duro on Nostr: My first job immediately after finishing grad school was teaching high-school A-level ...

My first job immediately after finishing grad school was teaching high-school A-level courses in Ethics, Philosophy, History and Literature at a small international private school in Abu Dhabi. This was in the late 1990s.

The opportunity came to me through luck and happenstance, and I remember there being only a few days time between the unsolicited and unexpected phone call offer and my hopping on a plane to fly to the other side of the world in a scramble to arrive for the start of the school year.

My experience teaching there was enriching. The kids were diverse, curious, optimistic, energetic and transitioning forward in time toward a new chapter in their lives when they would emerge into a much larger and less bounded world. It helped that my classes, in particular, were viewed as a bit of a respite from the heavy and demanding loads of work that they would trudge home with them from their various science and math classes.

Although there were textbooks already assigned for the courses I was to teach, there wasn't really a curriculum to speak of, and I had complete leeway to build it and teach it as I wanted (I was either empowered or ignored by the administration, depending on what POV you want to take). In retrospect, this lead me to do some questionable things, including teaching a lesson on Nietzsche and some of his concepts that were relevant to our discussions (in a country where internet was accessed through a state-owned utility and all online information about Nietzsche's writings were censored and blocked). But it also lead to some inspired moments, like my decision to kick-off the introduction to ethics class with a thought experiment originally proposed by Robert Nozick in 1974: the Experience Machine.

The discussions this thought experiment generated were amazing--not just because they were varied and novel, but because they were also, in the end, insoluble. This really surprised me. I had specifically chosen this thought experiment because I thought that it would inevitably lead to an enlightening consensus for all of us. It didn't. Yes, there were many in the class who grappled with the experiment and puzzled out some deeply personal value they held more precious than the seductive promise of the experience machine. Seeing them mine and refine their reflexive hesitations in order to conceptualize and articulate them as values was amazing.

But there was an almost equal sized cohort who were enthusiastic proponents of the machine and who could find nothing worth the uncertainty that came from opting-out. They were not swayed by the reasoned self-discovery of their class-mates. It struck me as somewhat uncanny. These were not bad kids--I liked them a lot. And yet, even now, remembering back, I am not able to fully convince myself that they weren't wrong in their decision to plug-in. But I have, at least, convinced myself that whatever I think about what they think isn't fully right.