PHI 1306.01 Second class period

I should have posted this yesterday, because I had the second class period then.

I used Microsoft powerpoint in class, with all my teaching notes projected onto the screen. Students seemed to have a good time, and I felt the teaching experience definitely to be easier. I will continue to use powerpoint in class, and see how students do.

Krusch. was right. Each teacher should be himself/herself. Don't try to step into someone else's shoes.

PHI 1306.01 First class period

I just taughter my first class. It was also the first class of this semester, well, for most people on this campus (except for business students, I believe). So it was kind of rough. People was yawning, and their faces displayed distance and tiredness.

The sudoku was a really good idea. I saw several hands raised in the air when I asked for volunteers. The students were also quite cooperative, at least several of them. They were interested in the questions, and they were good at answering them. I was, and still am, feeling pleased. I think the sudoku part truly got some people interested in logic. We will keep doing similar things in class.

I asked for one volunteer to write down the reasoning process on the board at one point. He did well. And I myself also got the chance to stop talking, take a deep breath, and relax a bit. Students sitting there also seemed relaxed. I will keep using this idea.

I still believe that close-to-home examples and collective-efforts are great for attracting students. If I myself keep talking for twenty minutes, some people will surely doze off.

PHI 1306.01 First class period

For the first class period of PHI 1306.01, I am going to do these three things:

First, knowing people: I will first introduce myself to the class, and after that, call the roll, and everytime a student's name is called, she or he should briefly introduce her-/himself. Students' self-introduction should include the following information: where they are from, what are their majors, and what are their favorite things.

Second, going through the syllabus. I will walk the students through the syllabus real quick, explaining their responsibilities, the objectives of this course, and other logistic information.

Third, solving a sudoku puzzle. I will hand out a sudoku puzzle to the students; they will have five minutes to look at this puzzle and perhaps try to solve it. Then, me and the whole class will work on the puzzle together. The goal is to let the students have a rough idea about the nature of (deductive) logic: making inferences in accordance with rules.

Adams' Thesis

Adams's Thesis has won many people's agreement:
An indicative conditional p-->q is assertable if and only if q is high probable given p.

Or, an alternative version:
An indicative conditional p-->q is assertable to the degree that q is probable given p.

The alternative version is clearly false. When the probability of q given p is lower than .5, p-->q is hardly assertable.

But the original version is also faced with counterexamples:
E.g., There are ten balls in a non-transparent bag. You have the opportunity to pick one ball out of it. It is known that nine of the balls are black and the other one white. Let p be 'you pick a ball out of the bag', and q be 'the ball you pick will be black'. The probability of q given p is .9, which means that q is highly probable given p. But p-->q is not assertable.

So neither version of Adams' Thesis works. But there does seem to be something intuitively right in it, although it is hard to describe it. How are we going to revise and save Adams' Thesis?