Week 1: Bravery and Dragons and Giants
[edit] Teaching “Dragons and Giants”
In order to teach philosophy, you need to do more than ask questions. You need to get the children to puzzle over something philosophically significant about the concept you want them to think about. That means that you have to have some knowledge concerning the philosophical issue(s) you will be discussing.
In the future, come to the Monday sessions with any questions you have about the philosophical issues in the book you will be teaching. I try to explain them in Big Ideas and the philosophical introductions on the /go/kidsphil do as well.
Key points about bravery:
1. It is a state of character. This means that it is a tendency to act in certain ways. It therefore has a loose connection to how a person looks. It’s not how you look, but what you do.
2. Tendencies require something to trigger them. In the case of bravery, the trigger is dangerous situations. But there is a problem here: Do the situations have to actually be dangerous or do they merely have to seem dangerous to the person in question. There can be disagreement about this. If you use scary instead of dangerous, it supports the latter alternative.
3. So how would be characterize the nature of the character state that a brave person has when faced with a dangerous/scary situation? They have to maintain the ability to act despite the fear that they feel. So two things:
a. There is an emotional component of bravery, i.e. fear. Bravery can be thought of as a response to fear.
b. This raises the question of whether a person who has faced certain dangers to regularly that they no longer experience any fear can be brave. Interesting issue!
4. I call this aspect of bravery confidence, though there might be a better word. It means that you have the ability to act and think rationally when confronted with a dangerous situation that makes you scared.
5. Because bravery has fear as a component, it has an interesting feature: A person who fears too many things is not brave. To be brave, you need to have knowledge of what is truly dangerous and thus worthy of fear. So a person who is scared of erasers but faces their fear and uses one is not acting bravely, for erasers are not really dangerous. (There can be disagreement about this!)
I could go on. But I hope you see from even this brief discussion, that bravery (aka courage) is a complex concept with many puzzles associated with it. Our goal is to get the children to think about this concept.
The MLK Session
1. Begin with a discussion of the rules.
2. Don’t spend too much time on the book cover, though you should introduce them to Frog and Toad, if they don’t know who they are.
3. Go over vocabulary.
4. Read the book with great emotion!
5. Conduct a discussion (see below for some suggestions)
6. Remember to praise them and give markers
7. With about 5 minutes left (2:55 or a bit earlier), begin to provide closure by either summarizing what has happened, asking them for last comments, or both.
Some Suggested Questions
1. We are going to begin by thinking about the type of thing is bravery? Not every that exists is something that we can see. What about bravery? We can see if someone is happy. Can you show me a happy face? Good. Now, can you show me a brave face? So do you think that bravery is a feeling like being happy?
2. Can a person be brave but run away from every scary thing they encounter, like Frog and Toad?
3. When do people act brave? Are there specific situations where people need to be brave?
4. Do all these situations have something in common? (danger)
5. Can someone be brave when they only think they are in dangerous situations? So, if you were scared on your first day of school but went anyway, were you being brave even though going to school is not really dangerous?
6. So what makes going to school brave in this case?
7. Now imagine that there is a very scary monster who has come to town. This monster is huge and it will kill anyone who comes close to it. Would it be brave to just walk up to it and tell it to go away, even though you knew if wouldn’t listen and would just kill you?
[So just not giving in to your fears, does not make you brave. It can be stupid to go into a situation that you know you won’t survive. We call people who do that “foolhardy.”]
NOTE: Ask open ended questions, not leading questions. Make sure you know where you would like the children to go in answering the question, although they may not go there and that’s o.k.
