ethics – Page 22 – dangermouse.net

New ethics: Patriotism

Actually I had two new ethics things today. In my online classes I started a new topic, on patriotism. I wrote the lesson today, and then ran it three times in a row this evening. I need to add some more material, as I ran out in two of the classes. Some topics seem to generate lots of discussion and rambling answers from the kids, while others… don’t. This seems to be one of the latter sort. I’ll have to spend some time tomorrow morning adding a few more questions.

But first thing this morning I travelled over to the public school where I’ve been teaching ethics face to face with students since 2017. 2021 was a write-off, given COVID restrictions and school closures, but this year we are kicking off a new year of ethics lessons, hopefully to cover the full year as normal. Today we had a meeting from 08:15 with the new deputy principal of the school, so she could go through various admin details with us before we started – this meeting was with all of the ethics and scripture teachers (which teach simultaneously, depending on parental preferences).

Previously, we’d never had anything like this. We just showed up on our first day and bumbled around to find out which classes we had and where the rooms were, and there was no briefing on school discipline or anything. But this new deputy principal was super organised. She showed us the roll folders, and said there’d be info sheets on any students with special needs, and she gave us a step-by-step plan for dealing with any students who might misbehave in class, indicating a warning followed by sending the student to her office. This was all way more organised than anything I’ve seen at this school in the past five years. So that’s good!

As it turned out, the other years all had their first ethics class following this meeting, but the year 6 class that I’ve been assigned were away on a school camp, so I actually start teaching next week. I looked through the roll and it looks like I have 17 students, though the number may change before next week as parents shuffle their kids around. According to the rules I need to wear a surgical quality mask while on the school grounds, including during the lesson, for COVID protection reasons. So it’ll be interesting giving a whole lesson that way. Let’s see how it goes next week.

New content today:

Groupthink in ethics classes

In my current ethics topic of Tourism, I’ve been asking classes of kids the question: Is it okay for locals to have restaurants charging high prices in tourist areas (compared to low prices elsewhere, where tourists seldom go)?

In most classes the kids have been pretty negative, saying that’s scammy and unfair. But tonight I had a class where all four of the kids thought it was fine, in fact it was smart business.

I followed up with: Would it be okay for a shop to charge locals a low price for a bottle of water, but when a tourist comes in they say the price is much higher? One kid thought that was not right, but three of them thought it was perfectly fine, especially if the locals were relatively poor and the tourists wealthy.

This shows the phenomenon I’ve noticed where the kids in a given class tend to follow one another in their opinions, rather than going out on a limb and disagreeing. I do get kids within a class disagreeing sometimes, but other times there’s a surprising run of agreement on what I feel is an atypical response. I don’t really have anything else to say about this, other than it’s interesting.

I also taught the second lesson in my current 6-week course on creative thinking. The student I have for that is keen and I think will get a lot out of the course, because he’s paying attention and doing the exercises with gusto.

In between I made some more Darths & Droids strips to get a buffer up and running again. And for dinner tonight I cooked calzones, with pumpkin/ricotta/feta filling.

I should mention a new project my wife is working on. She’s been making bangles, to go with the dog bandanas that she’s been selling. She’s using leftover scraps of fabric from the bandanas and wrapping them around wooden bangles using decoupage glue and varnish. They take a few weeks to make as the glue and varnish need time to cure, but she’s almost got a batch ready to start selling. We’re going to do some glamour photography to show them off soon, so she can add them to her Etsy shop. I’ll share some photos when we get that done.

New content today:

Ethics of tourism

Today was a busy day with my online ethics stuff. I had to write the new lesson for this week, on the topic of the ethics of tourism. Then I had two extension follow-up classes with students on last week’s topic of artificial intelligence, followed by three iterations of the new class.

In between, I managed to do some work on the university data engineering course. Mostly going through slides prepared by the lecturer and providing feedback on those.

Speaking of tourism, Australia closed its borders to non-citizens on 20 March, 2020, due to COVID. The Government recently announced that from 21 February Australia will once again allow tourists to enter the country. 703 days, almost two years the ban has been in place. Life has been very different here without tourists, since I live in the most heavily visited city in the country. In one sense it’s been nice – you can walk around tourist sites like the Opera House and The Rocks without the usual crowds of foreigners. In another sense it’s been eerie, since some parts of the city that are usually bustling are virtually dead.

I saw a suggestion in a Sydney discussion group that now is a good time for us residents to go visit tourist areas, before they start filling up with tourists again. Honestly, that sounds really appealing. Maybe in the next week or so I’ll take a trip into the city and walk around the Opera House, while I can before the crowds return.

New content today:

The ethics of wealth

Today is Australia Day, which is always a bit of a weird day. Ostensibly it’s a public holiday to celebrate Australia, our national day. But it’s always accompanied by news stories and opinion pieces on how it doesn’t represent the Aboriginal people, because the date chosen is when Europeans first arrived in Australia. So to many Australians, both Aboriginal and not, it feels wrong and even oppressive to celebrate today. Personally, I think this debate is going to rage on until the date is changed, and until that point it’s just going to feel more and more uncomfortable every year.

I spent most of the day working on the new week’s ethics class. I wrote the lesson, which is on the topic of wealth and poverty. And this evening I ran it three times in a row. I think this isn’t one of my best planned lessons, because the questions are maybe a bit too leading. I might try to revise it slightly tomorrow for future classes to encourage more diverse answers from the kids.

I also had to fill out a new police background check for Outschool, for their annual security update. It’s been a year since I signed up as a teacher on their site! It started slowly, but I’ve grown to offering 14 classes a week, and the ethics one is very popular.

New content today:

Rain running, and ethics of extinction

Wednesday dawned cool, grey, and… wait for it… rainy. This has really been the “summer that never was”. I went for my 2.5k run in steady rain, because looking at the rain radar I didn’t have any confidence that the weather would be any better later on. I’ve been keeping track of the temperature and humidity when I do my runs. The temperature has mostly been around 25°C, give or take a few degrees, but check the humidity:

Humidity during my runs in January

Yes, it’s been 80% or above every day since 4 January, over two weeks. And into the 90s on several days. It’s not great weather for running!

I spent a few hours today writing the next week’s ethics lesson. The topic this week is extinction. I found a very cool film of the last known thylacine, which has been colourised recently by the National Film and Sound Archive of Australia. And it’s public domain, so I could use it during my classes.

This was taken in 1933, and the animal shown died in 1936. No living thylacine has been seen ever since.

The class asks questions about whether humans have a moral responsibility to try to save species form extinction. Even if it’s not our fault – say a species is dying off due to disease that has nothing to do with humanity. How can we balance the needs of humans against those of other species? We can’t save all species, so how do we prioritise which species to save? Should we save charismatic large species, or species that almost nobody knows about? Assuming we could do it successfully, should we reintroduce extinct species such as the thylacine by cloning?

Then this evening I had three classes in a row with this new material. Wednesday nights are always the most exhausting, as it’s three lessons without breathing space in between, and I’m having to adapt the class dynamically as I see how the kids react to the new questions.

New content today:

Thinking about art

Today I had a Zoom meeting with the university lecturer I’m working with on this data engineering course, to discuss our progress and plan the next week or two of work. We’re making progress on things and integrating stuff to keep the curriculum flowing from week to week. He also mentioned that a colleague was looking for some proofreading for journal paper submissions, to see if I was interested in a bit more casual work. So after the meeting he contacted her and put me in touch with her. So hopefully this will lead to a bit more paid work for me.

My wife decided it would be a good day to send Scully in for doggie daycare so that she can socialise with other dogs. Scully really enjoys it there. I took her in and she got super excited when she realised where we were going. After dropping her off I went to the hardware store to buy some humidity removing crystals and containers. I found a little mould in our garage storage cupboards yesterday, and given how ridiculously humid the weather has been for the past few weeks, I think it’s necessary to take steps to reduce the humidity in those cupboards.

From the hardware store I drove over to that new bakery at Naremburn that I’ve been enjoying occasionally, to get a pie for lunch. They also had chocolate custard tarts today, so I tried one of those for dessert, and it was really good.

This afternoon I had to work solidly on writing the new ethics class for this week. The topic is art, and it’s really more of a critical thinking topic than an ethics one, although I included a few ethical questions in there. The main thrust of the questions was to get the kids thinking about what art is, how it might be defined, what counts as art and what doesn’t, and why we make art. I just got it finished in time for tonight’s triple classes, which mostly went pretty well. Phew!

New content today:

Ethics of data; and body systems

Today I got in a good chunk of work on the university data engineering course, writing an outline of a presentation on the ethics of data science. I also went over the lecturer’s notes for the lecture on data types and some exercises he’d prepared. We’re having a Zoom meeting tomorrow to discuss progress and plan out the rest of the time between now and the beginning of the course in late February.

The rest of the afternoon I spent assembling slides for tonight’s private Outschool science lesson. Today we’re covering body systems – or at least getting started on it. I suspect I have enough material to last for two weeks.

For dinner tonight I made calzones – spinach and ricotta, with a tomato/onion/garlic sauce to spoon over the top.

New content today:

Ethics of laws

This evening I restarted my online ethics classes on Outschool, after a break over Christmas and New Year. I had three classes in a row, so it’s diving right back in. There were 7 returning students and 3 new ones all together, so I did my class introduction bit a couple of times. Then we got stuck into the topic, which was “laws”.

We started with questions about why we have laws, would it be possible to have a society without laws, what might such a society be like? Then we moved on to the fact that historically laws were stated unilaterally by a king or emperor and everyone had to follow them, so what gave them the authority to do that? In modern society in contrast, governments make laws, and what gives them that authority, and is it any different to a king?

Then we moved on to questioning if everybody in a country needs to follow the same laws. What if someone strongly objects to a law, or disagrees with it for religious reasons or whatever, should they still have to obey it? What about people from ancient traditional cultures, whose traditional laws conflict with modern government laws? Is it fair for a government to recognise ancient cultures by allowing them to do things that other citizens can’t do?

All this stimulated a lot of very interesting discussion with the kids! I think it’s a good topic that really led to a lot of tricky questions and thoughtful answers.

In other news, earlier I worked on a particularly tricky bit of Darths & Droids plotting and script writing. I wrote a good chunk of material, but it needs polishing and reshaping a bit to flow properly, so it’s not finished yet. I also took a walk up to the shops because I had to visit a pharmacy to get some things. I’ve been trying to avoid going anywhere with people due to the now rampant COVID omicron strain going around, at least until I can get a booster vaccination in a couple of weeks, but I needed some things. Usually the shopping area is bustling with people, but today it was almost like a ghost town a a few people around, but nowhere near the normal levels. I stopped to grab some sushi on the way home for lunch.

New content today:

A mixed bag Christmas treats day

I got up early this morning. The sun is rising early these days – in fact I just realised today is the summer solstice. I went for a 2.5k run before the day got too hot. I’m still improving in my times, despite the weather recently getting warmer and more humid. I’ve been hovering around 13:20-13:30 for the past week or so. I thought today’s time would be slow because of the heat, but somehow I managed to clock 13:03, my best time so far.

Remember the council renovation work on the nearby park, which I posted about a few months back? They finished the work a month or so ago, but I was very disappointed by a set of sandstone stepping stones which the workers laid between the path and a section of grass up a steepish slope. The posted landscaping plans showed a proper stairway installed there, but for some reason they didn’t go ahead with that, and instead simply laid a set of three stepping stones on the hillside – at the angle of the slope. So each stone was at maybe a 20° angle or so to the horizontal. This made them tricky to walk on – not especially so for me, but we have a lot of elderly people in the neighbourhood who use that park, and I could see that they would be difficult to negotiate for anyone of less than sprightly mobility.

So I contacted the council. I phoned up and spoke to the councillor in charge of the landscaping work, and explained why I thought the stepping stones were dangerous, and suggested that – even if the full staircase had been abandoned – the stones could be relaid so they are horizontal, thus forming a set of horizontal steps ascending the slope. The woman I spoke to took my suggestion seriously and said it sounded like a good improvement, and that she would look into it.

And a few days ago, this happened!

The stepping stone slabs that were sloping have been relaid with concrete under them so that they now lie level, and form steps, exactly as I’d asked for. Nice! You really can get government to do some things if you ask nicely for them.

This morning I had an Outschool ethics class scheduled… Even though I stopped all my classes for a few weeks over Christmas, Outschool has a teacher tool where you can set up time slots in which parents can schedule classes if you have no class already on at that time. I’d set this up early on, when I was trying to expand my enrolments – and forgotten about it. So, of course, a parent scheduled a class for today. I tried to contact them to ask them to choose a different time slot, because I really wanted to keep Tuesdays free, but they never got back to me. So when the time came, I started Zoom and waited for the student…

And they never showed up. Oh well, I get paid for it anyway, so at least it wasn’t a complete waste of time. After 10 minutes waiting, you can cancel the class, which I did. And then a minute later the parent contacted me! But they didn’t complain about the cancelled class as I feared. They requested a transfer into one of the existing Monday classes (which start up again in January). So that’s actually good.

After I picked up Scully from my wife’s work, we went on a drive. My wife had got an order for some dog bandanas from a woman who had met her at the market on Sunday, shed offered to make them and deliver before Christmas. To ensure that, I drove over and popped them in the mailbox, rather than entrust them to Australia Post. It was only about 20 minutes drive, so not too far.

On the way back I stopped at a liquor store to pick up some bottles of wine, since we were completely out of red wine. They allow dogs there, so I could take Scully in with me. And then we stopped again on the way home, at the new bakery in Naremburn that I’ve mentioned a few times. I’d been feeling like some cake for the past few days, and decided to satiate my craving. They had slices of carrot cake there – they seem to have a rotating menu of sweet treats that they go through, as there’s a different selection every time I go. They also had some amazing looking mince tarts for Christmas, so I got half a dozen of those too, which we’ll work through over the next few days.

In between all this, I worked on Darths & Droids comics. Phew! A busy day!

Addendum: And I just fed my sourdough starter, in preparation for baking tomorrow. It’s a significant day, because today my starter is a year old! It was spawned off a friend’s starter one year ago today.

New content today:

Last ethics of the year

Today I taught my final two ethics classes for the year. I’m taking a break over the Christmas/New Year period and will return to teaching the kids in the first week of January.

To celebrate, I went out for lunch, trying a new cafe in the area that I haven’t tried before, called Bitter & Twisted. They had a Korean chicken burger on the menu which looked tempting, so I got that.

Wow, that’s enormous! I was very full after that. The burger was decent, but the chips were really good.

This afternoon was the Christmas party at the dog park where I take Scully. I took her there before 4pm so we could go for a walk along the waterfront before the party officially started at 4:30. My wife finished work a little early and came on down as well, arriving around 5, so we could meet and greet all the other dog owners and share some of the snacks and things that everyone had brought. It’s a nice gathering, in a nice outdoor setting, with kids and dogs running around.

This evening back at home… I can relax! Whew! Oh, also, it was sunny today! And warm! It almost feels like summer, finally.

New content today: