I’m in the middle of marking an environmental ethics exam. The scripts are no better or worse than usual. But, one gets to look for excuses to procrastinate. Thinking back over some of the funnier remarks I heard from my students in recent semesters, I thought it was about time I came up with an exam that spoke to my students in language they would understand. Here’s what I came up with.
Philosophy 297 Environmental Ethics
Answer, like, any two of the following questions:
Can a dude be an ecofeminist?
Rap on one of the following:
(i) Biodiversity is, like, way cool.
(ii) Deep ecology rocks.
(iii) Global warming sucks, big time.
R U in2 recycling?
‘Singer is, like, meat eating = murder, girlfriend, and Descartes is like, chill out dude, they’re only robots and Kant is like, whatever.’ Critically discuss.
Now I must have left something out. Nothing on overpopulation, nuclear power or wilderness conservation yet. I’m sure this must carry over to other subjects. Any suggestions?
This reminds me of the supposedly true story of a Philosophy professor whose final exam consisted of a single essay question:
Why?
He no doubt expected his students to go to great lengths to explain various philosophers’ examinations on the meaning of life and existence, but one student simply answered:
I wonder if that ever happened. The closest confirmed sighting is the following incident in a graduate diploma tutorial in Social Anthropology in Oxford. A friend of mine had finished her tutorial and her tutor was staring vacantly out the window. She asked him what she was to write on for the next tute. Still staring out the window he replied ‘Is there anything out there?’
It was with the greatest difficulty that she refrained from going over to the window and saying ‘Oh look, a couple of bicycles and a student with a scarf going into the library.’
I found it doubly funny because that would never have happened in philosophy.
And down at the other end of the education spectrum, where we sit with six year olds who are new to English and test their speaking and listening skills face to face, we have delightful answers. A third of my students have headed off to India for four to ten weeks in the middle of the school year. At one point in the interview, I tell a brief story.
“John is going to the airport with his parents. They are taking a trip to visit his grandmother who lives in the city. John and his parents will fly on a plane.” Then I ask, “Where does his grandmother live?”
The answer I hear very often, confidently spoken, is, “India!”
My brother had something close happen in his college philosophy class. During the final exam, one student sat at his desk without writing anything. When the professor told them to turn in their exam papers, this guy quickly jotted something down and handed it in. He got an A. What did he write? “Never rush a philosopher.”
Well, one thing I would respectfully request be made clear is the distinction between “ecology” and “climatology.” Nearly every time someone askes me for my major I find myself having to give an oral essay explaining what ecology isn’t.
It reminds me of a computer science exam I once had. We had to generate a bunch of random numbers and do some crackpot calculations to determine the actual randomness of the numbers. I spent a week busting my butt to write the most random of random number generation programs. Upon receiving my “B” test result I saw my friend had gotten an A. I asked her what she had done. She said she rolled a six sided die and spent all of ten minutes on her project. Brilliant.
