On Friday I was very busy! I did the grocery shopping first thing, then I had a doctor’s appointment to get a flu shot before winter sets in. This was slightly complicated by the fact that my doctor is a couple of train stations away, and they’re doing some major construction work at my nearest station, necessitating a long pedestrian detour to reach the station from my place. On the way back I considered just walking all the way home, which takes about half an hour. But I decided it’d be quicker to get the train again—forgetting about the detour—and then I just missed a train and had a ten minute wait for the next one… basically it ended up taking just as long overall.
I had to work on my lesson plan for the second Outschool ethics class, which I had at 4pm. And in the middle of it I had to go pick up Scully from my wife’s work and bring her home. Then to ensure that Scully didn’t want to go out for a toilet or a walk during the ethics class Zoom meeting, I took her out to the park at 3pm and gave her a run around to tire her out. This was tiring work for me, because she’s a fairly reluctant ball chaser, and does it in a leisurely fashion. The best way to get her to run is to play chase with her, and run around after her myself. So I did a bunch of short sprints, wearing myself out in the process.
But it worked – I got her to do a toilet after the running and then we came back inside and Scully flopped into her dog bed and stayed there throughout the entire ethics class. The topic for the day was “generalisation”, including jumping to conclusions, and touching a little on prejudice. The main questions raised were when is generalising valid or invalid, and what caveats do we need to take when generalising from our own experiences? It was a really good discussion, and at the end the two students both said that they’d “loved” the class. So think both of them will continue with weekly lessons for a while, which is good.
In the evening it was games night. We had an attendance of only four due to people having various other engagements. We played Extraordinary Adventures: Pirates!, then Istanbul, and then had a big game of Apples to Apples, which caused several hilarious moments.
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