ethics – Page 26 – dangermouse.net

Late Friday games night update

On Friday I was very busy! I did the grocery shopping first thing, then I had a doctor’s appointment to get a flu shot before winter sets in. This was slightly complicated by the fact that my doctor is a couple of train stations away, and they’re doing some major construction work at my nearest station, necessitating a long pedestrian detour to reach the station from my place. On the way back I considered just walking all the way home, which takes about half an hour. But I decided it’d be quicker to get the train again—forgetting about the detour—and then I just missed a train and had a ten minute wait for the next one… basically it ended up taking just as long overall.

I had to work on my lesson plan for the second Outschool ethics class, which I had at 4pm. And in the middle of it I had to go pick up Scully from my wife’s work and bring her home. Then to ensure that Scully didn’t want to go out for a toilet or a walk during the ethics class Zoom meeting, I took her out to the park at 3pm and gave her a run around to tire her out. This was tiring work for me, because she’s a fairly reluctant ball chaser, and does it in a leisurely fashion. The best way to get her to run is to play chase with her, and run around after her myself. So I did a bunch of short sprints, wearing myself out in the process.

But it worked – I got her to do a toilet after the running and then we came back inside and Scully flopped into her dog bed and stayed there throughout the entire ethics class. The topic for the day was “generalisation”, including jumping to conclusions, and touching a little on prejudice. The main questions raised were when is generalising valid or invalid, and what caveats do we need to take when generalising from our own experiences? It was a really good discussion, and at the end the two students both said that they’d “loved” the class. So think both of them will continue with weekly lessons for a while, which is good.

In the evening it was games night. We had an attendance of only four due to people having various other engagements. We played Extraordinary Adventures: Pirates!, then Istanbul, and then had a big game of Apples to Apples, which caused several hilarious moments.

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Double ethics classes

This morning I had my normal Year 5/6 ethics class. We started a new subject: Vanity. The first lesson of the topic was really just about exploring the idea that people look different, and asking whether some people look better than others, and if it’s okay to want to look good, or specifically better than other people. We got through the material a bit quickly, as most of the answers were agreed to by the class, without a lot of discussion or differing opinions.

And then straight after my usual class, I took relief for another ethics teacher who was away this week. He has a Year 3 class, younger than I’m used to (although I have taken a Year 2 class a couple of times before to fill in). The kids can bit more excitable and uncontrollable at that age, but they’re also a bit more obedient when asked to do things. It was a large class and they had a tendency to blurt out answers over the top of each other without putting their hands up to wait their turn. I stopped that fairly quickly by saying I noticed the polite students with their hands up. It kind of bubbled along a bit, but never got out of hand, so that was good.

The topic was Persuading, and today’s lesson was about advertising in particular. I showed the kids a couple of (fictional) advertisements and we discussed how honest they were, and if they were trying to persuade you to buy something by being deliberately misleading. It was a really good discussion, and I think the kids really latched onto the idea that advertisers are trying to sell stuff, so they’re not motivated to be entirely honest.

After the double class, I hung out a bit in the shopping area near the school, and then grabbed some food for a slightly early lunch before heading home. I picked up Scully at lunch time, and it was rainy again today, so we got a bit wet coming home. Fortunately she behaved at home all afternoon, since I didn’t feel like heading outside in the rain again.

This evening I did my usual Italian practice on Duolingo. I’m now up to a 300-day streak of uninterrupted lessons every day. I did have a longer streak a few years ago, but it got interrupted by an overseas trip and reset my counter, and then it took me a while to get back into it. But I’m feeling a lot better now about some of the different tenses, particularly the subjunctive and the conditional. I’m still working on modal tenses.

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Sushi and books

This morning I had another Outschool class, a second session of the ethics course, on the same topic of greed as last Friday, with a different student. I just had the one boy this time, so it was very one-on-one, and we had a pretty deep discussion of what greed is, and whether it’s wrong or not – or rather in what circumstances it’s wrong or not. I could tell he was really thinking hard about the questions I posed, and he said he enjoyed it at the end, so that’s good!

For lunch today I decided to walk up the street to the local shops and get something. I didn’t have anything in mind, but settled on sushi when I passed a sushi shop. I took my bento box of sushi to the nearby square, where there’s a grassy area and trees and some steps to sit on, and ate there with some other local workers who had come out for lunch. And a gaggle of magpies, who stalked everyone looking for handouts. But I never feed birds, no matter how persistent.

After eating I stopped in the bookshop to browse around for a while. I saw some mildly interesting things, but nothing inspiring enough to buy. I flipped through an Italian recipe book and found a simple ratio of ingredients for making pasta dough, which I committed to memory. I’ve been thinking now that I’m making my own bread and pizza bases, I should give hand made pasta try. I think dinners for this week are more or less covered already, so maybe I’ll try next week.

On books, I recently finished reading the Dungeons & Dragons adventure Curse of Strahd, which is a 5th edition conversion and expansion of the classic original 1st edition adventure Ravenloft. Ravenloft has long been a favourite of mine, and I’m very pleased with the expanded content in this version.

Sticking with the D&D theme, I’ve now started on another book in my list of unread books: Grimtooth’s Ultimate Traps Collection, Foil Hardcover edition. This is a classic old school series of books containing various dungeon traps originally published in the 1980s, collected together into a republished compendium. The book weighs a ton, and should take a while to get through. I like the nostalgic feel of reading old gaming material like this.

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First online ethics class

Today I did some grocery shopping, then spent some time working out my detailed lesson plan for this afternoon’s Outschool class.

It was my first class in the Critical and Ethical Thinking course, so I wanted to be prepared. Given I only had two students enrolled I wanted to have plenty of material ready, in case we got through it quickly. I needn’t have worried so much.

The students showed up in Zoom on time, two girls. They were both very articulate and engaged with the material. I asked both of them for their opinions on each of the questions I raised, after telling various stories starting with King Midas and the golden touch, and then going through some more real world examples of greed, or potential greed. They gave some good responses, and I had to skip over a few questions towards the end to finish on time.

I asked if they’d enjoyed the class and they both said yes, and indicated they’d be back next week. So that’s really good! Hopefully by then another student or two will have signed up.

Tonight is virtual board games night, and my wife is out with her friends having a dinner. I dashed out for some fish and chips for my own dinner. And now I’m losing at games of 7 Wonders…

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Change of season

We’ve been experiencing a rather cool autumn. After last year when we had an extremely mild winter, it feels unusually chilly for this time of year. I’ve taken to wearing a jacket when going outside about a month earlier than last year.

The leaves on the deciduous trees are changing. Mostly in Sydney that means plane trees turning a dull shade of light brown. There are a few liquidambars scattered around that go a lovely deep red, but they’re not that common, and for the most part of course all the other trees are evergreen. So it’s not spectacular, but it is noticeable.

I took this photo of a path I walk down while collecting Scully from my wife’s office. The plane trees a mix of green and brown. This is basically what autumn looks like in Sydney.

The coolish weather makes it lovely to be outside. And after last month’s ridiculous amounts of rain, April has been extremely dry so far. We haven’t had any rain since the 8th, three weeks ago. And what we had in that first eight days was only about 10% of the April average rainfall. What we have had the past week or so is smoke – the bushfire control authorities are taking this cool weather as a chance to burn a lot of the undergrowth in forests around the edge of the city, and the prevailing wind conditions are wafting it across the city.

I took this photo at the dog park this afternoon while walking Scully. It’s normally a lovely view, but you can see the brown smoke across the lower level of the sky.

Tonight for dinner I tried a variant of one of my regular dishes. Pasta with butternut pumpkin, nuts, chilli, and feta. I normally use walnuts, but tonight I tried pistachios, which worked really well. And made it pretty colourful.

Oh, and in good news I have two students signed up for my first online Critical and Ethical Thinking class, tomorrow. Tomorrow’s class is in a time zone suitable for Australia/Asia, but I also have another parallel class on the same topic in a time zone better suited for the Americas (Sunday afternoons in US time zones).

New content today:

A final act of punishment

This morning was my Ethics class. It was the final lesson on the topic of punishment, which has been dragging on for four weeks. I don’t like the topics that go 4 weeks, as the kids (and myself) are really sick and tired of it after that long. I much prefer the shorter 2 or 3 week topics.

Anyway, today we went through a scenario in which a teacher/coach catches some girls on the netball team teasing another new girl who has a different accent. The coach decides some punishment is needed, but isn’t sure what, and so asks four of the other team coaches what they think. One says to give them a taste of their own medicine and have some other girls tease them. Another says to ban them from playing for 4 weeks. Another says they should have to do something to make it up to the teased girl. The fourth says they should have to think about what they did and the reasons why it’s wrong.

The exercise was to get the kids to discuss the merits and flaws of each suggestion. They pretty much agreed the first idea was bad, as it would lead to a cycle of teasing back and forth, escalating the situation. They had an insight that I didn’t with the second one, and said banning the girls from playing would punish the whole team, not just the ones who did the teasing, so it wasn’t really a fair punishment. They also agreed that this sort of punishment isn’t a big deterrent against teasing – it’s just more likely to make the girls be more careful not to get caught. They thought that the third idea, doing something to make up for it, was a good idea, suggesting things like helping the teased girl with a project or something. They liked the idea of having to do a good deed to make up for the bad one. They also liked the fourth idea, that the kids should have to think about why teasing is bad, but they couldn’t come up with any good ideas on how to make them do that.

They concluded (with appropriate prompting) with the concept that a punishment should be “fitting” to the crime, in that it should be proportionate and not too severe, it shouldn’t lead to escalation, it should in some way attempt to make up for the damage caused, and it should lead the committer to reconsider what they’ve done so that they’re less likely to do it again.

Overall it was a pretty good discussion! And I think they really had some good insights into the topic by the end of it. Next week we start a new topic: Vanity.

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More experimental cooking

This morning was the first Ethics class for the new school term. When I got to the school and picked up my class roll, I noticed that one of the students I had last term had been removed. And when the students arrived and I asked if a couple of other kids who hadn’t shown up yet were late or away, they responded that one of those had left the school. So my class is down two students compared to last term’s 15, making it a class of 13.

We continued the topic of punishment, which we got halfway through before the school holidays. Today was a discussion of the reason for punishment. Most of it was in the context of football, all three of soccer, Australian rules, and rugby. The questions basically led them through why penalties exist in these sports, whether penalties are a type of punishment, whether the penalties are needed, whether the penalties are fair, and why some penalties (e.g. for deliberate dangerous contact with another player) are more severe than others.

It was only towards the end that we switched back to punishment for crimes and why they might be needed in society. The connections were pretty straightforward, and there was no real disagreement from any of the class that punishment of some sort is needed. They said that if there were no punishments, people would just go around robbing banks all the time!

For dinner tonight I tried something new. I had some Brussels sprouts which I bought last time I got groceries, and wanted to use them up. Normally I’d fry them with garlic and chilli and miso, and serve on the side of some vegetarian burgers or sausages. But this time I thought I’d try roasting them. And since we have some butternut pumpkin to use too, I added that in. And also the leftover cherry tomatoes from last night’s pizza. I did add some garlic and a bit of chilli, and roasted in the oven for about 50 minutes. The mixture of the three different vegetables turned out very nice!

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The feel of autumn

I really noticed today that autumn is in the air. The weather has turned crisp and cool – the maximum temperature today was only 24.6°C, although it was cooler this morning when I was out and about. After my Ethics class I drove out to the Pitch-and-Putt golf course where I met a friend and we played 18 holes. The trees around the city are looking autumny – at least the ones that actually change colour. Liquidambars are going red, and the plane trees are going that dull brown colour and starting to drop their leaves.

It was the last Ethics class of the school term, with the students getting two weeks of holidays for the Easter break, so I have two weeks off now before the second term begins in mid-April. Today we talked about what constitutes punishment: is it punishment if it’s accidental, or unintended, or if the recipient enjoys it, or if it’s imposed by someone with no authority. (The last one was illustrated with the example of a boy who teases his younger sister, and she gets back at him by hiding his cricket bat. Is losing his cricket bat punishment, or is it only punishment if one of his parents takes it away?)

We had a good discussion. At the end of the class, one of the boys said he would be moving to a new school, so he wouldn’t be in the class next term. This reduces my class size down to 12 students. Which is much more manageable than the 21 I had last year.

At golf, I did poorly for the first 9 holes, but got my eye in and scored really well on the last 9.

Back home this afternoon I worked on photos and writing up my trip from a couple of weeks ago as a full travel diary – expanding the entries I posted here to add more details and photos.

Oh, I should mention that Comments on a Postcard is running low on submissions. This is the easiest webcomic in the world to submit material for! If you’re reading this, you probably have what it takes to submit some stuff – so please take a look.

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Standards meeting and ethics course

Today I chaired a Standards Australia meeting on photography, following up on the ISO Photography standards meeting held a few weeks ago. This is where I report back to the Australian expert committee on events and discussions from that ISO meeting. We also discuss the standards currently up for ballots and decide what Australia’s vote will be. COVID is still keeping our local meetings virtual, so it was all via Zoom. We had a good attendance today, so that was good.

The other main thing I did today was complete work on my Critical Thinking and Ethics course for Outschool. I’ve submitted the completed course description, but they need to go over it and approve it before it becomes public, which can take a day or two. When it’s ready for students, I’ll let you know.

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Exhausted

I’m feeling really exhausted today. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s the hectic week away last week finally catching up to me. But I woke up this morning and had to struggle to drag myself out of bed. I needed to get up to have breakfast and get ready to go teach my Ethics class. And as I was sitting in the room at the school waiting for the kids to arrive, I just felt drained of energy.

The class went mostly well. I think I have all the kids’ names more or less memorised and matched to faces. I made a couple of mistakes, but correcting those in my mind gives me a full set of matches now, I think. We’ll see next week if I can get them all right. The replacement teacher last week while I was away finished the voting topic with them, so today we started a new topic: Punishment.

This is a long one, we have four weeks on this. It covers the concepts of understanding what punishment is, and whether it’s needed in a society. Today we started with imagining if you had a magic ring of invisibility, and thinking about what you would do, and what other people might do. The kids were all pretty much into the idea that if they had an invisibility ring they would rob banks, and steal stuff, and play pranks on people. So we moved onto the idea that if you can get away with something bad without being punished, would you do it? Or would you still do the “right” thing? Do you think other people would do the right thing if there was no punishment?

And that was basically lesson one of the discussion. Next week we move on to other aspects of the topic. It was a good and lively discussion, but this meant that there was a certain amount of spontaneous chatter that I had to calm down to get attention and focus back on me. We’ll see how it goes next week.

Today I worked more on my planned Ethics course for Outschool. I’m almost at the point of uploading the info and opening the course. Maybe tomorrow.

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