Tag: ethics

And right into the working week

I had another good, solid sleep and feel pretty much over any travel weariness now. My wife even got up super early to go to the gym before work! I got up just after 07:00 and took Scully out, then had breakfast and prepped fro a morning of ethics class, beginning at 08:00. This is the end of the “Natural resources” topic.

Which means a new topic tomorrow, for which I began writing the lesson plan this afternoon (but will need to finish tomorrow). The new topic is “Heroes and Villains”. I also just now got a message saying that some parent has enrolled a 7-year-old in my class designed for 10-12 year olds! I’ve had a few 9s and an 8 before, but this is the first time someone has tried to enrol a kid that young. I’ve sent the parent a message saying the class is too advanced for most 7-year-olds. Let’s see what response I get.

The other thing I had to do today was compete tomorrow’s Darths & Droids strip and send it off to our guest commentator so they can get their comments in before publication time. I’m going to be a bit hard pressed to keep up with comic production this week, as I barely managed to buffer enough strips to cover my trip, and now the buffers are empty. We’ll see how I manage…

In food news, recall that when I dropped off my sourdough starter with my friend to mind while I was away, he gave me a bottle of home-made Carolina Reaper chilli sauce. I tried it today, putting a couple of drops on my lunch wrap, which also had cheese, some zucchini fritter things from the supermarket, sliced tomato, and a lot of sour cream, just in case. Well… turns out the sauce wasn’t nearly as hot as I’d feared. It was actually perfectly fine at that concentration. So I might be a little more bold with it next time.

I’m still getting used to the cold weather again after being in hot Japan for two weeks. Today wasn’t too bad, with a top of 18.0°C, but tomorrow will be challenging, with a forecast maximum of only 15°C – which is about as cold as a winter day gets here in Sydney. And it’ll be rainy too.

New content today:

Ethics of documentaries

The new topic this week for my 10-12 year old classes is Documentary Films. I spent the morning writing up my lesson plan, with questions about the ethics of staging scenes for documentaries, dramatising re-enactments, and whether it’s okay and/or educational to film and present scenes of wild animals hunting and killing each other.

After eating lunch, I took Scully for a longish walk, stopping at a bakery to sit and refresh with a glass of water and an orange-almond cake. The sky was a weird mix of patchy blue on the eastern half, and very dark grey cumulus clouds on the west. It looked like it might storm, but it held off.

And tonight I had the first three classes with the Documentary topic. I think it’s an interesting one. We discuss Nanook of the North, which provides an example of the first really successful documentary film, but also examples of staging scenes. I considered talking about White Wilderness too, with its famously faked scene of lemmings leaping off a cliff, but decided I had enough examples to talk about.

For dinner I made pumpkin soup, with a touch of Thai red curry and coconut cream. It turned out delicious, and we had it with freshly baked sourdough, still hot from the oven. Mmmm…

New content today:

Ending advertising

This morning I got up early to be ready for my first ethics class at 8am. I could have used more of a sleep-in to continue recovering from this illness, but maybe I can get that tomorrow. I’ve been sleeping much better the past three nights, after nearly a week of just a couple of hours sleep a night. My infected eye is improving thanks to the eye drops.

The classes were the last three of the advertising topic. I found it interesting in the interrupted week’s worth of classes that virtually all of the kids expressed the opinion that yes, ads often stretch the truth, or do things that are deceptive, to try to convince people to buy their products. And that’s okay. I asked them if they thought it was bad that ads were deceptive, and almost every kid said it was okay, because that’s what companies have to do to sell stuff and do business. And people know ads are exaggerated, so it’s not really fooling anyone.

I pushed a little, and asked: “Just because lots of companies do it, and people are used to it, does that really make it okay for them to be deceptive in ads?” And all of them said yes, it was okay. I asked if their should be laws against deceptive ads, and none of agreed that there should be. A couple even suggested there should be no laws against even outright lying in ads.

Honestly I’m kind of flabbergasted. I would have thought that a large number, maybe half or more, of the sample size would have expressed the opinion that deceptive ads were bad, and should be cracked down on in some way. Maybe kids these days are more cynical, and figure nobody should be gullible enough to actually believe ads, so it doesn’t matter if they lie to us.

Today I finally managed to get access to the video presentation of the last university team, and mark that, which completes the marking work. Although I still need to upload the marks and comments into the university system, which is about an hour’s work copying and pasting into the clunky web UI.

Not much else to report. I cooked vegetable fajitas for dinner.

New content today:

Ninja revision and advertising ethics

First task today was writing the week’s new ethics lesson, on the topic of advertising. That was fairly easy since I did this topic a couple of years ago when I first started the classes, and none of those kids are still enrolled, so I mostly copied the old lesson, just revising a few of the questions.

Then I spent a fair bit of time revising the Ninja Grandma board game for the kids in the Creative Thinking class. I still have some work to do on that and hope to finish it tonight.

I took Scully for a big walk over to the bakery for lunch. I had her in her doggie backpack for the walk there (she walks all the way back by herself – it’s a fair distance for a little dog). We passed a woman on the street going the other way, and as she drew level and passed me, she must have noticed Scully. She said, “Hi Scully,” and kept walking, without saying a word to me! I didn’t recognise her, but presumably she’s another local dog owner and we may have interacted briefly at some point (or she knows my wife).

I’ll keep it brief because I want to get back to the game design and try to send it to the kids before bedtime.

New content today:

Ethics of sports fans

It’s new ethics topic day, and this week the younger kids are doing the topic of Sports Fans. There are questions about how sports fans should behave, and whether it’s okay to follow teams just because they win more, or if you should be loyal to your home team, and about athletes being role models, and other stuff like that.

The weather is still chilly like winter, though should warm up a bit as the week goes by. I took Scully for a walk up to the local shops and had sushi for lunch for the first time in ages.

On the way back, I dropped in on a furniture store nearby, one that specialises in ergonomic furniture for back posture. My current desk stool is breaking and I ned a replacement. I got it at this same shop many years ago, and it’s been brilliant. The base is convex, so it doesn’t sit still on the floor – it constantly wobbles and you need to use your core muscles to sit steadily. And there’s no backrest, so it’s impossible to slouch. It’s been great for my posture and I wanted a similar replacement. I tried looking on their website on the weekend, but all the wobble stools that I found were too tall – the lowest adjusted height was significantly higher than my current stool. So I wanted to ask in the showroom if they had anything else that might suit me.

And when I went in I found one of these, a Leo Perching Stool. I tried it out and adjusted the height, and it was perfect. And feels really good. Maybe even better than my current old stool. The guy there told me it came in a wide range of colours and I could select them from the website and order it to be picked up from the store, to avoid delivery fees. So I came home and found it on their website and ordered one.

It came with a range of fabric types and colours. One of the types was a premium fabric, and it said it would add the premium charge at the shipping stage. I selected a premium fabric and went to the checkout to see what the extra cost would be… and it didn’t add anything! I liked the colour I’d selected, so I purchased it with that. Hopefully I’ll get it with the premium fabric at no extra cost! 😀

OOPS! I saved a draft of this post on Tuesday night, and then neglected to actually post it. But that gives me time on Wednesday morning to add this photo I took yesterday of a kookaburra.

Kookaburra by phone

Yes, that’s with my phone. Sometimes kookaburras are tame enough to get within a metre or so.

New content today:

Quitting before the end

This morning I had a new student in one of my ethics classes. I was halfway through teaching the class when I got an email notification, and I could see part of my mail client in another window behind the Zoom window, and saw enough of the subject to know that it was a student unenrolling notice from Outschool. Curious to know who it was, I clicked it and saw that it was the new student I was in the middle of talking to, and the reason given for unenrolling was “don’t like the class”. With over 200 students so far going through my classes, I’ve seen reasons mostly like “parent has a schedule conflict” or “student has a schedule conflict” or “taking a break” or whatever – this is the first time I’ve ever seen anyone say they didn’t like the class.

And I still had to teach this kid for another 20 minutes! I thought it had been going well, with the kid answering questions and giving good explanations. I wonder if it was more the subject matter this week (“getting even”), and they would have liked it more in a different week.

We reached the end of the class, still with no sign from the kid that they hadn’t enjoyed it. I decided to just do my regular end of lesson summary for new students, in which I suggest they can discuss the class with their parents and use it to start a family discussion on the topic. And at that point in the Zoom video I saw this kid shake their head quite vigorously, clearly indicating they were not going to do that.

I’m guessing the kid didn’t make the call. Often on first lessons a parent sits next to them out of the Zoom video, to supervise, and I’m thinking the parent decided and made the cancellation. Oh well. I have hundreds of happy kids and parents. I suppose it had to happen eventually that one just didn’t like it!

For lunch I took Scully for a drive to the Allambie Pie Shop. I tried their pumpkin and feta pie today, which was really nice. Im glad I found this place – they make really good pies, and it’s closer than the Collaroy pie shop for a mid-week lunch drive. And there’s a soccer field a short walk away, where I can let Scully run around and chase a ball for a while to get some energy out.

This afternoon I worked on writing more Darths & Droids strips. I was over a week ahead a few weeks back, but the buffer has been burnt away with the fact that I’ve been busy on other stuff recently. I need to build it back up again before our trip to Japan next month.

For dinner tonight I had Brussels sprouts which I’d bought last grocery shop, and I wondered what to make with them. For the evening walk, I took Scully past the nearest supermarket, and popped in quickly to grab a couple of potatoes. I made chilli-miso sprouts, accompanied by garlic mashed potatoes.

New content today:

Planning about city planning

Today was pretty busy. I started with a 5k run after breakfast. 5k really feels significantly tougher than my more usual 2.5k distance, and especially on the street route that I prefer for the variety and the views, compared to the oval laps I did last time. The weather is getting cooler and less humid, which makes it a bit more pleasant though.

I made a few Lego comics using the photos I shot yesterday, since I needed them to see out publications for this week. Then I got stuck into writing a lesson plan for this week’s older kids’ ethics topic: Cities. I’ve got some questions on the growth of cities and urbanisation across the world through history, and what advantages and disadvantages city living brings to people. And questions about impacts of cities on the environment – is it more or less than the same number of people spread out across rural land? And how do we deal with wildlife in cities? And development issues such as redevelopment of historic districts, gentrification, and so on.

Add a walk with my wife and Scully around the harbour shore and three classes with the younger kids (on getting even), and that filled up my entire day.

New content today:

If I could talk with the animals…

I spent most of today thinking about talking with animals. This is this week’s topic for my ethics/critical thinking class with the younger students. I spent time this morning writing the lesson plan and questions, and then had the first three classes tonight.

I introduce the topic by talking about Doctor Dolittle, and the fanciful way in which he learns to speak with animals. Then I go into discussing the experiments we have done with chimps like Washoe and subsequent research that has cast doubt on the initial optimistic early findings about ape intelligence and communication skills. I ask questions about the importance, relevance, and humaneness of such experiments.

And then I go into speculative mode and ask the kids questions about how our attitude to animals might change if we could communicate with them, and what we should do in various hypothetical scenarios in which we talk with animals. Should we continue eating cows and pigs and chickens if they could talk to us? If pet dogs and cats tell us they want their freedom, should we let them run free, or treat them more like children and confine them to keep them safe? If cockroaches could talk to us, should we still treat them as vermin to be exterminated? What would the world actually be like if suddenly we could communicate with animals?

In other items, I did a 2.5k run this morning. And baked the sourdough loaf I made last night and let rise overnight. It’s a special loaf with dried apricots, dates, and walnuts in it, by special request of my wife who likes a fruit and nut loaf now and then.

The weather has been glorious the past few days. Beautiful autumn weather, with cool mornings and evenings, and a pleasantly warm day in the middle – great weather to be out in, without being too hot. The deciduous trees are turning colours. We don’t have a lot – 99% of the trees around here are evergreen eucalyptus, ficus, bottlebrushes, wattles, banksias, and other native species. But there are dots of imported deciduous trees in places, and some are going lovely shades of red or yellow. I like the liquidambars the most, because of the vivid red leaves. The ginkgos are starting to go their beautiful butter yellow. Unfortunately there are also a lot of plane trees, which just go a dull brown colour and drop tons of leaves.

Oh, today is ANZAC Day too, so a public holiday here in Australia. It ends what I think of as the “public holiday season” – the four months from 25 December to 25 April contain 8 public holidays: Christmas, Boxing Day, New Year’s Day, Australia Day, Good Friday, Easter Sunday, Easter Monday, and ANZAC Day. The remaining 8 months of the year only have two holidays: The Queen’s Birthday (I guess the King’s Birthday this year for the first time in over 70 years) in June and Labour Day in October.

New content today:

Science fiction cloning

This morning I wrote my lesson plan for this weeks new topic of “Science fiction cloning”. And tonight I’ve run the first three lesson, which were a lot of fun. It’s a good topic for getting the kids engaged and interested, and there were some very interesting and diverse opinions on some of the questions. Some of the questions include:

  • Would you like it if there was another copy of you, who looked the same and had the same personality and memories?
  • If it were possible to create a copy of someone like this, would that be okay? Under what circumstances?
  • Should we clone people as backups (“extra lives”) before sending them into dangerous situations?
  • Would you feel okay taking a risk that could end up in your death if there was a perfect clone of you who could take your place if you died?
  • In a world where cloning was common, should originals and clones be treated the same, or differently?

The first one was very polarising. Some kids said it would be creepy and they wouldn’t like it at all. Others said it would be cool, they’d have someone like a new brother/sister to play with, and they’d like all the same things, so it would be great!

At lunch I took Scully for a long walk – she was really tired by the time we got home. Which was good, as she slept for much of the afternoon.

For dinner tonight I was inspired by a friend who made a roasted pumpkin, coconut, and ginger soup the other day. I improvised my own version, and it turned out very nice!

New content today:

The ethics of experts

It was chilly again today. We had a very sudden flip from hot summery weather to cold wintery weather in the space of about a week. Today really felt more like a winter day than autumn. There’s already been snow on the mountains. But at the same time we have a tropical cyclone threatening to hit Western Australia as a category 4 storm some time tomorrow. (That’s a very very long way from me, thankfully, and in a mostly uninhabited part of the country.)

Today was my first day back at teaching ethics online, after my COVID and Easter break. I still have a bit of a cough but it’s improving daily, and didn’t affect my classes too much this evening. Although it is definitely more of a problem when I’m speaking, rather than just sitting quietly. The topic for this week is “Trusting Experts”, and we examine the idea of what makes someone an expert and should we trust experts more than average people, and why. And also ponder why in some cases people, or governments especially, don’t trust expert advice.

I also spent some time doing part 2 of cleaning the kitchen, involving moving stuff around and cleaning underneath things, and so on. It’s all done now, and I feel much better abut it because it was long overdue, especially judging by some of the dust I found!

New content today: