Warm under the collar
Apparently the best way to make your students misbehave is to brag about them to the Internets. I wonder if the reverse is true.
You see, one assignment is to watch a documentary and then to analyze its rhetoric in a paper. The students voted on the documentary they’d most like to see, and although “Super High Me” came in first, it was rated R which is generally not approvable, plus my research into it didn’t seem like it would present an argument per se, so we went with the runner-up, An Inconvenient Truth. To be clear, while it wasn’t their first choice, it was still their choice.
Oh. my. gawd.
Such wailing and gnashing of teeth — you’d think Al Gore personally done them all wrong what with all the whining and death wishes directed his way. And what kills me is how this film – that they voted to see — is so irrelevent that they see the idea of human-caused climate change as boring, yet they all want to see 2012. Um, guys? Srsly?
On Wednesday we’re going to talk about ad hominem logical fallacies and evaluating an argument, not a person. In the meantime, I wish aspirin were good for fetuses (feta? fetii?). Or alcohol.