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.
New content today: