My end-of-week-2-of-quarantine non-pandemic reads: bye bye family routines
© Joe Woodhouse, The New Yorker
Plus, my attempt to be an armchair
epidemiologist: my triage take (this is not going to end well)
We’ve somehow survived just over 2 weeks
of quarantine in our cramped flat without managing to strangle each other. It’s
amazing that as parents, you can spend months and months trying to get your
child into a pattern and set of routines, only for it all to get thrown out the
window when something like self-isolation comes into force. To hell with what
all the so-called ‘baby experts’ say about limiting your kid’s screen time and
giving them a balanced diet and establishing clear routines and getting fresh
air and…and…and…our daughter has been watching 8 hours of cartoons a day,
eating pizza and pastries and other unhealthy crap, running around the flat
attacking the cat with various household objects like a maniac and generally
causing all sorts of havoc. She has yet to wreck one of my online lessons, but
it’s probably only a matter of time.
Never mind that. Here’s this week’s set
of pandemic-free reads to take your mind off things. Because it’s somewhat of a
challenge to find something panic-free – probably about 90% of the articles I’ve
read are pandemic-related, I can’t help it, really – I’ve gone into my archives
to share a few older favourites.
Take your mind off things and read something
a bit more uplifting
Except for this first one.
1 As if Ukraine doesn’t have enough
problems to worry about.
Ukraine’s Quiet Depopulation Crisis
The government is trying to entice its
people back, not entirely successfully.
© Sasha Maslov, New York Times
2 This one is rather more positive and
is more of a photo essay. And the title is not a euphemism or anything.
Ukrainian Railroad Ladies
3 My third and final Ukraine-themed
offering is a culinary treat about the joys of varenyky, amongst other regional
delicacies.
The Underrated Pleasures of Eastern
European Dumplings
4 With much of the world moving to
online teaching, it’s worth asking whether we humans will ever be out of a job.
If I were 20 years younger, I might think twice about becoming a language
teacher.
Can computers ever replace the
classroom?
With 850 million children worldwide shut
out of schools, tech evangelists claim now is the time for AI education. But as
the technology’s power grows, so too do the dangers that come with it.
5 Another from my favourite journalist,
the always-wise and ever-so-insightful Oliver Burkeman.
Is screen time damaging for your kids?
No study can tell you that.
Adjusting your behaviour to each new
wrinkle in the science is a mug’s game.
6 Whether you have a child or not, this
is some of the best financial advice you’ll ever see and read. And in light of
the chaos in the markets, it’s a good way of getting back to basics.
Financial Advice For My New Daughter
7 And lastly…let's go out with a bang.
Scientists build a database of animal
farts
Amongst all that pandemic reading, this
is perhaps the very best
Okay, okay, I know I said this was a
pandemic-free list, but I’ve waded through countless articles so that you don’t
have to. This is some of the best stuff out there – a series of reflections
from the NYRB’s writers from cities around the world. This is less newsy, more
literary. There are 4-5 updates every day and they all bring a fresh
perspective to things.
NYRDaily Pandemic Journal
And now for some of my armchair
epidemiological ‘expertise’. Or rather, something of a ‘hot take’ on how to
make morally fraught decisions.
I’m not going to say anything about
self-isolating, washing your hands and being a responsible human being. You’ve
heard all about that and are no doubt doing it. Well done to you, and keep it
up.
I don’t know how many teachers do
lessons with their students relating to ethical and moral dilemmas, but I certainly
do as a way to challenge them and get them to think deeply and critically about
life-and-death situations in a philosophical way. Sometimes it’s a means of
introducing a particular grammar point in an engaging, meaningful approach: ‘If
I were in that situation, I would…If I had to choose between the dog and the
cat, I’d probably…’ To non-teachers out there, this would be the 2nd
conditional for hypothetical situations.
I’ve been doing variations on the
classic out-of-control trolley car dilemma for years, and I often show a
lecture from Harvard professor Michael Sandel entitled ‘The Moral Side of Murder’ (from ‘Justice: what’s the right thing to do?’). Most people will no
doubt be well aware of the trolley care dilemma, but just to briefly reiterate:
* a trolley car is on a track heading
for 5 workers. There’s a switch on the track that, if you pull it, will divert
the trolley car onto a side track, where 1 worker will be killed, thus sparing
the 5. If you stand by and do nothing, the 5 will die.
What do you do?
* the next step: instead of pulling the
switch, you can go onto a bridge over the track, where a morbidly obese man is
standing. Again, if you do nothing, the trolley car will ram into the 5 workers
will be killed. But you can push the fat man off the bridge, onto the track,
sparing the 5 workers, but of course killing the man.
What do you do?
In the interests of philosophical
consistency, the situations are about the same, but interestingly, the vast
majority of people in the first scenario choose to pull the switch, but
significantly fewer would push the fat man off the bridge.
* in another scenario, Sandel gives us
this: there are 5 people in hospital, all awaiting urgent transplants. One
person needs a heart, another a lung, another a liver, someone else a kidney and
the last needs a pancreas. Without getting these organs in the next couple of
hours, they will all die. Sitting there in the waiting room is a perfectly
healthy man just in for a checkup.
You can see where this one is going.
What do you do?
Again, Sandel would argue that the
situations are all the same, but how many would actually opt to sacrifice the
healthy patient in the third scenario?
From here, as a teacher, you can then
get into all sorts of moral dilemmas, from the downright bizarre, totally
unrealistic and even ridiculous, to more everyday mundane decisions. Most
students really enjoy this type of stuff, even if some do find it a tad
uncomfortable and difficult. It’s definitely thought-provoking, no doubt about
that.
You can also play around with all sorts
of situations and see where most of your ethical values are, in The Moral Machine, a fun way of getting human perspectives on moral decisions made by
machine intelligence.
Quite a few students do ask things like ‘this
will never happen in real life, we’ll never have to make such tough decisions,
this is just some silly thought experiment.’ Well, perhaps, but one never
knows.
The stories coming out of Italy and
Spain (and now New York) are harrowing, the horribly tough decisions that have to
be made on who to save and who not to. When hospital beds and ventilators are
in short supply, you can only imagine the incredibly difficult decisions that
have to be made. And many more are coming.
Over the past couple of weeks, I wonder
how many of my students have given this any thought, and whether they’ve
applied what they learnt from the trolley car dilemma and The Moral Machine to
what’s going on at the moment. I wonder if they are even aware.
With two of my classes, we just finished
covering this topic a few weeks ago. It should be somewhat fresh in their
minds.
Where am I going with this and what am I
getting at?
Here’s what I think. I wish there were
some way to find out who has been obeying the self-isolating guidelines, and
who has been a responsible, conscientious citizen. And I wish there were a way
to find out who the real covidiots have been, the ones flaunting the guidelines
and throwing all caution to the wind, the ones who don’t give a s*** about what’s
going on, or who find the risks to be way overblown, or say things like ‘I’m
young and healthy, I have nothing to worry about.’
I wish there were a way to track people
so that if/when tough decisions have to be made, doctors know who to
prioritise. Surely this can be done, though it may come with serious invasions
of privacy*. But if there is any justice in the world, then surely the
covidiots should be at the bottom of the list, and those doing what they can to
be responsible should be prioritized. This isn’t at all pleasant to think
about, but if do we get to that point…(and we will…)
I told you that this wasn’t going to end
well.
Chew on those conditionals.
[*editor’s note: this is being done in
Hong Kong, and to a certain extent, South Korea, though ostensibly to ensure
people are obeying the quarantine, and not as a means of deciding who to
prioritise if it comes to that. But the author is correct in asserting that
this does raise some concerns with privacy and much else besides.]
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