how to frustrate your students

Wanna frustrate your students? Play devil's advocate while discussing an ethical dilemma. I stole my dilemma from The Book of Questions. Not having seen my old copy of the book in years, I pulled this question off the dusty shelves of memory and tweaked it. The problem, as I phrased it (and yes, it required some explanation since these were Level 1 students):

A genie grants you the power to eliminate cancer in the world, forever. With a single snap of your fingers, millions of suffering people will be instantly cured, and uncounted billions of future people will be spared cancer's ravages. But your power comes at a price: when you snap your fingers, a random person you love-- a sibling, a parent, a spouse or whoever-- will die. Would you use this power?

What if you knew which loved one would die?

What if, instead of a loved one, some random person far away, perhaps in another country, were killed when you snapped your fingers?

What if your power killed someone who was terminally ill?

What if your power eradicated cancer but killed a hardened criminal?

Almost all my students today were adamant that they would never exercise their power. When we weighed the cancer cure against random loved ones, it was no contest: loved ones simply could not be sacrificed.

The issue didn't get any murkier for most of my students as we went through the alternative scenarios. When it came to the hardened criminal, only one student-- the gentlest-looking one in the class-- expressed a willingness to off him in the name of helping humanity.

I laid the guilt trip on my class, though. I said, "You're focusing so much on the one person who will die. What about the millions of cancer victims you're killing by not using your power?"

That hit a nerve with one student. "It's not the same thing at all!" she said. "These people have cancer already; I'm not killing them!"

"But you're in a unique position to help, and refusing to do so," I countered. She stood firm, which delighted me. While this class is usually pretty good at participating in whatever activity I've devised, they were especially intense and focused today.

"Let me show you what I mean," I said. I drew a scene on the chalkboard: a little girl in the middle of the street, about to be run over by a large bus. Next, I drew a stick figure on the curb, a witness to the scene.

"That's you," I said, pointing to the stick figure. "What do you do? Help the girl? Turn away? Take out your video camera and watch the show?" (That last question got shouts of simultaneous delight and disgust.)

"I help the girl!" said my contrarian student.

"But why?" I asked.

"Because I can!" she shot back.

"You don't know this girl. Why help her? Because you're standing right there?" I asked. We took a moment to discuss the influence of physical proximity on ethical decisions, and unanimously concluded that, quite often, our sense of responsibility is affected by how physically close we are to a given situation. After all, what can we do for this girl if, say, she's in Seoul and we're in Taegu?

"But my point is this: you knew you couldn't just let her die," I said, bringing us back on track. I turned evilly back to the genie scenario: "It seems to me that, when you save that one life, you are indeed responsible for the deaths of millions, maybe billions, of other people."

My students were having fits, frustrated by their limited English, unable to divert my argument (which, I think we can agree, isn't a particularly good one) from the seemingly inexorable course on which I'd set it. I was trying to make my students really feel that they would be responsible for all those deaths: millions of people who could have gone on with their lives; millions of families that could have known happiness. No one wanted to think of herself as committing a sin of omission.

As the discussion wound down, my contrarian student did offer a fantastic smartass answer, though: "If I cure cancer, millions of cancer specialists, and their families, will be miserable because the doctors will be out of work."

Beautiful. I love it.

The class I'm talking about is the same class that has the two clueless students I wrote about yesterday. There was a quiz today; people were anxious about their grades. The ethics discussion came afterward, and was a good way to get the students' minds off how they did on the quiz (it turns out that no one got below a "B").

At the end of the discussion, I revealed to the students that I was actually very sympathetic to their position, and that I, too, would probably refuse to use such a wonderful power (except maybe in the case of the hardened criminal). The students declared today's discussion "fun," but seemed iffy about whether we should tackle more ethical problems in the future. I understand their hesitancy: I normally reserve such problems for higher-level students. Having ideas and being unable to express them properly-- that's a frustrating experience, and probably shouldn't be repeated too often in class.


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