Dear SEP Families,
The students in Session 3 enjoyed talking about being fans and about why games are worthwhile. They seemed to get the definition of a game well, and could easily repeat and apply it by the end of the session. They had more trouble with some of the parts about comparing performances. Some of the views were pretty clearly ones they hadn’t thought about before, and which ran counter to their usual ways of thinking. These topics seemed a bit more challenging to them.
They really didn’t have many different ethical perspectives. I think they were sometimes interested to see that there might be different views at all. One question to pursue over the new few weeks during the Olympics might be whether athletes should be paid and why the Olympics thinks they shouldn’t be.
The students in Session 3 enjoyed talking about being fans and about why games are worthwhile. They seemed to get the definition of a game well, and could easily repeat and apply it by the end of the session. They had more trouble with some of the parts about comparing performances. Some of the views were pretty clearly ones they hadn’t thought about before, and which ran counter to their usual ways of thinking. These topics seemed a bit more challenging to them.
They really didn’t have many different ethical perspectives. I think they were sometimes interested to see that there might be different views at all. One question to pursue over the new few weeks during the Olympics might be whether athletes should be paid and why the Olympics thinks they shouldn’t be.
Resources for Continued Learning
Books
Websites
Activities
NOTE: Items marked with an * are more difficult philosophically.
Thank you for being a part of SEP 2016 Session 3!
- Michael Lewis, Moneyball
- Lewis, The Blind Side
- George Will, Men at Work
- Matthew Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head*
- Malcom Gladwell, Blink
- Gladwell, Outliers
- Bernard Suits, The Grasshopper*
Websites
- FiveThirtyEight.com, especially the Sports section
- FanGraphs.com, Baseball Propsectus.com, and similar “advanced stats” sites for other sports
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (plato.stanford.edu)*
Activities
- Play a sport
- Learn to keep score in a sport
- Learn a game
- Participate in debate in school
NOTE: Items marked with an * are more difficult philosophically.
Thank you for being a part of SEP 2016 Session 3!
