complications in commercializing curriculum
November 16, 2009
This NYT article piqued my curiosity:
Selling Lesson Plans Online Raises Cash and Questions
Basically, some teachers have made quite a bit of money by selling their lesson plans online to other teachers. Some teachers’ employers are wondering whether they should be receiving a cut of the profits, and one educational expert warns that the practice “reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”
I have mixed feelings about this. In general, I definitely support a person’s right to sell the products of her labor to a willing buyer at a mutually agreeable price. However, there are some wrinkles here.
First, how many of these lesson plans were produced during teacher work days, when the teachers were on the clock? Surely at least some of them. Maybe there’s no good way of figuring it out. But, if the teachers produced the lesson plans they’re selling on their employers’ dime, then they have a moral, and maybe legal, obligation to share the proceeds.
Second, some of the teachers’ quotes seem to suggest that, considerations in the previous paragraph notwithstanding, they deserve the money because they are underpaid.
“Teaching can be a thankless job,” said Ms. Bohrer, 30, who has used the $650 she earned in the past year to add books to a reading nook in her first-grade classroom at Daniel Street Elementary School on Long Island and to help with mortgage payments. “I put my hard-earned time and effort into creating these things, and I just would like credit.”
Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like “The Outsiders,” enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.
“I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together,” she said. “Well, now I’m going to have to learn to cook.”
Oh, cry me a river. There is lots of evidence that teachers are paid quite well, and the benefits as well as virtual immunity from being fired can’t be beat. If it does turn out that teachers must legally share the profits with their employers or stop selling the lesson plans altogether, violators will have no moral justification for disobeying the rules, at least not on the basis that they were bullied into accepting poverty-level wages or something.
Finally, while I don’t think that selling lesson plans will inevitably lead to the collapse of education as we know it (although that might be welcome), it simply isn’t clear what effects it will have on instruction. On the one hand, it could be that genuinely good teachers do the best at selling their lesson plans and, as a result, some students receive higher quality instruction than they would have received if their teachers had developed their own curriculum. On the other hand, there isn’t any reason to believe that the consumers of lesson plans are competent judges of decent curriculum. In fact, their very status as buyers might indicate that they are not competent. The lesson plans that they purchase might be as bad as what they would have come up with on their own, possibly even worse. And, unfortunately, I have no idea how any of this would be tested.
Moral of the story: There is no good prima facie reason to indict entrepreneurial teachers solely on the basis that they are selling lesson plans to other teachers on a purely voluntary basis. However, these teachers likely have moral and maybe legal obligations to share the profits with their employers. And it will be important for interested parties to keep an eye out for anecdotal data as to whether commercial curricula benefit anyone other than the teachers… like, perhaps, the students, whose interests so often go curiously by the wayside in educational debates.
wasting food
November 12, 2009
Even though I try really hard to buy only the groceries we need and in amounts we can use, my husband & I still end up throwing away a pretty good bit of food on a regular basis. What I can’t figure out is why throwing away food feels so much worse than letting clothes go unworn or DVDs unwatched, for instance. I wasn’t even raised in the kind of household where cleaning one’s plate was encouraged (in fact, quite the opposite – I was urged not to eat things I didn’t want).
What’s going on here? Does this emotion track something morally significant? That is, is it in fact worse to waste food than other kinds of things? Or is it just that the value of food is highly salient while you let it go bad and then chuck it into the trash?
more thoughts on veganism and well-being
November 3, 2009
I was thrilled to receive this thoughtful comment on my last post on my vegan experiment:
I have some disjointed things to say in response.
First of all, yes, it can definitely be difficult to have a significant other who does not eat the same way as you. Around the time I started testing the veg waters, my now-husband and I became engaged. He was very supportive, but had no intentions of going veg himself. Honestly, I was at least a little disappointed that he was not responding to the moral arguments that had moved me. Depending on the couple, the dynamics of this kind of situation can go a thousand different ways. So that is at least one respect in which being veg can disrupt even healthy social relationships.
There is a problem with the arguments for veg*ism that is relevant but which neither of us has brought up yet, and that is the collective action problem. As the argument goes, no animal food producer is literally sensitive to the change in demand caused by one person ceasing to buy their products. So, the producers continue to raise the same amount of animals as they were raising even before you were veg. Although veg people like to talk this way, it is not true that you are saving any animals by being veg, strictly speaking. Read the rest of this entry »
competition is as american as apple pie, except in education
October 23, 2009
Recently, I saw the above video on Facebook. Basically, it illustrates the argument that a public option in health care would compete against private insurers to the benefit of those covered under both kinds of plans. This argument seems like it is supposed to appeal to the market-minded among us, who are into competition amongst businesses. And “competition is as American as apple pie,” quoth MoveOn.org
Now, I’m going to take the liberty of guessing that alot of people who are in favor of the public option also oppose school choice (in my experience, this is true, but feel free to take issue with this assumption in your comments). To the extent that their arguments for the public option are really about competition, their opposing school choice – which promotes competition amongst schools – is inconsistent with their position on health care.
Alternatively, perhaps this just exposes the fact that the proponents of the public option really don’t care about competition much at all, that it was just a strategic argument aimed at pro-business types, and that really they favor something about the state provision of important goods and services, like health care and education.
Thoughts anyone? I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who favor the public option but oppose school choice. Please explain to me your real position on competition, as I am confused. Thanks in advance.
why being vegan can be bad for you
October 15, 2009
I had written some notes on this topic a while back, but I lost them, so here goes nothing.
You might have guessed from the topic of this post that I was going to write about why the vegan diet is not nutritionally adequate. That actually isn’t the main reason why I think being vegan can be bad for you, although I do have my doubts about its nutritional optimality. It seems that the only people who are totally confident that a vegan diet can work for everyone (or almost everyone) are practicing vegans with vested interests in other people being vegan too, for moral or environmental reasons usually. But eating vegan is surely better than the “Standard American Diet” that most people are already eating, so even it is isn’t the optimal diet, you probably will still come out ahead health-wise.
Actually, I am concerned that being vegan can be bad for you for social reasons, in three ways. Read the rest of this entry »
why I became vegan
September 5, 2009
Here’s the second in a series of posts on vegetarianism & animal welfare.
If you spend any time at all in the veg*n (vegetarian and/or vegan) areas of the internet (websites, blogs, message boards), you learn the ideological territory pretty quickly. For people who recognize and take seriously the ethical problems surrounding food animal production, there are four basic possible positions to take.
First, there are two vegetarian positions (I use “vegetarian” to refer to lacto- and/or ovo-vegetarians, who do not eat animal flesh but do eat dairy and/or eggs).
A: You can be a vegetarian because you think that animals have rights against being killed.
B: You can be a vegetarian because you wish to decrease the amount of animal suffering involved in producing meat.
Second, there are two vegan positions (Vegans eat no animal foods of any kind. Strictly speaking, vegans are a subset of vegetarians, but usually “vegetarian” is used to mean non-vegan vegetarians).
C: You can be vegan because you think that animals have rights against being used for human purposes.
D: You can be vegan because you wish to decrease the amount of animal suffering involved in producing all animal foods.
(Disclaimer: I am simplifying a little here. Some people become veg*n for health or religious reasons, for example)
There are convincing arguments available for persuading type A vegetarians to change into type C vegans, and type B vegetarians into type D vegans. Read the rest of this entry »
how I semi-accidentally became vegetarian
August 26, 2009
Animal welfare issues are really important to me, but somehow they have failed to make an appearance here so far. Allow me to rectify the situation. This is part 1 of a few posts on my adventures in plant-based eating.
Flash back to fall 2007. It was my first semester in graduate school. I was living alone and trying to be self-sufficient on a tiny budget. This meant eating all but one or two meals per week at home. And also, I didn’t know how to cook at all.
This was kind of a perfect storm, because meat is both expensive and tricky to prepare, and it resulted in a huge decrease in the amount of meat I was eating. At this point, though, I was hardly aware of my trend towards vegetarianism. In fact, I distinctly remember telling a friend sometime during that semester that I “didn’t get why people would choose to be vegetarian.”
However, by the spring of 2008, I had realized that I was becoming very nearly vegetarian, and I started eating meat only once per week and never at home. I planned to continue in that manner, except all of the sudden meat became absolutely revolting and I lost nearly all of my desire to eat it even rarely. I remember barely being able to keep some of it down.
Part of what caused me to become so disgusted by meat was that I had just adopted my first dog. In addition to being very cute and friendly, he had separation anxiety, as is pretty common amongst shelter & rescue dogs. I watched him experience full-blown panic attacks whenever I picked up my keys to leave the house. I already knew and believed the facts about factory farming conditions, but the suffering of animals was made vividly salient to me through my dog. So, I decided to be vegetarian for real by early summer 2008.
What interests me most about how this went down is that it’s a great counterexample to a commonsense understanding of moral psychology. Often, in both philosophy and just in general, we assume that people always deliberate, make value judgments and then act, and that value judgments and actions can usually or always be explained by some prior deliberation. But actually, often it’s the other way around. Your value judgments and deliberative processes can themselves be altered by ways in which you already act. This is to avoid cognitive dissonance, if I understand it correctly: the human mind generally tries to keep thoughts in coherence with actions, and that can entail adjusting either one to fit the other. In my case, this meant that I became much more receptive to philosophical arguments for vegetarianism apparently because I had already been eating that way.
In the near future, I’ll write on the next phase of my adventures in plant-based eating: the vegan period!
state control of abortion: funding, or failing to provide?
August 21, 2009
I am genuinely confused by this recent Feministe post, Michele Bachmann: radical pro-choice feminist?
The author offers two pieces of information that she seems to believe are contradictory.
1. A quote by Michele Bachmann:
“That’s why people need to continue to go to the town halls, continue to melt the phone lines of their liberal members of Congress, and let them know, under no certain circumstances will I give the government control over my body and my health care decisions.“
2. A video of Michele Bachmann speaking. Basically, she calls for the government to quit funding Planned Parenthood, which provides alot of abortions.
Now, I understand how this is a weird picture if you add a further piece of information:
3. Michele Bachmann is quite radically pro-choice (and that is why she wants Planned Parenthood defunded)
But in the absence of 3, there is no contradiction, and so I don’t really understand the shock value of the original post as presented.
I guess it comes down to this:
If you oppose state control of health care (and thereby abortion), and you think that “control” consists in, or is promoted by, many-strings-attached state funding, then definitely retracting federal funding from Planned Parenthood is the right thing to do.
But I can only assume from the post that the Feministe author thinks that state control of health care amounts to the state refusing to help provide those services promoting reproductive choice for women – i.e., abortion. (Remember, the Bachmann speech wasn’t about outlawing abortion, even if she actually wants to, but merely about defunding it).
Which seems like a better way of understanding “state control of health care/abortion” to you? Or am I totally missing something here?
Edited to add: A very similar story also appeared over at Feministing. Someone, please explain this to me? I don’t get it.
kant on queueing, or why I am not a kantian
August 18, 2009
In response to my post on how not to think about cutting in line, Jacob Levy makes these important points:
I’m puzzled. This seems like the easiest of cases for a Kantian. I cannot will as a universal maxim that the cutter be allowed into line, because that would destroy the coherence of lining up. It’s almost as clean a case as lying: the wrongness lies in the self-contradictory character. You cannot simultaneously will queues and cutting.
Or, to put it differently: the cutter him or herself treats others as not-ends-in-themselves. Their time is not as valuable or important as his/her time. The one person who unilaterally, without the consent of every other person behind him or her, allows the cutter in thus *also* fails to treat those behind him/her as ends-in-themselves.
So basically Jacob has suggested that I have misapplied Kant’s theory to our line cutting case, and that either form of the Categorical Imperative can dispense with the problem successfully when properly applied.
Let’s take CI1 first, the universalization one. The first problem with it has to do with maxim formulation. We have to figure out a way of describing the action we’re thinking of taking in order to give it the universalization test. One good way of thinking about maxims is that they have an ACE form: I will do A(ction) in these C(ircumstances) for this E(nd). The trouble with maxims is that any given action can be described using a variety of different maxims. For instance, imagine that someone is thinking of robbing a store for some lifesaving medicine. If you test the maxim “I will rob a store when I am broke to promote my self-interest” for universalizability, it fails, making the action morally impermissible. But if you test “I will rob a store when I am dying of cancer in order to save my life,” that seems to pass the test, making the action morally permissible. But it’s really bad if Kantianism renders conflicting deontic verdicts on what is actually just one action. And, in our queueing case, it’s not clear what maxim we ought to use, and whether using different maxims will generate conflicting verdicts as in the robbery case. Read the rest of this entry »
my least favorite facebook group: “cancel student loan debt to stimulate the economy”
August 16, 2009
I found out about this little movement through its Facebook group, “Cancel Student Loan Debt to Stimulate the Economy.” Basically, a guy named Robert Applebaum hatched an attractive-to-some but crazy plan to have the government bail out those carrying college debt by paying off their loans. This would, allegedly, cause all those formerly oppressed by student loan debt to feel renewed consumer confidence and start spending again and, well, you know the rest.
I could say alot about why this plan is bad on economic grounds. But, I’m not primarily an economist, I’m primarily an ethicist (in training), and so I want to say two things about what is morally wrong with this scheme.
First of all, the proposed bailout is deeply discriminatory. It’s full of language like this:
“Instead of funneling billions, if not trillions of additional dollars to banks, financial institutions, insurance companies and other institutions of greed that are responsible for the current economic crisis, why not allow educated, hardworking, middle-class Americans to get something in return? After all, they’re our tax dollars too!”
Now, keep in mind that the reason Applebaum thinks that college grads in debt are good bailout candidates is because they would spend their new disposable income and stimulate the economy with it, while rich people who get bailed out might not (saving or investing it instead). But this does not by itself suggest that “educated, hardworking, middle-class Americans” are the ones who should get the stimulus money. On the contrary, since non-college-grads learn less on average than college grads but are often similarly hardworking, they are equally as good as candidates to receive stimulus money that needs to be promptly spent. In fact, the very reason alot of these people didn’t go to college is because it costs alot of money and they couldn’t afford it. What better way to equalize these unfair life circumstances than to bail out the hardworking non-college-grads? I suspect that the reason that version of the proposal doesn’t have a Facebook group and a website is because those who are not college educated have less of a presence in social media. That doesn’t make them any less morally eligible to be bailed out, however. To whatever extent you think that college grads who are in debt are entitled make a moral claim for bailout money, non-college-grads are equally entitled to make such a claim, if not more. For Applebaum to prefer bailing out the college grads in the absence of a morally relevant difference between the two groups reveals that the proposal is about fulfilling special interest group demands at the expense of others, and not really about fixing the economy at all. Read the rest of this entry »
