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An Illustrated Book of Bad Arguments


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I'm planning on using this next year for my 5th-grade DD along with the Logic to the Rescue series.  How have you all used it?  Do you assign a certain number of pages to read and do some flashcards?  Discussion?  I won't have much time to do any discussion because of the number of children I'm teaching.

 

Any suggestions?

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Well we just read it together and discussed and looked for examples in the media together. It wasn't a priority for me to have my DD memorize the concepts at this point. So, not sure that will be helpful to you but that's how we used it.

Edited by deerforest
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I have that book, but haven't fit it into our schedule yet.

 

Each two page spread describes a different logical fallacy, with an example and illustrative picture. Reading multiple pages at once might make it tricky to keep them separate. Plus, the book is only 50 pages long.

 

I was hoping to use it in conjunction with the book Nonsense, but pairing them would take additional work which i don't have bandwidth for. The potential conversations seem soooo interesting, though!

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Well we just read it together and discussed and looked for examples in the media together. It wasn't a priority for me to have my DD memorize the concepts at this point. So, not sure that will be helpful to you but that's how we used it.

 

It definitely is helpful to hear all kinds of different ways to use something.  Thanks.

 

I'd like to use it that way sometimes and I would definitely have to make it a priority to have that discussion time.

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I was hoping to use it in conjunction with the book Nonsense, but pairing them would take additional work which i don't have bandwidth for. The potential conversations seem soooo interesting, though!

I started the year doing that but Nonsense turned out to have so much more info and every chapter was just packed with info. We got a few chapters in and I decided it was more than we needed for this year so we just finished the Book of Bad Arguments on its own instead.Loved Nonsense though and will likely use it in high school when I would like more of this to stick rather than discuss.

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I started the year doing that but Nonsense turned out to have so much more info and every chapter was just packed with info. We got a few chapters in and I decided it was more than we needed for this year so we just finished the Book of Bad Arguments on its own instead.Loved Nonsense though and will likely use it in high school when I would like more of this to stick rather than discuss.

That's good to hear, thanks for sharing. Plus, than perhaps I'm not behind after all!

 

Going into the topic, I was hoping there would be general consensus behind a basic list of fallacies that we could then flesh out, but in practice the topic seems much more amorphous.

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We read it together... The illustrations are cute but the text was a little much for my middle schoolers - the vocabulary level is a bit on the high end. It's clearly not written with younger students in mind. Not impossible by any stretch... but I did feel like I needed to read it with them to help them get the most out of it.

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We just read it aloud, and well, some of them I plain just didn't understand.  I felt like I needed more examples to fully get it.  But I really don't have the background in this area.  

 

I mostly really like it, but there were a few in there that I felt like were not well explained at all. And logic isn't my background either. Some of them I had not heard of.

 

Conceptually I love it - and some of the things are really good. Part of me wants to rewrite it with more cartoons and with real examples and questions for kids.

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