Thinkers' Stories Teacher Notes2 - thephilosophyman.com

Thinkers’ Stories

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Can!you!prove!you!are!real!–!or!is!your!brain!sitting!in!a!mysterious!building,!hooked!up!to!a!powerful!computer?!Is!letting!someone!fall!to!his!death!any!less!evil!than!giving!him!a!gentle!push?!And!what!is!that!extraordinary!gibberish!on!the!final!track!all!about?!

Thinkers’!Stories!is!compendium!of!thought!provoking!stories,!riddles,!brainteasers!and!questions!brought!together!to!get!your!pupils!thinking.!Complied!and!presented!by!Jason!Buckley,!a!philosophy!for!children!specialist,!the!DVD!is!simply!presented!with!the!stories!told,!not!read,!directly!to!camera.!

You!can!use!the!stories!by!themselves!to!develop!thinking!and!discussion!skills,!within!a!philosophy!club,!or!as!part!of!a!programme!to!launch!P4C!(Philosophy!for!Children)!in!your!school.!Teaching!notes!and!discussion!plans!are!included,!along!with!suggestions!for!taking!pupils’!thinking!skills!further.!

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• Open!ended!questions!• Stimulates!imagination!• Engagement!through!stories!• HigherPorder!thinking!skills!• Stretching!for!able!and!gifted!pupils!

[email protected]!

01245!830123!!

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Contents

Introduction

Stories That Ask You Questions

Cannibal Island

Are You Where You Think You Are?

The Porculent Potholer

The Evil Twins and the Demon Drink

The Evil Twins and the Lift That Wasn’t There

Impersonation

The Survival Lottery

Your Teacher as a Slave

The Crowded Lifeboat

The Honesty Box

Ladies First

Justice or Survival

A Story about Asking Questions– Diner or Dinner?

Stories to Make You Ask Questions

The Fairest Teacher of Them All

The Ring of Gyges

Bodkin

The Emerald

Thinkers’ Teasers

Thinkers’ Riddles

Thinkers’ Questions

Something Very Complicated

Something Very Weird

Bibliography

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Introduction You can use this DVD for stand-alone philosophy sessions, as part of a unit of work for English, for a philosophy club, or for a programme to introduce philosophy for children (P4C).

This DVD and notes do not assume knowledge of P4C pedagogy, but there are two simple steps that are easy to adopt, and that are enough to give a very different feel to a session. One is, if you can, get your class sitting in a circle. Listening to the backs of other people’s heads isn’t easy. The other is, as far as possible, for each speaker to choose the next rather than you choosing. These two simple changes begin to shift the children’s away from you and turn it into their enquiry rather than your lesson.

The best way to use this DVD is to watch a track, have a think about it, and then read the brief notes in this guide. They will give you some follow-up questions and leading ideas.

The drive of the DVD is towards pupils formulating their own juicy, philosophical questions for discussion. The stories in the first section have questions at the end; then there’s a scenario to get them into the habit of creating interesting questions; and then in the four “Stories to Make You Ask Questions”, it’s over to them to decide on the focus for discussion. This is very much the P4C way of working – giving children a stimulus to get them thinking, then asking them to formulate and vote for questions that are interesting and fruitful objects of enquiry.

The additional teasers, riddles and stand-alone questions are good for ten minute slots, perhaps during form time or at the end of the day. Solving such puzzles helps build collaborative thinking.

I hope it whets your appetite for philosophy, and that you’ll want to take your interest further. I am gradually adding to the teaching guides and resources available via www.thephilosophyman.com, and you can also contact me about staff training and pupil workshops.

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Stories That Ask You Questions

The stories in this section take traditional problems and questions of philosophy and present them through scenarios that are easy to understand, often with a “Horrible Histories”-style gruesome edge to capture interest. At the end of each story, I pose a question, and the teaching notes provide you with some ideas for guiding the discussion.

The first of these stories is based on the opening chapter of Stephen Laws’ “The Philosophy Files”. It was retelling chapters of that book during the Year 7 form time slot that got me back into philosophy for children.

These scenarios are great for getting children engaged, but steer the discussion towards the ethics of the situation, or the big ideas involved – and not practical suggestions for wriggling out of the problem. In “Cannibal Island”, for example, you can have a few minutes for imaginative suggestions about pretending you’re poisonous or that troops are standing by to rescue you; but at some point, the children need to recognise that they will have to convince the cannibals it is wrong to eat them, and begin to construct appropriate arguments.

Don’t worry too much about where the discussion goes – but encourage building on each other’s ideas so that the discussion goes somewhere rather than being a series of isolated points.

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Cannibal Island

Story Summary A solo explorer beaches his boat on what he thinks is an uninhabited island. He hears voices coming along the beach, and overhears them discussing how to cook him. He realises they are cannibals but before he can escape, they overpower him and tie him to a palm tree.

Racking his brains for a way to escape, he first tries to trick them into thinking they will catch a nasty disease, then to bribe them. When these attempts fail, he realises his only hope is to convince them that it is wrong to eat people.

Now you are in the story... you are the explorer. What can you say to convince the cannibals that it is wrong to eat human beings?

Extra Script Once you have heard some initial arguments, you can return to the story.

Just as you feel you are beginning to persuade them, one of the cannibals finds a ham sandwich in your lunchbox. If it’s OK for you to eat pig, surely it must be OK for them to eat you?

Facilitator Notes This story is based on one in Stephen Law’s excellent book, The Philosophy Files. It works best if you can continue the role of the cannibal, challenging them to refine their arguments until they eventually escape the pot... or not. Common arguments and replies...

It’s wrong to eat your own kind. Pigs don’t eat pigs – but there may be other examples from the natural world that do. Does something being natural or unnatural make it right or wrong? And what if they say their kind is limited to people from the island, not foreign explorers - making you fair game?

What makes people special?/Things people can do that pigs can’t. Language, culture, intelligence, knowing you have a future. But what about things pigs can do you can’t? Would a pig agree that humans are more important?

Pigs are bred to be eaten. OK – we won’t eat you... we’ll breed from you and eat your children... that alright? The pig was already dead/ I didn’t kill it. Can you shake off responsibility for something if you are the one that benefits from it in the end?

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Are You Where You Think You Are?

Story Summary This is a story about you – a rather unpleasant one. It takes place in a mysterious building somewhere near you. At some time yesterday, you were abducted – and now you, or a part of you, is in that building. I’ll spare you the gruesome details, because they’ve wiped your memories anyway.

All that remains of you is your brain, which is floating in a pool of jelly to keep it moist and healthy. Going into your brain where the nerves use to connect from your eyes and ears and other senses are bundles of wires. Other wires come out from the parts of your brain that used to send messages to your arms and legs.

All the wires are connected to an enormously powerful supercomputer which is running a perfect simulation of the world you knew. So the people around are not your real classmates, but virtual classmates who are part of the simulation. The chair you are sitting on is not your real chair, and the bottom sitting on it is not your real bottom but the virtual bottom of your virtual body.

Can you prove that you and everything around you are real, and that this is not just a simulation?

Facilitator Notes This is a variation on Descartes Meditations, in which the philosopher imagines that “some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment."

All practical attempts to prove their reality, (heartbeats, memories, etc.) can be challenged with the same response, that they are all part of the simulation. So if they pinch themselves, they will feel virtual pain; and if they pinch eachother, their virtual teacher will give them a virtual telling off, which will feel the same (not virtually the same) as a real one!

To put the same problem in a different perspective, have you ever had a dream in which you thought you woke up, only to discover later that you were still in a dream? If so, how can you be completely certain that you are not in a dream now?

You can then invite them to think what they can be absolutely certain about, even if they can’t be completely sure they are not in a virtual reality game – sooner or later, they will hit on the idea that if they are thinking, they must exist – so at least there is something they know for certain.

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The Porculent* Potholer Story Summary

You are on caving day during an adventure holiday. It starts to rain heavily, and the water levels in the cave system start to rise. You attempt to leave, but a particularly fat potholer gets stuck in the exit hole.

He will eventually be rescued, as his face is sticking out into the open air. Behind him, the five of you will soon drown as the waters rise.

Someone has brought some dynamite with them to blow up rockfalls. Do you use it to blast him out of the way, or accept your fate, drown and leave him to be rescued.

Facilitator Notes

This is based on a “thought experiment” by philosopher Philippa Foot. Like any thought experiment, the basic rule is that you have an either-or choice. Allow a few minutes of ingenious alternatives but the bottom line is that if they do not blow him up, they will die as the waters rise, while he will eventually be rescued; if they do blow him up, they will live and he will die. No middle ground.

If they decide they should blow him up, would it be murder? Could they argue it was self-defence? Does it make a difference that they don’t want him to die, but it cannot be helped? This is a tenuous application of the “doctrine of double effect” – his death is an unintended but foreseen consequence of blowing him up!

How ought they to feel afterwards if they blew him up? Should they still feel guilty even if it was the right thing to do? Following this with “The Survival Lottery” brings out some interesting thinking.

Discussion about the discussion There’s an interesting extra layer to thinking about this story. Is it OK to have a story where someone being fat is a source of (rather dark) humour? It would almost certainly be unacceptable to have a story where someone’s race or gender was used in the same way. Is being fat any different? People will sometimes argue that it’s something you can change – but why should that make a difference? And does that mean it’s OK to make jokes about someone’s religion, since they can change that too?

*If I know what “porculent” means, and so do you, does that make it a word? You could get pupils to guess what it means before they hear the track

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The Evil Twins and the Demon Drink

Story Summary Zak and Zeb, the evil twins, are out at the pub. Zak has three pints, Zeb has five. Both are well over the drink drive limit, but that doesn’t stop them getting behind the wheels of their cars. Zeb drives home first and makes it home without causing an accident. Zak follows, but hits a pedestrian and breaks both his legs.

Which of the twins is the more evil? Zeb for drinking five pints and driving, although he hasn’t cause an accident, or Zak for drinking three and causing serious injury.

Extra Script What if Zak left before Zeb, and it was only because his brother had already knocked the pedestrian into the ditch that Zeb did not run him over and kill him?

Facilitator Notes

At first sight, it might seem obvious that drink driving that results in injury is worse. If you focus on the outcome of the two actions, it’s no contest.

But what if, instead of looking at the result, you look back to the start – the behaviour of the two drinkers. Both are breaking the law and being reckless and irresponsible – but surely the one who drinks five pints is even worse by the same criteria?

Zeb, who drank five pints, is arguably the worse person but has been lucky not to cause an accident. But which would and should the law punish more harshly?

This can lead on to a wider discussion about what makes something right or wrong – is it the result, or the intention at the time? Can you be a good person by accident, or is it something you have to do on purpose? Should a (lucky/unlucky?) person who fails to murder his victim receive a lighter punishment?

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The Evil Twins and the Lift That Wasn’t There

Story Summary

A class at a school had two sets of twins. Paul and Stan who were good twins, and Zak and Zeb who were evil twins. Zak and Zeb bullied Paul and Stan in every way you can imagine.

Years later, Stan and Paul were on holiday in Cuba, in a rickety old hotel where lots of things didn’t work properly. To their horror, Zak and Zeb arrived and took the room next door.

One of the things in the hotel that didn’t work was the lift. The doors to one of the lifts on the tenth floor were always open, but the lift was usually on the ground floor. So if you didn’t know that lift wasn’t working, you could step in to empty space and fall to your death.

One day, Paul saw Zak standing by the liftshaft and, remembering all the bullying, gave hima gentle push to his death. An hour later, Stan saw Zeb about to walk into the lift that wasn’t there. He thought for a moment about whether to put out his hand to save him, but decided not to, and Zeb fell ten floors and crumpled to death on his brother.

Which was worse, or were they just as bad? Paul who pushed, or Stan who stood still?

Facilitator Notes

The main theme of this story is the action/omission question. Can not doing something be just as blameworthy as doing something, if it has the same effect? If the intention in both cases is that someone dies, aren’t they equally bad?

Legally, would one be murder but the other not? Can something be wrong morally even if it’s not illegal?

Does it make a difference that in one case, the twin was going to die anyway? Does “fate” come into it?

What counts as a “cause” is relevant here. In pushing Zak, does Paul cause his death? Is it the broken lift that causes Zeb’s death? But Zak would still be alive if the lift had been working, even if Paul had still pushed him. So isn’t the broken lift the cause of his death too?

Working with older children, you might bring in the applied ethics of end-of-life care: doctors can withdraw treatment but not actively cause death. Is that right, or is it a cop-out? Or consider a classroom setting – how different is actively bullying someone to allowing someone to be bullied? If you could stop something, and don’t, are you responsible for it?

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Impersonation

Story Summary

You have been emailing your friend Sally over the web for years, but today is the first time you are going to meet face to face – you haven’t even seen a picture of her, as your friend has said she is too shy and you wouldn’t like her if you knew what she looked like.

You’ve always said that what matters to you is the sense of humour you share and the friendly banter you enjoy.

When you turn up to her flat, though, you are shocked to discover that Sally is not a human being at all, but a computer.

You feel deceived, but on reflection you wonder if it should matter if Sally is a computer. Isn;t it her personality that should matter?

Facilitator Notes

This is a fictionalisation of the famous “Turing Test”. Turing, the brilliant mathematician whose early computers helped crack the Nazis Enigma code during World War II, argued that a computer that was indistinguishable from a human in a typed conversation would be intelligent.

Would such a machine be possible? Could it ever reach a human level of intelligence? Could it acquire emotions, desires or humour, or perhaps have a soul? Would not having a body would make a computer irretrievably different to a human being?

You might argue that the deceitfulness involved disqualifies Sally from friendship – but if you are shocked about her being a computer, doesn’t that show she was right to keep it a secret? Would there be some advantages to having a computer as a friend rather than another human being? How would you react in 40 years time if your son or daughter brought back a new best friend from school, and it turned out to be a robot?

There are all sorts of avenues you can take this on, including testing out some of the natural language avatars on the web. It can bring out a lot of interesting stuff about language – ambiguity, how humour works; or about what it is to be human.

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The Survival Lottery Story Summary

40 years from now, you have gone into politics and become the Minister for Health. During this time, medical advances have made transplant surgery very successful, so that from one healthy body at least five lives can be saved. But improvements in car safety have also meant that fewer people are dying in accidents, so there is a shortage of donor organs.

A proposal from MI13 comes across your desk. They have a plan to “disappear” healthy people who have no friends or family, so that the organs of each one can be harvested to save five lives.

Facilitator Notes

The maths of lives saved is the same as with the Porculent Potholer – take one to save five. But whereas, on average, people’s intuitions say blow up the potholer, they are usually aghast at the idea of a random, innocent person dying to save the lives of five others.

How can it be OK to blow up the potholer, but would bad to carve up people for their organs, even if the number of lives saved would be the same? Is the potholer to blame in a way the “donor” is not?

Would it make a difference if the “donor” being carved up for his organs was willing? Someone who gave his life to save five others would be praised. Should someone who refused to be condemned as selfish? If something is good, surely you ought to do it? Or are some good things optional?

Does it make a difference what sort of people are the donor and those that are saved? Or are all lives worth exactly the same?

What if, instead of having to give up all your organs, you could save five lives by donating a modest sum to charity? Is that already the case?

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Your Teacher As A Slave Story Summary

Years from now, you have done very well for yourself and are a rich and successful business person. Your teacher, meanwhile, has fallen on hard times, and comes to you with an unusual proposal. They want to sell themself to you as a slave, and use the money you pay to buy them to provide for their family. They are too proud to accept your charity, so the choice is either to buy them or leave them in poverty.

Facilitator Notes

This is an example where one principle can pull you in different directions. Most people agree that, at least for adults, most aspects of how they live their lives should be their own choice. That would make slavery a bad thing which should be prohibited. But if someone wants to sell himself into slavery, would the same principle argue he should be able to!

This question can work well if you put in a spirited defence of your right to sell yourself as a slave - unless your class are rather taken with the idea!. It forces them to scrutinise a belief that is taken for granted.

Has slavery just got a bad press, because it is associated with oppression? Perhaps the fact that, once the choice to become a slave has been made, it would preclude any further choices, is sufficient counterargument. Another is that people should not be free to do things that will harm them (take drugs, drive without a seatbelt and so on)... but isn’t it patronising to say that they cannot judge for themselves? Or are some decisions so obviously wrong that, if someone makes them, they must be mad (and therefore incapable of taking the decision reasonably)? But if it was good enough for the Romans...

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The Crowded Lifeboat Story Summary After your boat sinks at sea, you are left sharing the last lifeboat with an old man. A mother with infant twins struggles towards you, desperately treading water to keep them afloat.

Should you give up your place to save her and her two children, or is it better to push the old man out instead?

Facilitator Notes

This story brings out another of those double-edged principle. Doing the moral maths, sacrificing one life to save three others – especially infants with their whole lives ahead of them – seems a noble thing to do. But on a finer calculation, why not push out the old man, who has less of his life left to live?

Could you argue that infant twins are less important? – they don’t yet have an idea of what they want to do in the world, so death will not frustrate so many plans. A much richer set of memories and experiences will die with the old man. Or are all lives, whatever their age, worth exactly the same in all circumstances?

What about choice – might it be best if he threw himself out, but worst if you threw him out?

Then again, if things were different, it would seem quite wrong to throw out the mother and twins to make way for him – so why should three lives be lost just because chance decreed that he got there first?

Shouldn’t you overcome your squeamishness and throw the old man overboard in order to make the best out of a bad situation?

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The Honesty Box  

Story Summary

The owner of a small business that supplies bagels to office blocks on an “honesty box” system notices something odd. The higher up a building the box of bagels is, the more bagels get taken without someone paying for them.

Facilitator Notes

This is taken from the story of “Bagel Man” in the provocative book “Freakonomics”. The bagel man’s own theory on the correlation between which floor customers were on, and how consistent they were in paying for bagels, was that the better paid executives were on the top and that they had a greater sense of entitlement, and so paid up less frequently.

This can lead to an interesting enquiry where empirical research can be sought out. However, there are alternative explanations and this was not a formal study – maybe it was such an insignificant amount of money to them that they didn’t notice. How many office blocks would you need to do the experiment in to reach a reliable conclusion? What evidence might you look for to support or contradict the hypothesis that rich people are greedy? If they are, does being rich make you greedy, or does being greedy help you get rich? What counterexamples are there?

The deeper question is why do we do the right thing when nobody is watching? Bagel man found people did, on average 89% of the time. Nature, nurture, conscience? But why have a conscience – isn’t it a bit of a nuisance? What if you were the only person who didn’t? And why do some children say you are more likely to do the right thing when nobody’s watching...

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Ladies First Story Summary If you have ever seen a theatre during an interval, you’ll notice that the ladies loos always have the longer queue. Yet new buildings tend to be built with the same amount of space given over to toilets for each gender. Wouldn’t it be fairer to give more space to ladies loos so the queues ended up the same length?

This question illustrates the difference between the two main ways of looking at equality. It can lead on to interesting discussions about fairness in the classroom and the wider world.

Facilitator Notes

This question illustrates the difference between the two main ways of looking at equality. It can lead on to interesting discussions about fairness in the classroom and the wider world.

If you think that it’s fair to put the same resources into both men’s and women’s facilities (as generally happens), you perhaps side with equality of opportunity – sharing resources evenly, even though you know this will lead to different outcomes.

If you think that more space should be given to ladies loos so that the queues end up the same length, you are aiming for equality of outcome – distributing resources unevenly between people so that the end result is the same for all. As Marx would have it, “from each according to his abilities to each according to his needs” – or her needs, in this case by some accounts for a visit of an average of 89 seconds, versus 39 seconds for men.

Do architects even think about this issue? If not, why not? And is it likely to change as women become better represented at the higher levels of management and the professions?

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Justice or Survival  

Story Summary

Prosecutors gather information about alleged crimes and decide whether or not there is enough evidence to accuse somebody.

Imagine you are the prosecutor for the International Criminal Court. You have evidence that the president of a country has been authorising attacks on some of his own people, because they belong to a different race.

But you also know that if you issue a warrant for his arrest, he will ban aid organisations from his country, which may make life worse for people who are already suffering from his regime.

Facilitator Notes

This dilemma was a real one for the International Criminal Court in early 2009. It issued an international warrant for the arrest of Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for crimes against humanity in Darfur. In response, thirteen aid organisations working in the area were expelled.

This dilemma brings into conflict the two main camps of ethics. In deontological ethics, doing the right thing is about following the rules – in this case, that those who are suspected of being responsible for the deliberate deaths of thousands of innocents should be brought to justice. In consequentialist ethics, the rightness of an action is judged by its effects – on the face of it, in this case, a worsening of the day-to-day lives of millions of displaced people.

But which consequences do you have to take into account? If war crimes can be committed with impunity, will that lead to worse crimes in the future? Is including the consequences threatened by a wicked regime an invitation to be held to ransom (don’t call me to account for what I’ve done, or I’ll do something worse)? What are the consequences of not enforcing rules, and what rules do you need about weighing consequences?

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Diner or Dinner?

Story Summary

This story acts a bridge to the final group of stories where pupils need to generate questions themselves. The “contestants” will have to demonstrate that they deserve to be diners by generating lots of interesting questions, then voting for the one they think is going to allow them to sustain a discussion that will impress their alien hosts.

Facilitator Notes

This story acts a bridge to the final group of stories where pupils need to generate questions themselves. The “contestants” will have to demonstrate that they deserve to be diners by generating lots of interesting questions, then voting for the one they think is going to allow them to sustain a discussion that will impress their alien hosts.

The criteria the aliens have are, conveniently, the same as the advice given for formulating questions for enquiry in Philosophy for Children sessions. Give plenty of time to generate questions without being critical about one another’s ideas, and then edit out any they think science will have solved within 500 years – the aliens are centuries ahead of earth.

Remind them of some of the questions they explored in connection with the earlier stories. Have them think about which ones led to the most interesting discussions and what it was about the questions that helped. Here are some hints for identifying “juicy” questions that will be fruitful for philosophical enquiry.

Suitable questions. . .

..are conceptually rich.

…use big ideas such as fairness, justice, meaning, purpose etc.

...may use why, should.

...may search for meanings or definitions

...may be controversial

...can be closed (yes/no) if the reasons why are open to argument.

...have meaning for the questioners – relevance to their everyday lives, or to things that are important to them

...can be playful or witty as they are easy to remember

Unsuitable questions. . .

...may be simply factual

Writing a factual question on one side of a sheet and a philosophical question on the other shows this distinction.

...may be speculative

“Where do the aliens live?” is just a question for the imagination

...may be questions of taste -about which there can be no dispute.

...have easy answers on which most would agree

…are tangled and unclear

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Stories To Make You Ask Questions

With this section, knowledge of the P4C method of teaching will be a real help to you in getting the most out of the stories. After they have seen the track and have had some time to discuss the story itself, you need to get them to devise, probably in small groups, their own juicy, philosophical questions in response to the story. Then have a vote for one to discuss.

You can get information about P4C from www.p4c.com, or by signing up to my bulletin.

It can be helpful to do a “concept pool” first – where you brainstorm the big ideas e.g. fairness, equality, same, different, rich, poor and use the resulting list as a word bank for generating questions.

Another useful tip is that the questions, while they should be connected to the story, should rarely be about the story. Often you can make a textual question into a philosophical one by making it more general. So, with the “Fairest Teacher” story, “Why did Albert want to be a teacher?” could become “What else matters in a job apart from money?” which could lead to an interesting enquiry that would consider how work contributes to leading a good life.

If you use the DVD in form time, you could watch the story, create questions and vote in one session and set about answering it in another – which gives you time to think of questions to help the enquiry along.

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The Fairest Teacher of Them All? Story Summary

Albert is a banker who grows frustrated with the inequality between his rich clients and the poor people he sometimes sees on the streets. So he retrains as a teacher, and when he visits “your school”, he tries to treat everyone the same – exactly the same.

Facilitator Notes

Before using this story, I usually do an exercise in unfair discrimination. I might select the three girls with pink rucksacks to be my “chocolate tasters” and find out whether a bag of Maltesers are better crunched or allowed to dissolve slowly on the tongue. Then I’ll ask if anyone has any complaints about how I have started the session. Of course, I’m being unfair by treating people differently, whereas the teacher in the story is unfair in treating everyone the same.

This story often yields conceptually rich questions about fairness and equality. Typical questions are “Is it fair to treat everyone the same?” Pupils will often relate the question to school experience, so it can be a sensitive topic.

Enquiries often proceed to consider the kinds of differences that shouldn’t permit you to treat people differently (race, for example) and those that sometimes do (how people act, their personalities, whether you are friends). Criteria can be created for when and how it is OK to treat people differently, and why some differences “count” and others don’t.

The full enquiry plan for this session is in the first issue of the free email bulletin – subscribe at www.thephilosophyman.com

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The Ring of Gyges Story Summary Survives an earthquake and discovers that it has opened a passage to an ancient tomb. In it, he finds a ring which has the power to make him invisible at will. He uses it to take over the throne, and he and his queen live happily ever after.

Facilitator Notes

This story was already old when it featured in Plato’s Republic in the 4th century BCE, and the idea will be familiar to any Lord of the Rings fans.

What would you do with such a ring? In Plato’s dialogue, Glaucon tells the story and then imagines that there are two such rings. One is given to a just and one to an unjust man. The unjust man would take what he wanted and kill who he chose; and Glaucon contends that the just man would do the same: that all men know in their hearts that injustice is more profitable, and anyone who failed to take full advantage of the ring would be thought an idiot.

This theme of the story invites questions about abuse of power, and whether people are naturally god or bad; or whether you can live “happily ever after” if you are a bad person. However, groups are quite often drawn to the question of whether it is wrong to steal from the dead. If it is, why is it? Who is being harmed? If people can have rights after they die, can they have them before they are born?

Another angle: is it right to talk about people behind their backs? The reflex answer is no...but what would it be like if nobody ever said anything about anybody they wouldn’t want them to hear...?

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Bodkin Story Summary

Bodkin wants to live forever. He asks a succession of people how to do so, and each passes him onto the next. He lives for hundreds of years with the Old Man of The Mountain, but eventually wants to see his old home. He travels back to find everything has changed; on his sad return back to the mountain, death finally catches up with him.

Facilitator Notes

This story, with its themes of mortality and fate, might seem heavy going, but I was introduced to it by someone who has used it from Year 3 upwards to great effect. Children show surprising maturity and resilience in discussing the subject of death, although it’s obviously not one for the recently bereaved.

Can you escape your fate? This invites further questions about how much control you have in your life, the part that luck plays, and whether fate is controlled by somebody else.

Would living forever be boring? What if it was only you that did? What If everyone did? Would that mean no new children? Would everything end up staying the same? What about heaven – would that get boring? If not, how not?

The story, which is drawn from folklore, (and also features in a book by Selina Hastings) has layers of interest which are worth revisiting in the enquiry. Has the old man of the forest cut down the tree himself? Why doesn’t the old man of the lake stop drinking it? Would the mountain have lasted forever? And then there’s the poignancy of Bodkin, moved by pity, getting down from his horse...

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The Emerald Story Summary

A poor emerald miner scratches a living at the bottom of a volcano. His child becomes sick, and he can’t afford the medicine to help him. Then he finds a huge emerald. But his troubkes are not over. Traders try and cheat him into accepting a low price, and so he sets off to sell the stone himself. But tragedy strikes, and he ends up throwing the stone back into the volcano from which it came.

Facilitator Notes

This is a rather pale imitation of John Steinbeck’s intense, fairytale-like short novel, “The Pearl”, which I recommend.

Questions coming out of this story are unpredictable, which is why it is a good one to use when you and the group are confident about creating and tackling tough questions. There are issues of escaping your fate, the gap between rich and poor, what makes a fair price, whether you are born to a particular role in life, the meaning of names, and (more common than the rest) whether you need to be rich to be happy.

If your group is sat in a circle, as a warm-up you could play “Philosopher’s Fruit Salad” with this series of questions. If someone’s answer is “yes”, they should stand up and swap places.

Do you have to be rich to be happy?

Can a rich person be happy surrounded by poor people? Should they be happy?

Can a poor person be happy surrounded by rich people? Should they be happy?

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Thinkers’ Teasers

The first five are all “assumption” teasers. The listener adds to his own mental picture something that has not been said, or unconsciously chooses one meaning for a word or phrase that can be understood differently, and that throws him off the scent.

After they guess, it’s worth getting them to think about how the riddle works.

1. The horse is called Wednesday. Ambiguity of “on”.

2. There are twenty sick sheep (not twenty-six sheep) in the field. Ambiguity of spoken rather than written language – could a riddle work in reverse that you could only write down?

3. It’s daylight! Repetition of the word “black” creates an image in the mind.

4. The surgeon is a woman. Is this a sexist assumption? Or a reasonable one on present probability? Also the use of lots of masculine language (He, son, father, man) is distracting.

5. There are still window frames and door frames, it’s just the windows and doors have gone.

When you have done a few of these, it’s worth exploring the nature of an assumption: an idea that a thought relies on but which nobody has said.

For example, what are the assumptions in the following arguments?

I gave John an invitation to my party, but he’s going to Mickey’s instead. So he must like Mickey more than me.

If you went to bed earlier, you wouldn’t be so tired by the end of the school day.

If you have a good job then you get to drive a nice car and own a big house.

6. This is a bit like a paradox: if the information they find isn’t useless, they can’t join; and if it is useless, they can use it to join the society, so it isn’t useless!

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Thinkers’ Riddles Riddles are a good way to encourage speculative, risk-taking thinking. Rather than a barrage of wild guesses, you can make it an exercise in giving reasons to back up opinions by only accepting guesses that are accompanied by a reason. The answers to both riddles are on page 32. You can drip feed clues to them, and then get them to think if their guesses are consistent with the clues. Once they have the answer, get them to work out how it fits each line.

Pupils may want to share their own riddles and brainteasers, which is a good confidence builder. Writing riddles or “What Am I?” poems can be an enjoyable follow up activity.

Polite request: please do not put either of these riddles or their solutions up on the internet, as they are original ones and at the moment nobody can cheat and find the answers!

First, none at all. Big and short when you are small. Long and small as you grow tall. Big and long as old age falls. Last, none at all.

Clues: it’s not a part of the body; they are around you now; how can something go from big to small at the same time as it goes from short to long?

I am often a killer But will never be punished I bring lovers together But they never invite me to the wedding Though my looks are average I am a great breaker of hearts And while I am poor I can make men rich Who am I?

Clues: it’s an occupation; they can do things while they are working that they would never be allowed to do when they are not; how could you kill someone but never be punished?; they have God-like powers; some of them are famous; you probably have a favourite one; you are one sometimes.

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Thinkers’ Questions

These questions are good as little fillers at the end of the day, as a starter or to give a focus to a twenty-minute form time slot. Getting a pupil whose birthday is near to pick a number at random and then playing the question is a good routine.

For discussions, a good format is a few minutes of time in groups of x members numbered 1-x, then calling out a number to report back for each group.

Or use the questions to start a thoughtful writing exercise. Ask pupils to write a script or dialogue of two people discussing the question who have different opinions. Maybe because the form gives a momentum to the content, pupils often find this exercise easy to get into and write at considerable length and with well-thought out reasons in a short space of time – so it can be very motivating for reluctant writers. Pupils can then read their dialogues in pairs, which can give less confident speakers the feel for supporting a point of view in an argument.

Another method is to use small books (the size used for spelling journals) as philosophy journals in which they could record their responses to the questions – or to other ones that they ask themselves.

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Something Very Complicated Story Summaries

This comes in three parts.

Part 1 is Bernard Williams thought experiment of “Jim and the Indians” –

Part 2 floats the concept of carbon offsetting – is it OK for me to salve my environmental conscience about a long flight by paying to have some trees planted.

Part 3 Takes the offsetting concept further, and imagines “child offsetting” – where to mitigate the impact of having a child, I donate to a charity that encourages other people not to do so.

Facilitator Notes Not for the faint hearted. First, take the dilemmas one by one. In the first, does something stop being bad if it prevents something worse? Would it still be murder? Would you be responsible for the deaths of the others if you refuse to kill one?

In the case of carbon offset, to be thinking of it, you must have a guilty conscience about flying in the first place. Does doing something good entitle you to do something bad? If you can do the good thing and not do the bad thing, isn’t that better?

The suspect nature of this link becomes clearer when you look at the third dilemma. Unless you are very optimistic, a child born in the UK is likely to add considerably to CO2 emissions. You’d certainly have to plant a lot of trees to counter the impact, so isn’t it more sensible to use the money to discourage others from bringing forth their own environmentally damaging offspring?

What links them all together? Can the rightness or wrongness of an action change if it is linked to other actions? What links make the difference, and who has to make them? Could you offset a violent assault by sponsoring a policeman in the third world...

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Something Very Weird

Just play it without preamble and then challenge them to guess what it is, and what it is about.

It’s actually “The Loch Ness Monster’s Song”, by Edwin Morgan, one of the Poems on the Underground that again civilise the tube. According to the author, “the lonely monster rises from the loch and looks round for the companions of his youth -- prehistoric reptiles -- and, finding nobody he knows, he descends again to the depths after a brief swearing session.” From a replay, they will pick up on the emotions. If you can give them the text as well, they will see the form of a poem and be able to pick out questions, exclamations, and repeated segments that must be words – and begin to see it as a language. Last few sounds give a clue to the watery location, as does the menu – feed in clues but make them work for them! You can follow up the guessing game by translating the poem out of Monsterese, use it as a stimulus for a P4C enquiry or to kick off some creative writing such as sound poetry. Or ask, what makes something a poem?

The Loch Ness Monster’s Song Sssnnnwhuffffll? Hnwhuffl hhnnwfl hnfl hfl? Gdroblboblhobngbl gbl gl g g g g glbgl. Drublhaflablhaflubhafgabhaflhafl fl fl - gm grawwwww grf grawf awfgm graw gm. Hovoplodok-doplodovok-plovodokot-doplodokosh? Splgraw fok fok splgrafhatchgabrlgabrl fok splfok! Zgra kra gka fok! Grof grawff ghaf? Gombl mbl bl - blm plm, blm plm, blm plm, blp.

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Bibliography

Cannibal Island – The Philosophy Fi les , Stephen Law.

The Survival Lottery – John Harris in Applied Ethics, Oxford Readings in Philosophy, Peter Singer ed.

The Porculent Potholer –Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, Philippa Foot

Impersonation - Computer Machinery and Intelligence, Alan Turing in Mind 1950

Honesty Box – Freakonomics, Stephen Levitt

The Ring of Gyges – The Republic, Plato

Something Very Complicated – “Jim and the Indians” in Utilitarianism: For and Against, Smith and Williams

Something Very Weird – Loch Ness Monster’s Song by Edwin Morgan in Poems on the Underground

Are You Where You Think You Are? – Meditations on First Philosophy, René Descartes

The Emerald – The Pearl , John Steinbeck

Bodkin – The Man Who Wanted to Live Forever, Selina Hastings

Books I would recommend to anyone are in bold, books I would recommend to those keen to find out more about philosophy are underlined.

About the author P4C hadn’t reached Essex in my youth, which is perhaps why I left sixth form to teach myself before reading philosophy at Cambridge. Next, a bizarre series of jobs and enterprises including selling fireworks and not selling encyclopaedias. Eventually I became a philosophy-flavoured English teacher.

I then moved into outdoor education. Outspark, the logo of which you’ll see on the DVD, used to handle all my work but now just looks after the expeditions.

Now I work as a freelance P4C writer, SAPERE- registered trainer and pupil workshop host.

One on-going project is giving teachers sustained support to make thinking fun, through a free, most-weekly email bulletin of stories and resources. To receive it, enter your name and email on the homepage of:

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You are also welcome to contact me with your P4C queries, requests, suggestions, problems and triumphs on my mobile, 07843 555355 or at [email protected].