Dreams and sleep

This week the fifth grade students and I talked about dreams and sleep and the mysterious world of non-waking life. Our conversation, excerpted below, ranged from an exploration of dreams and nightmares and why they occur the way they do, to wondering about whether all of life is a dream or illusory in some way. We started by talking about the ways in which sleeping is different from being awake.

One student suggested that perhaps sleep is closer to death than being awake.

“Well,” another student responded, “I think that sleeping is more like unconsciousness than death. Sleeping is really not close to death. I mean, you have to sleep to live. If you don’t sleep, then you will be dead.”

“When you’re sleeping you dream, and when you’re unconscious you dream, but when you die you don’t dream,” offered a third student.

“How do we know that?” asked another. “Nobody knows unless they’re dead whether dead people dream or not. No one comes back after they’re dead and tells us that they dream or they don’t.”

“Whenever I have dreams,” one girl described, “my parents ask me what happened. They tell me that when you dream, your subconscious mind is telling you things that when you’re awake you don’t consider. I don’t think that when you sleep you’re close to being dead. Sleep is part of being alive.”

“I think that a part of your mind takes notes on everything you do, and these come out in your dreams. Dreams get you to deal with things in your life that maybe you are trying not to deal with.”

“So then you have to be thinking when you dream because your mind is working. Without thinking there would be no dreams,” declared a student.

We talked about whether the mind stops working at death, and whether you can ever stop your mind from working when you’re alive. We discussed why we dream, and why some dreams are nightmares, and whether we can ever control our dreams.

“I have a dream about Voldemort from Harry Potter,” one student said. “He’s wearing a t-shirt and shorts, and he rides a bike. He tries to get into our house. He climbs up the outside of the house and starts slamming on the doors, trying to find a way in. I’ve had this dream a few times. It scares me.”

“You can think about things during the day and keep yourself from dreaming about them at night,” suggested another student.

“I wonder if we are really a dream right now,” a boy asked.

“Sometimes,” a girl responded, “I think that maybe we’re all dolls being played with, like my sister playing with dolls. Like maybe there are people much bigger than us just playing with us, like we’re their dolls.”

Comments from Memphis High School Students

I had a conversation recently with a colleague about the difference it makes, in his view, when students who have had philosophy in high school enroll in his undergraduate philosophy classes. He said that he almost always recognizes students who have studied philosophy in high school -- he observes deeper thinking about the questions explored in the class and an enhanced ability to write and reason well. We talked about the relative invisibility of philosophy in the United States, and the difference it would make if philosophy were a subject (like history) that all high school students studied, the way they do in many European and Latin American countries.

Soon after this discussion, students in a philosophy class taught by Michael Burroughs at Booker T. Washington High School in Memphis sent the following comments on to me, reminding me again of the value of philosophy from the students' points of view.

Aysahn Roach: "What is philosophy? To me philosophy is a class to have group discussions on different philosophers such as Aristotle and Socrates. Not only does this class cause debates, but it also helps us really get into the subjects that we are talking about, such as forgiveness. I would offer this class to anyone who is willing to learn or likes to debate about different subjects."

Robert Coats: "We discuss key points about life that I would never have thought of. This class allows me to think outside the box. Some topics we have discussed are: the good life, forgiveness, and destiny. We have discussed more but these topics really stick out to me. Other classmates seem to be really interested in these topics and engage in conversation on them. Listening to the thoughts of others and how they perceive a question really gets me thinking. I believe philosophy is not only beneficial to me, but also to the whole class."

October

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cider-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats



October Birthdays

See October 2008 post

College Students in Seattle Schools

We began our Philosophy for Children seminar at the University of Washington earlier this month, and this quarter we have 10 students going into 8 different classrooms, from 1st to 12th grade, in six different Seattle public schools. The students are facilitating philosophy sessions in our seminar to help them to get ready to do pre-college philosophy. This past week two students led our discussions of Arnold Lobel's story, "Dragons and Giants" (in Frog and Toad Together), and Plato's Ring of Gyges. Topics in our seminar range from ethics to aesthetics to philosophy of mind and language.

One of the things we talked about last week is the importance of letting the classroom discussions flow organically, and not trying to push an agenda. Our seminar discussion of the Ring of Gyges ranged widely, and was a good example of letting a philosophy conversation take its course in its own way. One of the most challenging aspects of doing pre-college philosophy, in my view, is letting go and not trying to control where the students take the discussion. Helping to keep it philosophically focused and making connections between what the students say is crucial, but it is equally crucial to allow the questions and topics of inquiry emerge from the students and not be imposed upon them.

Fifth Grade Questions

I had a marvelous class with some fifth grade students yesterday. The first class of the year, we began by talking about what philosophy is and why anyone might be interested in it. I had planned that we would read part of chapter three of Mat Lipman's Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery and probably talk about thoughts and thinking, but this was one of those classes where flexibility was key! As we talked about philosophy generally, one student raised her hand and declared: "I have a question. Why do we work hard and worry about money and what we're going to do for work and food and shelter, when one day we're going to die? What's the point?" This set off a wealth of questions from the students, which included:

Why do we need money? Why don't we barter anymore?
What is time? Why do we measure it?
How did everything begin?
How is the earth so perfect for humans?
Why do we communicate by writing?
How did all these words get invented? Where did names come from?

I suggested that we vote on which question to begin discussing, and the far majority of votes went to, "How did everything begin?" We decided to start by reading part of chapter 13 of Harry Stottlemeier's Discovery, which raises this question and related issues nicely. After we read a few pages, the students started wondering about whether something can come from nothing. If the world began, there had to be nothing at some point, and so how could something have come from nothing? And yet, as several students noted, imagining it not beginning is really hard. Although, as one student pointed out, numbers don’t begin and end. Some students suggested that God created the world, but we observed that this still doesn’t solve the problem, because where did God come from?

We then circled back when another student commented, “I have two questions that I have thought about my whole life. What happens when you die? And what’s the point of living when one day you’re going to die?” One student responded that she thought that you live in order to have memories after you’re dead, in whatever place and form that occurs after death. Then a student who had been quiet raised his hand and said, “I think that we are an experiment for God. That God created humans to see what we would do, if we end up destroying the planet and ourselves or not. And if we do, God will create some other beings in some other place and see if they can do better.”

At this point we were out of time, and we agreed that we would begin next time with the question, “If all we know is that we live and then die, what’s the point?”

Justice at Harvard

What's the right thing to do? Harvard professor Michael Sandel has been teaching a moral philosophy course at Harvard for almost 30 years, with 1,000 students at a time often taking his popular class. This class is now online and is also airing on many PBS stations for 12 weeks this fall. Taped in Harvard's Sanders Theater, using several cameras to include the student discussions that are central to Sandel's classes, the course explores questions about justice and the good life, as well as many difficult contemporary ethical issues.

Each hour-long segment includes two 30-minute classes. I think the classes would be helpful resources for talking about these questions with middle and high school students. Topics include "The Moral Side of Murder," "How to Measure Pleasure," "For Sale: Motherhood," and "A Lesson in Lying." The website devoted to the course offers episode summaries and discussion guides, as well as related readings for some of the episodes: http://justiceharvard.org/

A Wrinkle in Time

I love this book. A science fiction young adult novel by Madeleine L'Engle, it was first published in 1962 and has won all kinds of awards. In the engrossing story, packed with philosophical questions, three children travel through the universe by means of "tesseract," a fifth-dimensional phenomenon explained as being the square of the fourth dimension (like a space warp).

The novel provokes questions about the nature of space and time, the relationship between appearance and reality, essential versus contingent properties, the meanings of words, the relationship between equality and conformity, and the meaning of courage. It would be a marvelous book to read over a month or so with middle school students, with weekly discussion groups examining the philosophical issues raised in the book.

September

The Railway Children

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting
We were eye-level with the white cups
Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles
East and miles west beyond us, sagging
Under their burden of swallows.

We were small and thought we knew nothing
Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires
In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

Each one seeded full with the light
Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves
So infinitesimally scaled

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

Seamus Heaney

September Birthdays

September 5 Tommaso Campanella (Italian, born 1568)

September 8 Marin Mersenne (French, born 1588)

September 10 Charles Sanders Peirce (American, born 1839)

September 11 Theodor Adorno (German, born 1903)

September 13 Alain Locke (American, born 1886)

September 16 Henry St. John Bolingbroke (British, born 1678) and Pietro Pomponazzi (Italian, born 1462)

September 17 Marquis de Condorcet (French, born 1743)

September 26 Hans Reichenbach (German/American, born 1891) and Martin Heidegger (German, born 1889)

September 29 Miguel de Unamuno y Jugo (Spanish, born 1864)

September 30 Ettiene Bonnot de Condillac (French, born 1715)

Philosophy and Learning

Why do I do what I do? I've been doing philosophy in schools for almost 14 years now. At a conference in Memphis this past weekend about doing philosophy with young people, the participants suggested varied justifications for doing what we do. And I've been thinking since about the central reasons that I believe that philosophical inquiry with young people is important. 

For me the heart of the issue is all about learning. I reflect back on my pre-college years, and I remember very little of what I "learned" in classrooms. For the most part, basic skills acquisition aside, I learned to memorize whatever it was I was required to know, and then rapidly forget it after the test. 

What I do remember are the moments of new understanding, when something that was puzzling or interesting to me suddenly became clearer. Those moments emerged in the (what I remember as rare) instances in which I was actively participating in thinking about whatever was being taught. When what we were doing in the classroom was examining some event or idea or concept, and not just being told what it meant. That moment of clarity, when learning comes alive, when a new connection is made or a new way of thinking illuminated. For me that is what doing pre-college philosophy is all about. Because by definition philosophy involves exploring the meaning of unsettled questions and concepts, philosophical inquiry is especially capable of generating such transformative moments. And it is in those moments, I think, that real and deep learning really happens.

High School Philosophy Classes

There is lots of exciting work in philosophy going on in high school classrooms around the country! Here are two public high school philosophy classes about which I’ve recently learned:

In Memphis, Michael Burroughs, a graduate student in philosophy at the University of Memphis, is teaching a philosophy class at Booker T. Washington High School. So far the class has been exploring questions concerning what constitutes the good life and questions about the nature of justice. The class has organized a blog about their work -- http://www.blogphilos.blogspot.com/.

And in San Diego, Josh Cottrell, a high school teacher, is teaching the first philosophy class ever offered in the Poway Unified School district. “Critical Thinking: Philosophy in Literature” is a thematic approach to philosophy, augmented with poetry, prose, visual art and film, covering epistemology, philosophy of language, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and some metaphysics. Josh reports that “the students are totally engaged. In fact, I'm stunned at their engagement. These kids (juniors and seniors) are taking this class as an elective and earning UC "g" credit for the course. This class is not required, and in fact is more work than many of their required academic classes. Yet, I'm finding that they are not only doing the readings, but annotating their readings like graduate students! I've rarely seen that kind of work ethic in my honors and AP students.”

One of the challenges of doing philosophy with pre-college students is the isolation that many people engaged in this work experience. Often I hear from, especially, high school teachers who are teaching the lone philosophy class in their districts and have no one with whom to communicate about what's going on in their classrooms. The Pre-College Philosophy Committee of the American Philosophical Association (APA) is trying to address this issue by developing a new national organization, PLATO (Philosophy Learning and Teaching Organization), that will provide resource-sharing and support to K-12 philosophy teachers around the country.