Islands of peace in a revolution

From the Guardian’s live feed of the uprising in Egypt:

A protester approaches the police to organize a cease-fire for the evening prayer. (Screengrab from Al Jezeera via The Guardian)
Prayer as protest (via The Daily Dish)

And who are the police? Who’s side are they on?

An Egyptian anti-government activist kisses a riot police officer following clashes in Cairo. Photograph: Lefteris Pitarakis/AP (via The Guardian live updates)

It reminds me of this picture from the protests last November in London over university tuition increases:

Schoolgirls join hands to peacefully stop attacks on a police van during student protests in London. Photograph: Demotix/Peter Marshall (via The Guardian)

So some questions:

  • What would it take for you to go out and protest (have you done it before)?
  • What would you do under these circumstances?

“The only time anyone fails is when they are scared to try”

“[My father] used to say it was better to fail through lack of ability than lack of effort,” he says. “He also said fear of failure was something you had to go through because the only time anyone fails is when they are scared to try.”
— Ian Holloway in The Guardian

One of the things I really like about European (and other) soccer leagues is the relegation and promotion system. It encourages competition, and the dream that one day your small town side can make it up the the big leagues. Or as in Blackpool’s case, return to the top after thirty years in the lower divisions.

When they barely qualified for the top English division last year, it was widely expected that they would set records for most goals conceded, and be the first team to be relegated. But they’ve done well enough. They’re well out of the relegation zone at the moment and have impressed, even though they’re still playing in the smallest stadium and have the cheapest team. So their coach, Ian Holloway, knows something about facing potential embarrassment, and the fear of failure.

Keeping with our theme of graphing for this cycle, here is a graph showing the position of Blackpool in the English football leagues. Each league has about 20 teams so the graph shows a range of about four divisions. (From Wikipedia user Dudesleeper).

Moral Development in the Brain

If someone takes something of yours from your locker, does it matter if they intended to steal, or if they grabbed it by mistake because they thought it was their locker? We see there is a moral difference here, because people’s intentions and beliefs matter. An inadvertent mistake is one thing, but intentionally stealing is another.

We can see the difference, but typically, children under six do not. They see both things as just as bad, because they do not consider intentions.

The temporoparetial junctions. Image by the Database Center for Life Science, via Wikimedia Commons.

A recent study (Young et al., 2010) found the part of the brain that seems to be responsible for the consideration of intentions in moral judgment. This part of the brain, the right temporoparietal junction, develops between the ages of six and eleven.

I find this work fascinating because it implies that adolescents may still be developing the ability for deeper moral judgment when they get to middle school. It would help explain why they will sometimes make the argument that if the outcome did no harm then any transgression does not matter; taking something from someone’s locker is not that important if they get caught at it and have to return it.

Just like adolescents have to exercise our abstract thinking skills in order to fully develop and hone them, students probably need to practice and think about what morality means.

I think I’m going to have to figure out a framework for talking about morality for next cycle’s Personal World.

Note: Another interesting article on the role of the temporoparietal junction in meta-cognition.

Uprising in Egypt

(via The Daily Dish)

What protests look like:

See also:

  • Summary of the last two days’ protests.
  • The United States’ support for Egypt.
  • What happens when you’re arrested by the state security service. (warning: contains one quote with vulgar language)

UPDATE: We just watched the video over lunch, and it actually resulted in a very good discussion. Our morning novel discussions have been useful here, in helping us see the multiple perspectives of the actors in the street protests: the protesters and the police. After all, the police have families too.

I gave a little spiel at the beginning, to set the stage and to point out the potentially historical nature of these protests. Democracy spreading through the middle east has huge implications for a country fighting two wars in the region; not to mention the blowback from these conflicts.

The truth of the anger of the protesters in the video seemed to resonate, making poignant what could have appeared farcical. The music and the Kennedy quote also helped my students identify with these events in such a far off place.

We also touched on the role of the U.S. in supporting the Mubarak government, and the potential of the uprising to lead to an anti-US, muslim fundamentalist government (via the Muslim Brotherhood). We still need to talk about what the US should and can do to support democracy in this situation, which is so full of conflicting imperatives.

Extending Thinking with Calvin and Hobbes

My students have been asking to write “book” reports on movies or Dr. Seuss picture books instead of novels. I am not theoretically opposed. Our theme this cycle is literary essays, with a focus on extending our thinking about issues, which can be done to any type of media: books, movies, music or even art for example. A great example is of what can be done is Richard Beck’s series of essays on the theology of Calvin and Hobbes.

… given the fact that the two lead characters are named after John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, Calvin and Hobbes presents a dim view of human nature. … a running theme in Calvin and Hobbes is why virtue is so hard and vice so fun.
–Beck (2008) in The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes, Part 1: Human Nature Chapter 1: “Virtue needs some cheaper thrills”.

Although he’s an experimental psychologist at Abilene Christian University, Beck’s essays are fairly easy to read, and are great in how they analyze the subject work, in this case the Calvin and Hobbes cartoons, while drawing comparisons to other theological texts, from the original Hobbes’ Leviathan to recent analyses by authors like Alan Jacobs.

I think, as a condition for using an alternative to the novel, I’ll require students to read one of Beck’s essays. In fact, maybe I’ll have the entire class read the first one, “Virtue needs some cheaper thrills”, as an example of a literary essay.

The Chrysalids, Godwined

As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.
— Mike Godwin, 1989.

Our daily discussions of The Chrysalids have gone on long enough that Hitler came up. I can’t remember the details, but somehow, it occurred to one of my students that, since we don’t know exactly when the story is set, and given the outstanding question, “Did they ever find Hitler’s body?” what if Hitler turned up in the book.

Sigh.

Quite coincidentally, I ran into this article today, about Hitler’s last bodyguard. Apparently, he’s getting too old to answer all his fan mail. Tennessee gets a mention.

Sigh.

On a final note, the above quote about Godwin’s Law is a nice one to use in a cycle where we’re talking about probability.

Cheers.