ethics

I use my blog for all sorts of things, religious and political musings, expressing emotions, and to relate humorous stories and anecdotes. Sometimes, however, I just need to rant. For instance, my ethics class. I took Ethics this semester to fulfill my humanities requirement. I chose Ethics over Intro to Philosophy because I thought Ethics sounded more fun. Well I'm seriously beginning to doubt that assessment. The readings we do from the textbook are the only real meaningful content I get from the class. Everything else, the class discussion, the weekly papers, the online discussion, all a waste of time. At least that's my feeling so far.

This is a basic format of our bi-weekly classes. We come to class having read the assigned reading. The teacher starts at the beginning of the reading and starts to talk about it. Generally the chapters are analyzing philosophical and logical ways to look at things, and typically they used controversial topics to illustrate how these theories relate to important things. The discussion then goes in one of two directions: either the class keeps their focus on the ethical theory being presented in that section of the chapter, which leaves the room in crickets (my assumption is that most people haven't read it or don't get it, but sometimes there just isn't much to debate concerning the matter), OR the class ignores the ethical theory and focuses on the controversial topic being analyzed. It then turns into a debate not regarding anything having to do with ethics, but an all out argument over whether things like abortion and homosexuality is right or wrong.

Mostly I blame the teacher. I'm all about class discussion and debating class content with other classmates, but any discussion needs moderation, and if your teacher isn't moderating the discussion, things can get way off topic and out of hand fast. When I took my government classes, my teacher also used the same 'open discussion' method in teaching his class but he commanded the attention of the class, allowed only one person at a time to speak, disallowed people interrupting, and kept it on topic. He did a very good job overall in moderating the discussion. My Ethics teacher, however, does not. I don't care if she's hot, she's terrible at moderating discussion, and even if someone is just asking an open question, she doesn't do a very good job at addressing it concretely. Maybe that's just the nature of a subjective class such as Ethics, or maybe it has everything to do with the teacher. I don't really blame my classmates, even though I'm definitely annoyed by some of them. People are going to be loud and obnoxious and interrupt and try and dominate every topic, regardless of what class, the only thing that prevents that is a teacher keeping them in check.

Anyways, thats my rant regarding this dumb class, I'm not looking forward to the rest of the semester. I don't have high hopes for things ever improving. We'll see though I guess.