h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

When I teach this to 16 year olds I start my lesson by passing round a butlers corkscrew and asking each member of the class to write a description of it.

Some can do this description well. Others explain what it is used for. I then make the distinction. There are Describers and there are Explainers.

My lesson takes that as the starting point and then I draw a line down the middle of the board and we compare and contrast Positivism and Interpretivism for an hour on things like methodology, data gathering etc.

Too simplistic for what you need perhaps but it might be something you can run with.

Oh, cool. A good example and I'll play with it. My favourite so far is a traffic jam - at one end we have the mathematicians who can manage queueing theory and adjust the traffic lights to get rid of the jam, and at the other end we have all those car ads depicting how frustrating it is to be stuck in one.

The contrast I want is between dyed-in-the-wool bigoted fundamentalism on the one hand (which can be true for postitivsts, interpretivists, republicans, democrats, christians or atheists, or any other belief-position) and a more pragmatic, open-minded, approach which is comfortable with ambiguity and nuance, which I originally labelled "agnostic". It runs at right angles to the positivist - interpretivist polarity.

I might make the pair "fundamentalist" and "agnostic" actually.

Thanks for de-lurking!

B

[WA]

I've got my notes on a memory stick somewhere - I don't teach this any more. I'll take a look later and see if I have any more ideas. It used to be quite a fun lesson and by the end of it they had a clearly structured 2 columned page of notes which they used to refer to all the time. More than once the penny dropped at the end of the course that they had worked out all the answers at the start