Epistemology

Oddly enough, it’s probably more stressful to teach one class a week than six.

When you’re prepping for a single period, you’ve got way too much time to think about it and worry over what you ought to do and how it could all go wrong. You over-prepare and create way too many expectations for yourself and your students. You tend to be less flexible and often allow what you think should happen take precedence over what is likely to happen naturally. You forget that what actually happens in the classroom is way more important than what you think is going to happen when you’re putting together your lesson plan.

In short, you (and here, of course, I mean me) all too easily let your plan take precedence over your lesson; that’s when the whole magic just collapses under its own weight.

Fortunately, my students yesterday were just too good to let this happen, as they brought to our class sufficient vibrancy and commitment to overcome my over-prepped set of activities I had in store for them.

We were exploring the topic of epistemology, the part of philosophy that deals with the nature of knowledge and truth. First, we did a brief exercise where I have students write down something they (claim they) know to be true; then they write down three reasons they have for knowing it. They then go around the room reading our reasons and see if their classmates can figure out the original claim. This worked pretty well and pretty much everyone even saw the point of the exercise, which is to begin thinking about how we justify claims and what counts as a good reason for something.

I then passed out a strawberry to every student and asked them to write down everything they know about their own berry. This led to a really great conversation about whether we really know anything about the berries at all, given that most of the claims involved the use of our senses. We even wondered whether claims about one’s own subjective state, such as “This berry tastes good to me,” we incorrigible. One student pointed out that you could be having brain surgery while eating a strawberry and the neurologist could be stimulating the taste part of your brain to produce a pleasant sensation, so it wouldn’t be the berry that tasted good to you at all. Excellent!

This was the kind of conversation that allowed me to derail from all the “important” material I had hoped to cover and instead, just do philosophy with the class. Had I been teaching six classes this week instead of just one, I might have remembered to do so earlier.