Tag: ethics

New pizza tray

It was a pretty bog-standard Monday. Three ethics classes, to wrap up the topic of Games with the younger students. One particular question that I asked was very interesting. It needs a bit of introduction to set up, and there were other questions I asked along the way, but I’ll condense it down to the essentials for the pertinent question:

Tegan, Josh, and Adele are playing a board game together. They roll dice and play cards and move pieces on the board, chatting and laughing while they play. At one point in the game, Tegan makes a really good move which forces Josh to lose a bunch of points.

Later, as the game nears the end, an interesting situation develops. All those points that Josh lost put him in last place, and he only has one turn left. He knows he can’t score enough points to win. Tegan is currently in the lead, and she will win the game… unless Josh uses his turn to steal points off her. If Josh does this, Adele will win the game. Or he can just try to score as many points as he can, in which case he’ll still come last and Tegan will win.

While Josh is thinking about what move to make, Adele sees that he can steal Tegan’s points. She says, “Josh, if you take her points and make me win, I’ll give you a chocolate bar!”

If you were Josh, how would you respond to Adele in this situation?

Most of the kids throughout the week said they’d accept the chocolate and steal Tegan’s points, letting Adele win the game. (One of the earlier questions asked if it was okay for Josh to steal Tegan’s points, and most said yes, because it’s within the rules of the game.) A few kids said that accepting the chocolate would be bad, because it’s bribery outside the game – there are no in-game rules for chocolate bars, so it shouldn’t be allowed, and Adele was bad for trying it.

But in all the classes I did this week, one kid said:

I’d turn to Tegan and say, “If you give me two chocolate bars, I won’t steal the points from you.”

Honestly I burst out laughing at that point. I thought it was a brutally honest and clever answer. One of the other kids in the same class said, “Ooh, start a bidding war!” It was a great moment.

The rest of my day was pretty standard. Took Scully for a couple of walks, got fish and chips for lunch, made a sourdough loaf, and also made pizza for dinner tonight. I tried using the brand new pizza baking tray I bought last week, so we have a second one, to enable me cooking multiple pizzas on Friday night when the guys come over for Dungeons & Dragons. Our first pizza tray has holes in the bottom, which allows heat to bake the crust from beneath, making it crisp. But I didn’t find any with holes, so this new one is a solid aluminium pan, and the pizza turned out with the base a lot less crisp. I considered a pizza stone, but they’re expensive and I didn’t want to start messing around with that. I’m wondering now how difficult it would be to drill some holes in the aluminium pan.

New content today:

Planning population growth

I slept in today, after getting up early yesterday after a slightly restless night. I did a 2.5k run as early as I could manage, which was after 9am. It was still cool enough, but sunny and warming up rapidly to another warm day.

I spent most of my time today writing a new ethics lesson plan for the older kids, on the topic of population growth. This required a bit of research, and grabbing some graphs to show to the kids. I learnt that in the year 10,000 BCE, the human population of the world is estimated to be around 4 million people, which is fewer than live in Sydney, which is only about the 100th most populated city on the planet.

I didn’t really do much else today… Cooked an Indian style curry with eggplant and paneer for dinner. Um. Yeah…

New content today:

Back to school day

Today was back to school day for most of the schools in New South Wales. The start of a new school year, kids going to school for the first time, kids moving up to high school for the first time. I did my 2.5k run this morning and passed many kids walking to school – a sight not seen since mid-December.

And it’s the first school year in seven years that I won’t be returning to teach Primary Ethics face-to-face with a classroom of kids. I mentioned my last class last year and why I’ve decided not to go back this year. I was still enjoying it, but wanted to get that weekly time back.

This evening I have three online classes, starting the new topic about Games. I had one student from last year returning after the school holidays. I said I hoped she had a good holiday, and she said, “Yes. I nearly died!”

I was… appropriately shocked and concerned and asked if she was okay. She said she’d been collecting shells on a beach with her family, and picked up a cone shell. I immediately gasped, as these are well-known deadly marine creatures. I asked if it actually stung her, but she said no, she managed to drop it before it got her with its sting. Phew!

In the third class, which was at 9pm, I had a new student who signed up last week. And then a few days ago I got a message asking about the time, which Outschool was informing them was 4am. They said they were in Texas, and I confirmed that the conversion was correct – the class would indeed be at 4am for them. I’m not sure how they managed to sign up for that, as Outschool should display times in local time for all users. The only thing I could think is that it showed “4am” and they misread and thought it was 4pm. Anyway, I offered to transfer the kid to a better time, but the mother replied that they were out that day and said they’d stick with the 4am class. I replied saying I’d be happy to refund the fee they’d paid if the time was inconvenient, and then next week we could work out a better time slot. She came back and said her son was super keen on the Games topic this week, and she was okay with him getting up at 4am for it… So, yeah, he showed up in the class at 4am Texas time! He was actually surprisingly awake and lucid.

In other news, I went to the dentist today. One of the fillings I had in December has been bothering me, giving the occasional sharp twinge when I chew food. I suspected the tooth might be cracked and need a crown. But the dentist said that he thought the filling was flexing. He decided to replace it with a different, former filling material and see how that goes. He used a quick anaesthetic which wore off after just a few minutes and was amazingly good, so that was good in that I didn’t have a numb face for the next several hours. Hopefully he’s right and it won’t hurt any more. Even better, he declined to charge me for the repair!

New content today:

… and very wet

The humidity that was oppressive yesterday has really peaked today, and the clouds burst early this evening. We had 60 mm of rain in just over 2 hours, and it’s still coming down, with more on the way.

My day was filled with ethics class activity – teaching 4 classes, and in between writing a new lesson plan for the week beginning tomorrow (I update topics on Tuesdays). The next topic for the 10-12 age group os “Games”. I wrote a long scenario involving three kids playing a board game, punctuated by questions at appropriate events in the game. Here’s the beginning:

Tegan, Josh, and Adele are playing a board game together. They roll dice and play cards and move pieces on the board, chatting and laughing while they play. Whenever the three of them get together, they like to spend some time playing a game like this. They’re playing a game where the goal is to win. Only one of them can win – the other two have to lose the game.

  • If you’re playing a game like this, is it okay to be competitive – to try your very hardest to beat your opponents and make them lose? Why or why not?
  • Generally, it’s considered to be good to be nice and generous to people. What makes it okay in a game to deliberately try and make your opponents lose?
  • What about the opposite: If you’re playing a competitive game, is it okay to not try to win? Why or why not?

Tonight I made pizza for dinner – well, my wife made the dough and I did the toppings and cooked it. We do this once every week or two, but I mention it tonight because it turned out extra delicious today, with the crust nice and thin and crispy. Or maybe I was just really hungry. 😄

New content today:

Lazy Australia Day

It was hot and my wife had the day off work for the public holiday, but I still had a couple of ethics classes to teach. I did the first advanced lesson on the topic “The Meaning of Life”. I thought this would be good, because last week the two kids in this class bounced ideas off each other and it was a lot of fun, but at the last second the parent of one of them sent me a message saying that the kid had a medical appointment and couldn’t attend. So I had to run the topic with just the one kid, and it was difficult to get him to expand on his answers, so we got through the material quickly and I had to stretch it which is always tricky and less enjoyable. I have this topic again tomorrow and I hope there’ll be more than one kid in the class!

We stayed in mostly and used the air conditioning to keep cool. We took Scully for a mid-length walk in the evening when it had cooled down a bit. It also clouded over and threatened to storm, but so far we haven’t had any rain, but there are severe small storms pushing across Sydney now.

My leech bite seems to have healed nicely.

New content today:

How to rig an election

Yesterday was online board games night with my friends, so I didn’t have time to write a blog entry. I picked up the grocery shopping in the morning, then picked up Scully from my wife’s work at lunch and took her to the Italian bakery. Oh that’s right, it was raining most of the morning.

I had four ethics classes to teach, including one of the older kids, on the topic of “how to Rig an Election”. I promised last post that I’d share some of my teaching examples, so here’s a crash course in how to gerrymander!

Let’s imagine this map is a state with 5 orange voters and 4 purple voters, for a total of 9. Let’s say we want this state to elect 3 representatives to Parliament. The way to get 3 representatives is to split the state into 3 smaller regions, and then each region elects one representative. If we split the state into 3 regions of 3 houses each by horizontal lines, we get more orange votes in two of them, so orange gets 2 representatives and purple gets 1. Is that fair?

gerrymandering example

If we split them up vertically, we get the same result. Two regions with 2 orange votes, so 2 orange representatives and 1 purple. But now let’s imagine you are a purple party politician, and you are given the job of drawing up the voting districts. Can you draw them differently, to give the purple party more than 1 representative?

Here’s one possible solution.

In this map we have 13 orange voters and 12 purple voters, for a total of 25. We want to split it up into 5 districts, with 5 voters each. Because orange has slightly more voters, a fair outcome might have 3 orange districts and 2 purple. Can we divide the districts so that purple wins 3 (or more!) districts?

gerrymandering example

Here’s one possible solution.

So by being careful about the way we draw the districts, we can change the outcome of the election, even though the voters don’t change their votes. This practice is called gerrymandering. Here’s a slightly different map of 25 voters. If we want to gerrymander this map to have 4 purple districts, we need to do the same thing, have a district with 5 orange voters in it. Can we manage to do that?

gerrymandering example

Here’s one possible solution.

The basic idea of gerrymandering is to create districts that contain as close as possible to 100% of the voters you want to lose, while other districts contain just over 50% of the voters you want to win. You spread out the voters you want to win into lots of districts, so they can win lots of districts, while concentrating the voters you want to lose into a small number of districts, so they only win a few of them. An obvious feature of gerrymandered districts is often the strange shapes.

In this map we have 20 orange voters and 16 purple voters, for a total of 36. We want to split it up into 6 districts. A fair outcome might have 4 orange districts and 2 purple, or 3 of each. Can we gerrymander this map so that purple wins 5 districts and orange only 1?

gerrymandering example

Notice I didn’t say the districts all have to be the same size! Here’s one possible solution. We can do this if we change the numbers a bit, and make some districts bigger than others. This is another trick that someone can use to control the outcome of an election.

Now let’s have a look at a few real electoral districts. (I show the kids a nice, almost rectangular district, which is not gerrymandered. Then I show them this:) This one is the 4th District of Illinois. Does this look reasonable?

gerrymandering example

Now let’s have a look at the voting district overlaid on a map of Chicago showing areas classified by the racial background of the majority of voters.

gerrymandering example

You can see that this district has deliberately been chosen to include almost only yellow areas, which corresponds to Hispanic people. See how carefully it’s been drawn to exclude the green areas! This district has been gerrymandered so that the Hispanic people of Chicago will only be able to elect one representative, rather than getting two or three if they had been spread out between multiple districts.

I go on to ask the kids their thoughts about all of this, and their opinions on who should draw up the maps of electoral districts, and why. The class also includes a discussion of different types of voter suppression. I’ve done this class with two different groups of kids now, and it’s been a real hit each time. I could see their eyes light up as they figured out how to gerrymander, and they were all very vocal about the unfairness of it!

Today I spent much of the morning housecleaning. We had a new mattress delivered today, so I had to strip the bed and get the old mattress ready to be carted away. We bought it just before Christmas, but they did quote us 2-4 weeks for delivery, so we expected it around now. We paid a tiny bit extra to ave them remove the old mattress for recycling too – much easier than us disposing of it ourselves.

After they delivered the mattress, and I waved the delivery guys off with a cheery “thank you” and wishing them a good afternoon, I was struck by a thought: If this was the USA, would I have been expected to have given them a tip? I’m again very thankful that I don’t live in a tipping culture.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

First lesson on free will

This morning I did my first ethics class for the older students on this week’s topic of Free Will and Determinism. I had the one student from last week, plus another kid who graduated up from the younger class. They’re both very articulate and we had a really good discussion of the topic. I think they appreciated the difficulties of the questions and the nuances between simply declaring “of course we have free will” versus the idea that our decisions are determined by our circumstances.

I spent time today working on the next topic, which is How to Rig an Election. I’m going through ideas like gerrymandering, voter suppression, and other stuff.

On a lunch walk with Scully we went by the harbour, and I saw a couple of little black cormorants fishing for food. I could see the small school of tiny fish that they were herding into a ball and picking off as they dived repeatedly. It was very cool. I took a short video with my phone:

The sound you can hear in the video is cicadas, in the nearby trees. And there’s a silver gull swimming on the surface near the cormorants, presumably looking for some sort of hanger-on free feed.

And I did a bit of baking today. A loaf of sourdough (a mild mix of rye and wholemeal), and I made pastry to use for quiche for dinner.

New content today:

Electric power to houses

A thing I forgot to mention yesterday: At the start of one of my online ethics classes, I was expecting two prior students, plus one new enrolment, who I’ll call Barb (not her real name). One of the prior students arrived, and then a minute or so later Barb connected to Zoom. I could only see the thumbnail video until she spoke, and it looked very dark. I waved and said “Hello Barb, welcome to the class”.

The video went from thumbnail to the main window and I could see an adult woman in a dark room. She looked sleepily at the camera and said, “What’s happening? I got a message on my phone saying there was a Zoom on now…”

I said, “You’re Barb’s mother?”

And she said, “There must be some mistake. It’s 1 am here. She’s asleep.”

I said, “Oh… there must have been some time zone mix-up!” I told her to check, in the morning, the time on the class and I’d contact her through Outschool to help work it out. I deduce from the time she said it was that she must have been in the US Eastern time zone. Outschool is supposed to show users all times in their own time zone, so I can only guess that she must have had her time zone set incorrectly in her user profile. So that was pretty strange. I just hope she got back to sleep okay!

Today I finished off the week of classes on the current topics, with four of the age 10-12 classes. In between I started work on writing a new class for this group, for the week after the next one. I’m trying to stay a full week ahead in my prep (as I think I mentioned before). I had a one hour break from 12 to 1, and took Scully for a walk to the fish & chip chop, intending to get some fish & chips for lunch to eat on the way back. But the shop was closed for summer holidays! Some businesses do this here, close for a few weeks in December/January so the staff can have some vacation time over the summer. So I had to walk Scully back home quickly and make myself a quick lunch at home to be done and ready for my class at 1pm.

I took her for another walk again around 5. While I was walking, I did a bird count using eBird, so I was looking around at things, and I noticed an interesting thing with some of the houses I was walking past, and their connections to the overhead electricity wires. The area around here has a lot of older houses, and they generally have the wires supplying electricity strung from the street poles directly to a terminal on the top of the house. Like this:

Wires to house

There are also several properties where the old house has been demolished and a more modern house has been built. And in almost all of these, the wires are not strung to the house itself, but rather to a pole erected just inside the property boundary. Like this:

Wires to pole

Presumably the wires go down the pole and then into the house underground. I’m wondering why this is such a popular choice for new houses. Do the owners make this choice to route the wires this way via a pole on their property, or is it some sort of new requirement by the council? I have no idea. And why string the wires to a pole??

In another interesting piece of trivia, I got talking with some of my friends in our Discord about how many different animals we’ve eaten. We did a survey by emojis, and I thought I’d copy the results here. The number indicates how many of us have eaten meat from the animal in question. This number includes me, except where indicated.

🐂 – 7
🐖 – 7
🐑 – 7
🐓 – 7
🦃 – 7
🐟 – 7 (generic “fish”)
🦘 – 6
🦀 – 6
🦞 – 6
🦑 – 6
👠 – 6 (’eel)
🐐 – 5
🦆 – 5
💪 – 5 (“mussel”)
🦪 – 5
🦌 – 4
🐗 – 4
🐊 – 4
🦈 – 4
🐙 – 4
🦐 – 4
⭐️ – 4 (sea urchin)
🐇 – 3
🐪 – 3
🦢 – 3 (goose)
🐥 – 3 (quail)
🐎 – 2
🦬 – 2
🐌 – 2 not including me
🦙 – 1
🐕 – 1 not including me
🦤 – 1 (pigeon)
🦩 – 1 (emu)
🐢 – 1 not including me
🐸 – 1 not including me
🦗 – 1
🐜 – 1
🐛 – 1 not including me (witchetty grub)

New content today:

Ethics for older kids

Today I had my first class of online ethics for older kids (ages 13-15). I just had one student, and it was a kid I’d taught earlier in the 10-12 class. He’d stopped taking lessons several months back, but I contacted his mother to let her know that I had a new class for more mature kids and thought he’d be a good fit, and she signed him up.

The first lesson is on “Crime and Punishment”. We talked a bit about crime and why people commit crimes, and then concentrated on the idea of punishment. Why do we punish criminals? Do we as a society need to punish crime? What punishments are fair/unfair? Should criminals be given a chance to rehabilitate, or to live a life after serving punishment without prejudice? And so on. He really enjoyed it I think, exercising his brain on more difficult questions and ideas than I’ve done in previous classes. So I think it went really well!

The other main thing about today was the weather took a turn for the colder and wetter. It was very wintery, with a top temperature of only 22°C, also accompanied by wind and showers. Didn’t stop me going for a 2.5k run though!

New content today:

Are some things just wrong?

My online ethics classes have restarted for the new year. Today I just have the original ages 10-12 classes. The topic for the week is “Are some things just wrong”? The idea is to talk about whether morals are absolute or relative, by introducing the concepts slowly and building up to that question near the end of the class.

I start with a story about different foods that people of different cultures like eating. Is it okay for some cultures to eat dog meat, or is it wrong for them to do that? Is it okay for some cultures to eat beef, if some other cultures think that’s wrong? Is it always wrong to eat dogs, and any culture that thinks it’s okay is incorrect? Is it always okay to eat cows, and any culture that thinks it’s wrong is incorrect? Or does it all depend on your culture: it’s okay for some people to eat dogs/cows, but not other people?

Is it wrong to criticise someone else’s culture? Always? Or is it okay sometimes?

We move on to discussing things like stealing or murdering. Is it possible for everyone to agree that these are wrong? If someone thinks murdering is morally okay, are they incorrect, or is that a valid point of view?

So… could it be that some things are morally objective, while some other things are morally subjective? How do we know which is which? These are pretty deep questions – hopefully the kids will appreciate the trickiness of them!

Prior to the evening’s lessons, I mostly worked on Darths & Droids writing, trying to build up a bit more of a buffer before I get stuck into the teaching too much. It was warm today, but still not really summery hot. I checked the records, and discovered that the temperature hasn’t even reached 30°C here in Sydney since last February, which is extremely unusual. By January we should be having a few days in the high 30s or even 40s. Although I’m not missing the extreme heat – the lower temperatures are more pleasant!

New content today: