I've been thinking of this as an unproductive day, but compared to other unproductive days I've had in the past (e.g. in the grip of depression when getting dressed and eating counted as productivity) it's probably been ok. I've
-Put together my first lesson plan for the new teaching gig and made a handout
-Made an activity lucky dip - each week I'm going to get a student to pull a card out with instructions to prepare for the next seminar.
-Came up with guidelines for panel discussions, one of the possible activities
-Spent a bit of time nosing around journals trying to find a good home for my paper
-Put the recycling out
-Emptied one of the large boxes of random in my study
-Cleaned the downstairs loo so I have somewhere nice to wee and poo when I am being more productive
-Ran and emptied the dishwasher so I have clean things to eat with when I am being more productive

Today was my lesser teaching day (as in two seminars to tomorrow's three). I decided to take the brave terrifying positively foolhardy slightly unusual step of not taking in a thermos of coffee to keep me going. I had two cups of coffee in the morning before going out - one very early when Ducki got up and made me one, then another after a couple of hours work. I GASP bought a cup from one of the many more-or-less branded Costa outlets around campus in my break, and sat in the cafe reading a work-y book.

Both seminars were fine, if a bit sparsely attended. The students responded well to being offered mince pies. I'll miss the little bastards dears, hope I get some of the same ones next semester. Not just because I want to reap the rewards of spending the last 9 weeks trying to instill good work habits in them!

Then I managed to finish my summary of the literature on alter-globalisation movements. A day later than I'd have liked, but that's not so awful.

One of my groups has a bit of a communication problem. That is to say, only a small number of them are inclined to communicate, particularly when I am asking them to communicate knowledge of the topic. There's a lot of silence, and a lot of certain people's voices (nobody being particularly obnoxious - in fact one has told me he doesn't like being the most vocal person there - but those are often the only ones who feel like talking without a LOT of prodding). Last week I broke the ice a little bit by having an exercise where everyone has to speak, albeit briefly, and that loosened a few tongues.* However, it led to situations where half a dozen people started to speak, each coming out with the first part of a sentence, and the loudest got to finish what they were saying. I very rarely have a word with groups about communication and behaviour, but last week I did. (Trying to be positive - something like 'it's good that everyone is talking, let's improve on that by not all doing so at once') And the idea of something like the 'talking stick' was mooted. Now, no way am I going to let these guys wield sticks. My first thought was a tennis ball, but again, they could do a lot of damage to each other and the room with that. One student suggested a teddy bear. I am NOT carrying one of those around campus. A quick look in Poundstretcher on the way to the bus stop (I'd forgotten about it until I was travelling in today) showed a distinct lack of promise - no foam tennis balls, beanbags, nerf balls or whatever. So I picked up the next best thing - a ball of jazzy-looking yarn.**

Fortunately or otherwise, I didn't get to use it.Firstly, when we got to the classroom it was set up with rows of desks like an exam hall - not conducive to discussion even with the chattiest group. Sure, we could have moved it back to the normal setup (a rectangular table), but I decided instead to just shove the tables to the side and get the chairs in a circle. I think this helped a bit in terms of how students interacted - the absence of a large wooden barrier sometimes does that. I've used the tactic with quiet or apathetic groups before with reasonable effect. Secondly, I had the ball of yarn next to me and made a point of displaying it, giving it the title of 'weapon of mass communication' and explaining that I was going to randomly throw it at someone if there was a long silence or regulate with it if they all spoke at once.I think they may have felt that their bluff was called. I'm taking the yarn in again next week just to be on the safe side...


*Just realised I didn't blog this last week. The exercise is called 'spectrum lines' or the position game, and will be familiar to most people who've participated in a longer consensus decision-making session. Basically, each person physically takes a position on the issue at hand - in this case, lined up against the classroom wall, determinists near the door and libertarians near the window. Yes I do get up and stand in line. When used pedagogically, everyone is invited to justify their position. I'd been especially looking forward to it with this group precisely because of the silence issue.
**A bit of a waste of 99p as I have loads of those at home already, if only I'd thought of it before going out

In my classes today we discussed illustrious personages such as Stanley Milgram, Fred West, and scariest of all Rebecca Wade (in the context of riots outside alleged paedophiles' houses). Milgram was pretty early on, and I think he's going to be a standard example in classes on moral responsibility - it's a situation where people could justifiably claim they were causally determined by another agent to do something apparently immoral (electrocute someone - thankfully it was actually an actor behind the screen), but where they were also making a reasoned response to circumstances (assuming none of them electrocuted people to death for a hobby outside that scenario). The ability to do the latter suggests that the person has some free will and is morally responsible for their act.

On the nonce-hunting front, the purpose was to give a concrete example of why we might want to take moral anger out of criminal justice. Dirk Pereboom sees this as a major advantage of removing free will (which he doesn't believe we have or have need of) and by extension moral responsibility from the equation. The debate in class today was whether moral anger, outrage, repugnance etc was a destructive force in dealing with crime or a necessary element in telling right from wrong.

Fred West only came up in the second of today's two classes, I'm not sure I'll make regular use of that example, but I was getting a bit desperate to convey how someone's arguably immoral and definitely harmful to others acts might be causally determined by their past. I'm not convinced by that view, but can give it some credence - the students weren't even doing that, at least bringing serial killing into the equation focuses their attention...

Oh, and I also managed to derive some innuendo from reading up on the Zapatistas. Did you know members of the EZLN army have to ask their commander's permission to have sex? The idea being that the commander then knows two people will be indisposed if there is an attack, so s/he needs to be sure they are not skiving defensive duties to go and shag. Unfortunately - or fortunately for me since corrections-related stuff brings about a need for light relief wherever I can get it - Subcommandante Marcos chose to phrase this as 'I need to find someone to cover their positions.' Which in context sounds a bit dodgy...

I am wondering, not 100% seriously it has to be said, about doing some sort of risk assessment to avoid traumatising my students. I should probably let on that, contrary to whatever image I might have, I don't actually *do* anything nasty to them. It's more that when we get onto the more 'moral' areas (as opposed to whether we exist, nobody seems too scared by the thought that they might be dreaming or a brain in a vat) the concrete examples start flying, and they get nasty. Today's topic was freedom and determinism, with a bit of foreshadowing for next week's on free will (or the lack of it) and moral responsibility. So I used a chain of events example, the circumstances that pushed Gavrilo Princip to pull the trigger, causing the first world war and by extension the second and possibly the Cold War. Some of the students were concerned that determinism seemed to be making it ok that horrible things had happened. so I played devils advocate (standard practice if I have a group who all agree on a point of view) and asked whether determinism could at least provide some sort of consolation because you couldn't stop it. So by that point we'd had a fill of war crimes, but needed a new concrete example. The one I came up with was the difference between hitting someone with a car (assuming we're within the speed limit and the brakes are properly maintained, ok I forgot I was talking to people who've just left high school but whatever) and with a train (far less likely to stop in time, forget the exact distance - it was roughly similar to the distance between the two level crossings in my village) (BTW I didn't manage to incorporate combine harvesters, mad raging bulls or slurry lagoons into the conversation, so some of the safety lessons I had to sit through in my younger days remain wasted) Then for some variety we got back onto the Nazis and types of resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, which sadly for my students I'd been reading about for non-work purposes.

At some point in proceedings one of the girls left the room to go to the toilet, without doing anything daft like putting her hand up to let me know. So I spent the duration of her lavatorial visit (not short, because the loos in that building hardly ever seem to be conveniently located and you may have to go further to get one in a decent condition - don't ask me for criteria...) in a state of mild and thankfully concealed panic that I'd inspired someone to go out to cry or throw up. I was sometimes known to have that response as an undergraduate, and I'd signed up for a course on fascism knowing what we were likely to have to read, see and discuss. I didn't innocently blunder into intro to philosophy and stumble across the unpleasantness! Luckily this particular person just needed to wee.

So yes, I am semi-seriously considering either handing out questionnaires to investigate people's sensitivities (not so useful because I can't do much about what other students will bring up when I ask them for examples) or else disclaimers to say it isn't my responsibility if someone is freaked out by the subject matter. Or I may wait until next term when we look at abortion...