Today I got my contract for the new semester of tutoring at the University of Technology Sydney. This is the same Data Engineering course that I did last year, and helped the lecturer to redesign. He’s running it again unchanged this year after positive student feedback. It starts on Monday next week. When I started this tutoring job a couple of years ago, I had to print out my contract, sign it, scan it, and email it back in. Then last year I did digital signatures, pasting in a graphic of my signature to the PDF. This year they’ve enabled online contract signing, and all I had to do was click through a few “agree” buttons.
This morning I had the first older students’ ethics class with this week’s new topic: Debt. There was a new student, taking the class up to the maximum of 4, which meant we didn’t get through even nearly all of the material I’d prepared. There was a lot of discussion and it was really good. At one point when one boy was answering a question, I heard someone else interject a different opinion, but I didn’t recognise who it was, so I asked, “Who was that?” And the boy talking said it was his mother! She was in the room with him and overhearing the lesson and felt she needed to add something!
The other thing I did today was the second lesson of the game design class with the girl who started last week. It was supposed to be yesterday, but she didn’t show up, and when I contacted the mother about it, she was very apologetic and agreed to do a make-up class today (which I’d suggested). So the girl appeared and we did the lesson on brainstorming. It was really good, with one exercise asking her to name as many uses as she could for a handful of mud in one minute. She came up with 4 or 5. Then I explained how to brainstorm and free your brain up to come up with ideas, and had her try again, and she came up with 30 or so! I was typing them out because she’d broken her hand and couldn’t write, and I couldn’t keep up, she was saying them so fast. So that was a success.
For lunch today I walked with Scully up to the station and the little cafe there where I tried the satay chicken skewers a few weeks ago. This time I tried the beef rendang. Unfortunately it wasn’t as good as the satay… I don’t think I’d have it again. But I’m still to try some of the other dishes.
New content today:
I’m curious what you, an expert, think of the new millimeter-scale cameras.
https://engineering.princeton.edu/news/2021/11/29/researchers-shrink-camera-size-salt-grain
Very interesting. I don’t know much about them or how they work, I have to admit.