Rebecca Scott

Behold! The #survivor48 finale cocktail menu! 🍹🌴

#RHAP #survivor48 #cocktails #cocktailsky

Brainstorming cocktail ideas for the #survivor48 finale. Kyle’s has to be solid and sophisticated—maybe a twist on a martini. Joe’s is overly sugary and sweet—a bit too much. Kamilla’s strong and satisfying like a rum old fashioned. Eva, some kind of frat boy punch. Not sure about Mitch…

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I’m gonna be offering a critique of backward design tomorrow for an AAPT Talking Teaching session (spicy, I know). It’s free to attend and you don’t have to be an AAPT member. Link in replies.

#philsky #pedagogy

Experienced an important department chair rite of passage today. First time I’ve had parents show up for a student complaint meeting. 🙃🙄

Thanks! I’ll have to check it out. He is also a fan of dragons. 🐉

My 3yo has gotten really into me reading him chapter books. So far we’ve read Stuart Little, a bunch of Magic Treehouse books, and James and the Giant Peach. I think he would really like something sci fi. Any ideas of sci-fi books good for little kids (and also fun for me)?

One day and 1/3rd of the way there! Thank you!

Ryan’s glioblastoma has reached his brainstem and he’s got doctor’s orders to go to Greece one more time.

Please chip in or share if you can! 💛💛💛

Here’s some more of me describing and thinking out loud about my pedagogy fwiw.

Still in progress: Need to think of more explicit tools for identifying assumptions. I’m still kinda just telling them to go find some assumptions but how can I scaffold this better?

I think using kinds of claims might work—what ontological epistemological, normative assumptions, etc. are at play?

Overall goal: Continue to emphasize that identifying what we *do* with language is a crucial aspect of critical thinking.

Finally, a small group activity in which I give each group some questions and ask them to identify assumptions that are either explicitly built into the question or likely given a particular context in which the question is asked. Example exercise: “Is it ok to lie if the lie doesn’t hurt anyone?l

Next we turn to Tarantino’s blogpost on assumptions about questions (question essentialism, question intellectualism, question ownership, and question completion).

Are these assumptions we make about questions? Are they true? Are they helpful/harmful?

Next we talk about what makes assumptions good or bad. The goal here is to break free of the ‘assumptions are bad’ assumption (point out that we make assumptions about assumptions…Whoa…)

Can true assumptions be bad? (Yes, when?)
Can false assumptions be good? (Again, yes)

First students brainstorm assumptions that they made about our class when they signed up for it. I push them to identify more and more fundamental assumptions.

You assumed there would be a teacher; you assumed there would be other students; you assumed the teacher knows stuff; etc

Critical Thinking
Topic: Identifying assumptions/presuppositions built into questions
Reading: “What are we (not) doing when we struggle to ask questions?” Giancarlo Tarantino
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Donate to Send Ryan and Jennifer to Athens, organized by Jamie Lombardi We're a group of Ryan's friends who would like to help send him to Athens one more tim… Jamie Lombardi needs your support for Send Ryan and Jennifer to Athens

Dear philosophy twitter friends, a glioblastoma has come for @xaos.bsky.social and me, @jsthrill.modphi.com, @shengokai.bsky.social, & @philosopanda.bsky.social have organized a gofundme to help send him to Greece one more time. If you can chip in please do so here: www.gofundme.com/f/send-ryan-...

Got confirmation of my sabbatical from our president. Yay! But my real question is, do I reply to the email or is it annoying to clutter the president’s inbox with a Thank You. And do I reply all (thus cluttering the inboxes of my Dean and Provost)? The truly difficult questions of academia.

Julian (3yo): if a dinosaur tried to eat you, I would ABSOLUTELY save you.
🥰

If time, students write things they are curious about on index cards and small groups will pick a card & repeat the first exercise with a new topic.

A couple key goals:
- Get a new understanding of what questions are and what we can do with them
- See curiosity as a skill that can be developed

Then we become hunters (another curiosity type). We pick one question and talk about what it would take to answer it. We won’t answer it though bc part of what we are learning is a new way to think about questions. We can do things with questions other than answer them.

Next we look for patterns. Can we identify categories of questions that our questions fall into? (Ontological, normative, epistemological etc). We’ll keep this list and continue adding as we discover new question types throughout the unit.

I start with asking students to get curious about curiosity. I invite them to be ‘busybodies’ (one of the 3 curiosity styles Zurn and Bassett discuss) and generate as many questions as we can about curiosity itself. Goal is to fill the board and then some. So. Many. Questions.

Critical Thinking Day 2
Topic: Curiosity
Reading: “Curiosity’s Got Style” by Perry Zurn @perryzurn.bsky.social and Dani Bassett
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Yeah, you’re probably right but not worried about those haters. 🤷‍♀️

Hey #philsky if I posted semi-regularly about in-class activities I’m doing and my pedagogical thought process would that be annoying and boring or potentially helpful?

My philosophy of gender class is gonna be so special (I think/hope)! 9 students and they all want to be there. Spent our 1st session talking about our hopes, commitments, responsibilities and earliest experiences of gender norms. I’m so lucky. ❤️

One of the great things about academia is you usually see people on an every other day basis so you can wear the same pants two days in a row.

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Teaching philosophy of gender for the 1st time.

Units:
1) Sex, gender, and social construction
2) Masculinity and the “new misogyny”
3) Intersectionality and Decoloniality

Reading stuff by Lorde, Bettcher, Manne, Srinivasan, Khader and a bunch of others

I’m so stoked!