exploring things like:

  • How likely is it that all of the scientists who study the Earth accidentally got the shape wrong?
  • Does it make any sense at all that scientists and governments would deliberately lie to everyone about the shape of the Earth?
  • What do you think would make some people believe NASA didn’t really land on the moon?
  • If someone believes the Earth is flat, does that cause any harm?
  • Should we try to show conspiracy theorists they are wrong, or is it a waste of time?

Apart from writing the lesson and running 3 classes, I spent time working on comics, and walking up to the shops with Scully to get some lunch and buy some things.

And now I’m going to get an earlier night after staying up last night for that meeting that never happened.

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Ethics off the rails!

I did an online ethics class today that went completely off the rails. There was a new kid, from England, who was super talkative and kept bringing up extra points to every answer – often stuff that I’d planned to ask everyone later in the lesson. Rather than talk about farming, we ended up in a huge digression about whether we should force everyone to become vegetarians or not. Given the others were also keen to butt in on the topic and offer their own opinions, I just let it meander of its own accord for most of the lesson. It felt totally out of control and my lesson script went out the window, but it was fun, and we were still talking about interesting and ethical questions, so it was good in the end.

My sore back stiffened up again overnight, and it was painful turning over during the night. But again, it’s improved a lot during today. I got a better sleep, but hopefully tonight it won’t be as painful during the night.

I didn’t have my face-to-face ethics class at the school today, because New South Wales teachers held a strike today, seeking better pay and working conditions. They fully deserve it.

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And going to the physio

I had my physiotherapist appointment this morning for my sore back. It stiffened up again overnight, but wasn’t nearly as bad as the night before. I got a much better sleep and managed to get myself out of bed in the morning without too much pain.

The physio worked on my back for about 45 minutes and I felt significantly better after he’d loosened up the muscles and released tensions and whatever it is he actually does. I’ve been to this guy a few times over many years, and found him to be really good. Usually one visit is enough to make the movement freer and less painful, and then it improves rapidly over the next day or two. He also gave me a bunch of exercises to do some years ago, which I now do regularly to maintain my core strength and recover myself from minor strains.

Back home, I wrote my next week’s ethics lesson, on farming this time. I have a series of questions for the kids on the ethics of various types of crop agriculture, then we move on to farming animals, either for meat, or other products such as milk and eggs. In one of the classes there was a wide range of opinions from the kids, including “it’s fine to farm animals, because we need the meat”, “farming animals is cruel and we shouldn’t do it; we should hunt wild animals instead”, and “people should eat less meat so we don’t have to farm so many animals”. I suggested to the second kid we could eat less meat, but he said no, no, keep eating the same amount of meat, just hunt it all rather than farm it. I guess he hadn’t thought through the logistics of having to hunt for the amount of meat that we currently consume.

At lunch I took Scully for a walk up to the local shops and I had some Vietnamese fried rice from a “new” restaurant. I say “new” because I haven’t tried eating there before – it actually opened about 3 years ago, replacing a previous Cuban place that we quite liked.

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Ethics of gambling

I began the ethics of gambling lessons today. It was interesting. One class had pretty much all of the four students agreed on the premise that gambling is inherently bad, while another class mostly agreed that gambling is just a thing that people do, and it’s only a problem if people do it too much or take advantage of people by gambling unfairly.

One student told an amusing anecdote about his father, who used to work in a casino. I shouldn’t say more for privacy reasons, but it had the other students giggling.

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Anzac long weekend Monday

Today was the Anzac Day public holiday, although it didn’t make much difference to my day, as I had ethics classes online as usual. We finished up the topic on contact with extraterrestrial life. I started writing the lesson for tomorrow’s new topic, which is gambling. I mentioned during a class this morning that next week’s topic is gambling, and we’ll be talking about betting on sports—

At which point a student interrupted and said, “That’s not gambling! Gambling is like blackjack and stuff!”

So… maybe it’ll be an interesting topic for some of the kids. I guess they don’t have a lot of experience with actual gambling at their age.

There was a bit of housecleaning work and cooking and baking bread today, and some work on the secret project, and walking Scully, and that was about it.

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