Unit 1.2 - Fallacies
Learning Goals: For students to explain their understanding and application of economic fallacies.
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Success Criteria:
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Each page will have one political cartoon, one of the political cartoons will me on your Midterm Test.
Find the first lesson on the Unit here. Prior to your first group task, you we will go through the lesson together.
Opportunity Cost | |
File Size: | 349 kb |
File Type: | pptx |
Group Assignment : 2.5%
Updated Fallacies Rubric | |
File Size: | 14 kb |
File Type: | docx |
What is a Fallacy?
“A fallacy is an argument that is based on a common mistake in reasoning, a mistake that people tend not to notice. Fallacies tend to be deceptive…They often strike people as being cogent or good.” - Glover, 2001
In groups of 3, view the following links.
View the following Links
Critical Thinking Part 1: A Valuable Argument
Critical Thinking Part 2: Broken Logic
Critical Thinking Part 3: The Man Who Was Made of Straw
Critical Thinking Part 4: Getting Personal
Critical Thinking Part 5: The Gambler's Fallacy
Critical Thinking Part 6: A Precautionary Tale
a) You will then be assigned 2 of links to present to the class.
b) Provide a brief 250 word summary for your assigned videos. This handout will be distributed to the rest of the class for notes. These WILL BE on your MIDTERM Test
b) Your group will then be asked to provide a 4 - 8 minute presentation that details the idea (all must participate in one way or another - creating/presenting/answering questions)
c) Your group will also be asked to provide real life examples that explains your scenario. Do not use the example provided in the video.
d) Review the Presentation Success Criteria before beginning. You will likely be working with people you have not worked with before, so you want to be prepared to do your best.
Note: This is an exercise in thinking and relation. Think about what the video is about and relate it to your own lives. You must be able to analyze the material and make connections. Expectations are high.
Some Ground Rules
Do not use any of the video in your presentation.
Do not exceed the 8 minute time limit.
Do not come to class unprepared.
Evaluation: You will be evaluated holistically and given feedback that will inform your next presentation which will be for marks. It is improtant that you not only do your best, but that you listen to and reflect on the feedback that you are given so that you can improve for the next presentation. Also, these fallacies are both on your Midterm Test and you will have to use them in a Reflection at the end of this part of the unit.
Presentation Success Criteria
As part of the course you will be asked to make various presentations. For this, and to save some time, I will provide the Presentation Success Criteria for you. As I am providing it for you, i do expect you to use it! This is a Grade 12 course and expectations are high.
A Successful Presentation:
- ZERO Reading (you may use notecards to assit you, but do not read from them)
- Clearly Rehearsed
- Critical Thinking (You are not memorizing, you WILL be asked to answer questions)
- Media (People Like Photos, Videos and Interaction, so you should have 2 of the 3, but remember, your presetation lenghts and keep that in mind when you add video or audience interaction)
- Visuals must be not only be approripate, but MUST be used, analysed, and talked about
- All Must Participate in one way or another
- Reference ALL secondary Sources Used (create a Works Cited Slide) - This Link Should help
- Make sure you reference all sources MLA in text citations (Author's Name, Page#)
A Successful Presentation:
- ZERO Reading (you may use notecards to assit you, but do not read from them)
- Clearly Rehearsed
- Critical Thinking (You are not memorizing, you WILL be asked to answer questions)
- Media (People Like Photos, Videos and Interaction, so you should have 2 of the 3, but remember, your presetation lenghts and keep that in mind when you add video or audience interaction)
- Visuals must be not only be approripate, but MUST be used, analysed, and talked about
- All Must Participate in one way or another
- Reference ALL secondary Sources Used (create a Works Cited Slide) - This Link Should help
- Make sure you reference all sources MLA in text citations (Author's Name, Page#)
Unit 1.3 - Application of Fallacies
Learning Goals: For students to apply fallacies to economics. |
Success Criteria:
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Think back to the fallacies that we have discovered in the previous assignment. They all play a role in the manner in which our brain perceives the world. What we may think to be true, may in fact be false. Our attention now shifts to our first economic fallacy; the Broken Window Fallacy.
How is the Broken Window Fallacy actually a fallacy itself?
How is the Broken Window Fallacy actually a fallacy itself?
Fallacies Commonly Seen In Society
For each fallacy below, come up with an example of its use that you can think of in society.
1. Fallacy of Composition: |
Something is true of the whole from the fact that it is true of some part of the whole - What is true for me must be true for others (I think that we should save the environment, so should everyone else)
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2. Post Hoc Fallacy: |
The idea that what comes after is caused by what happened before. The alarm clock going off will cause me to wake up.
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Application of Fallacies
Read the following article and relate it to the two questions above. As a class we will discuss which economic concepts apply here and what your feelings about building a stadium of this magnitude.
Is a $60 Million High School Football Stadium Excessive?
By Bryan Toporek on May 5, 2011 3:04 PM
Don't mess with Texas when it comes to the size of its high school football stadiums.
A story about Allen High School has been making its way around the web these past few weeks, as officials there are aiming to complete construction of a new $60 million football stadium in August 2012.
Sixty-three percent of the voters in the school district, in a suburb of Dallas, approved a $119.4 million bond package back in May 2009 that included $59.6 million for the stadium, according to//The Dallas Morning News//.
OK, it's not fair to just call it a stadium ... a better description would be "full-blown multipurpose athletic facility." The stadium will include a weight room, wrestling practice room, indoor practice area for golf, and a two-tier press box. Oh, yeah, it's also going to have 18,000 seats—an upgrade from the school's current 14,000-seat stadium. School officials said the stadium will definitely be used for soccer, will likely house high school football playoff games and band competitions, and the school's graduation ceremonies may take place there, according to the Morning News.
A few more quick facts about the stadium and school: Allen High is one of Texas' largest schools, with 3,897 students enrolled this school year, according to the Morning News. The marching band and accompanying color guard and drill team consists of 600-plus members. And the school did manage to sell out the 14,000-seat stadium during at least one varsity football game this past season.
Not surprisingly, however, the stadium's price tag is raising some eyebrows nationally, especially given the nation's current economic climate.
//The Seattle Times// wrote a quick piece about the stadium in mid-April, while the //New York Daily News// just ran a story about it this past weekend. Yahoo! Sports even made it the subject of a Yahoo! Sports Minute earlier this week.
"It's hard when people are losing their jobs and you're building a $60 million dollar stadium and an auditorium and things like that," Allen High athletic director Steve Williams told CNN. "But ... those are two separate things. You can't take that money for buildings and hire teachers with it."
To Williams' credit, he's absolutely right. The bond referendum specified what the $119 million would be spent on: $59.6 million for the stadium; $23.3 million for a new 1,500-seat auditorium (the school currently doesn't have one), and the remaining $36.5 million for a transportation, maintenance, and student-nutrition center, according to the //Allen American//.
And, believe it or not, Texas has at least four stadiums larger than Allen's new stadium, including the 20,000-seat Mesquite Memorial stadium for the Mesquite Independent School District. That said, those stadiums are regularly used by more than just one high school, according to the Morning News.
"I think that's what people who aren't from this area or aren't from Texas don't understand the magnitude of the event and how many people come to watch and support their kids," Williams said to CNN.
My colleague Sean Cavanagh reported on the State EdWatch blog that a budget proposal being considered in Texas would slash schools' budgets by at least $8 billion over the next two years. Texas is currently projecting a two-year budget shortfall of as much as $27 billion. Another proposal, recently approved by a state Senate committee, would only cut $4 billion from schools over the next two years, according to the Morning News.
Unit 1.4 - Scarcity and Opportunity Cost Review
Learning Goals: For students to understand scarcity and opportunity cost. |
Success Criteria:
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Scarcity: Examine the two images above and make note of the types of resources and what human needs are vs. human wants.
Scarcity is using resources effectively and efficiently.
But how are resources allocated?
Examine the nature of the different possibilities, which do you prefer first-come-first-served, a lottery, a contest and winner-take-all, money and price, need, an auction, or sharing equally?
Scarcity is using resources effectively and efficiently.
But how are resources allocated?
Examine the nature of the different possibilities, which do you prefer first-come-first-served, a lottery, a contest and winner-take-all, money and price, need, an auction, or sharing equally?
Application of Scarcity
Read the article below on monkey relationships and be prepared to discuss why male monkeys groom female monkeys to mate and how it is related to scarcity.
Study: Male monkeys 'pay' for sex
By Gillian Wong, Associated Press
SINGAPORE — Male macaque monkeys pay for sex by grooming females, according to a recent study that suggests the primates may treat sex as a commodity.
"In primate societies, grooming is the underlying fabric of it all," Dr. Michael Gumert, a primatologist at the Nanyang Technological University in Singapore, said in a telephone interview Saturday.
"It's a sign of friendship and family, and it's also something that can be exchanged for sexual services," Gumert said.
Gumert's findings, reported in New Scientist last week, resulted from a 20-month observation of about 50 long-tailed macaques in a reserve in Central Kalimantan, Indonesia.
Gumert found after a male grooms a female, the likelihood that she will engage in sexual activity with the male was about three times more than if the grooming had not occurred.
And as with other commodities, the value of sex is affected by supply and demand factors: A male would spend more time grooming a female if there were fewer females in the vicinity.
"And when the female supply is higher, the male spends less time on grooming ... The mating actually becomes cheaper depending on the market," Gumert said.
Other experts not involved in the study welcomed Gumert's research, saying it was a major effort in systematically studying the interaction of organisms in ways in which an exchange of commodities or services can be observed — a theory known as biological markets.
Dr. Peter Hammerstein, a professor at the Institute for Theoretical Biology at Humboldt University in Berlin and Dr. Ronald Noe, a primatologist at the University of Louis-Pasteur in Strasbourg, France, first proposed the concept of biological markets in 1994.
"It is not a rare phenomenon in nature that males have to make some 'mating effort' in order to get a female's 'permission' to mate," Hammerstein said in an interview, likening the effort to a "fee" that the male pays.
"The interesting result of Dr. Gumert's research on macaque mating is that the mating market seems to have an influence on the amount of this fee," Hammerstein said.
Hammserstein said Gumert's findings indicate the monkeys are capable of adjusting their behavior to "different market conditions."
Gumert completed his fieldwork in February 2005 and first published his findings in the November issue of Animal Behaviour, a scientific monthly journal.
Copyright 2008 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.