Today I had a couple of tasks with Scully in the morning. I needed to run an errand to pick up something first thing in the morning and took Scully with me for the walk. And then not long after I got back my wife had to leave for an appointment. We’ve found the hard way that if she leaves while I stay home with Scully, Scully cries and whines non-stop until either my wife gets home, or Scully finally gives up about an hour later. The simple way around this is if I take Scully on a short walk and my wife leaves while we’re out. Then when I return home with Scully and my wife isn’t here, she just settles down and is fine. Who knows what goes through a dog’s mind?
After that I knuckled down to write the lesson plan for my next week of online ethics classes. The topic this week is “Creators and their works”, probing questions such as:
- If you found out the writer of a book/movie you loved was a bad person, would that affect your enjoyment of it?
- Should people care about liking the work of a bad person?
- Is it okay to buy a book or movie created by a bad person, thus supporting their work with money?
- Should the works of bad people be removed from libraries, or art galleries? Should they be removed from sale?
- Should you find out about the person who created something before deciding if you like it?
I also had a contingency extension asking if it’s okay to use an invention or scientific breakthrough that was made by a bad person, and if that’s different to liking a work of art made by a bad person. And I explored whether the art form made a difference, in particular with the case of popular music, where people who like the music often also admire the band members, perhaps seeing them as role models, and if this is different to books or paintings, where the creator feels more distant.
And this evening I had two consecutive classes, rather than the one I’ve had on Wednesdays. I created a new Wednesday timeslot last week, and it filled to the capacity of four students by today! It seems my class is popular enough that I could probably keep adding new timeslots every week and keep having them fill up.
During the classes, I think this topic went more smoothly than last week’s on peer pressure. Last week I ended up with a lot of similar questions, and simple yes/no responses, and all the kids agreeing with one another. But today the questions were more open-ended and prompted more discussion, especially as in each class there ended up being some disagreements between the kids’ opinions. So I’m really happy with this one.
New content today:
The cancel culture debate… stick the nazi medical experiments in if you get stuck – should we use scientific knowledge that was obtained by nazies killing innocent people for that knowledge. What if it’s something that could save future lives?
Makes worrying about watching Bill Cosby’s show kinda juvenile…