Yes, thank you for saying that so I didn’t have to. 
Actually, I was enjoying the poetry hijack. Why try to help someone who doesn’t want helping?
I’m with tomndebb on this one. I’d like to see a bunch more folks sign up for the “questions only in GD” pledge for a week.
Based on his political stripes, I wonder if it will make an impression on him to compare his ridiculous self-declarations of triumph to the equally ridiculous spectacle of George Dubya claiming victory as he buggers out of the inarguably unwinnable debacle Iraq will be two or three years from now.
Yeh, my teacher was slamming away with open palms on his desk at certain moments when he rolled through that. Gave me chills when he recited the last few lines, drawn out to great length,
as the notes say on the version I linked to.
Now I’m hearing James Earl Jones recite it – can you imagine?
So, since I’m trying not to pile on Scott anymore, I’ll change the subject remorselessly.
Bricker asked Scott a few pages ago to summarize the Slippery Slope Fallacy as if he were teaching a class. Intrigued, I got to thinking about how I would teach it to a class.
Here’s my lesson plan. Feedback welcome (especially since I’m going back to school to be an elementary school teacher; I may end up doing a lesson like this in the classroom one day).
Start off by going into a classroom, with a few assumptions:
- They’re bright fourth-graders or thereabouts.
- They’re doing a unit on logic, and are familiar with the words “logic” and “fallacy.”
- You can give them cookies.
Tell them that they’ve been doing so well with the logic unit lately, that you decided last night to surprise them with…cookies! Brandish a bag of cookies and wait for the “Yays!” to die down.
Look worried, and continue. "But you see, I was thinking about it. If I give you cookies, then you’ll probably be happy. And happy people get excited, and sometimes excited people get up and run around all over the place. People running around all over the place happens during riots, and when people riot, cities can burn. CITIES BURN!
“Give you cookies, cities burn. So I decided that, in the interests of humanity, I’d not give you cookies. Aren’t you glad you have such a thoughtful and logical teacher?”
Wait for the “Noooo!!!” wails to die down; look shocked that they disagree with you; and make an offer. If the students can persuade you that you’re being illogical, they’ll get cookies.
Illustrate your argument on the board with a slope. Put a happy cookie-eating face at the top; next down, put the excited people; then excited people with baseball bats; then cities burning at the bottom. If they argue that these things don’t necessarily follow, draw in big arrows pointing from one to the other and really emphasize those arrows.
The students should make the following points:
- Not all the steps in the argument follow from previous steps (people can be happy without getting especially excited, for example).
- Sometimes you switched the contents of a step (people who are running around excited out of happiness aren’t usually the same people who are running around and rioting).
- Drawing arrows between the steps is completely meaningless: there’s no such thing as momentum in such an argument.
Suggest to the students the name “slippery slope” to describe this type of argument; admit defeat; distribute cookies.
Daniel
OOOO!!! OOOO!!! ME! ME!
Beat the teacher with the bat and take the cookies??
Clear, imaginative, fun, and memorable. Quite a contrast to the “other lesson plan” posted by the resident dumbass.
If all your lesson plans are like that one, LHoD, I’d want you teaching my kids, because you’d be the kind of teacher that they remember to their kids.
Where was that thread about how many five-year-olds you could take on?
I’m thinking a class full of determined 9-year-olds all working together could probably handle a teacher.
LHoD, could you do this for second graders? Then we could run it past Scott to see if he gets it.
Y’know, I never thought of that… It wouldn’t seem out of place for Scott Plaid to have “MISSION ACCOMPLISHED” as his sig.
(or maybe “MISSION, ACCOMPLISHED”)
For the record, I too am a person on the left side of the political spectrum who heartily wishes Scott wasn’t on our side.
But isn’t it true that you can debate using questions only?
Who’d want to?
Lefty, please be sure to point out to the kids that not everything that looks like slippery slope is a logical fallacy. In its purest form, slippery slope is a list of premises that do not follow from each other but might individually be true. What you’re showing the kids is really a list of non sequiturs. Just because B sometimes happens when A, it does not mean that A -> B. But sometimes things do lead to other things. You don’t want kids to think that, for example, they can inch their way toward danger and scream “slippery slope!” when their parents try to teach them life lessons like not talking to strangers. As well as you did in composing your lesson, I’m confident you can devise an explanation for real slippery slope that they will understand.
Do you truly believe that?
Is it possible he was being self-referentially ironical?
Does it matter?
Yes, but the “pledge” was more than a promise to only ask questions-- it’s a promise NOT to argue your case, but to simply try to understand the other posters’ cases.
A very good debater could still undermine someone’s argument using that method, and that’s part of the point, also!
Are we trying to make this thread turn into a *Who’s Line * sketch?
Would you *like * us to?
By the way - are you going to eat that?