Well, I had the usual five online classes today, on the Sharing topic. For the older 13-15 age group I recast the topic as “Resource Distribution” and concentrated more on complex real world scenarios such as countries or communities sharing resources, rather than individuals sharing things. I wrote about 1.5 times the usual length of scenarios and questions, and am picking different subsets with some overlap between the age groups. So it’s kind of an efficient way to get two somewhat different topics.
Also I had a video meeting with a teacher at Wenona School, to kick off our new STEM Professionals in Schools partnership. She told me some of the science programmes and projects the kids are doing to give me an idea of where I might be able to help. I suggested a first step would be if I come into the school and do a short presentation for some of the students and the use the visit to meet some other science teachers and get further ideas on how we can work together. She said they have a science club every fortnight on Thursdays at lunch time, and I could come to do a talk next week. So I’ll be heading in then and doing a talk on cameras and human vision, to cross over between physics and biology and hopefully appeal to a wide range of the students.
For lunch today I got fish & chips from my regular shop in Greenwich for lunch. I was shocked to discover they’ve raised the price for a basic fish & chips to $18.40. 😲 The last price I recall was $14.90. Which I still hadn’t got over thinking of as a bit expensive after they raised it from $12.90. Wow.
Weather was miserable, as you’d expect from the forecast of a solid week of rain. It was very cold. The rain did stop occasionally, and I almost got home from buying lunch without getting wet, but it started raining again just as Scully and I approached home, and then she had to dawdle and sniff around the grass for a few minutes before going inside. 🙄
The weather seems to be going to extremes all around. Finland has its 20th day in a row with temperature somewhere being over 30 Ëš C. This is quite unusual here – obviously it’s not the same place every day, but it’s been relatively hot all over. I think we discussed the buildings at some point here, and our problem is that most of the buildings are not built for prolonged periods of heat, and many do not have good opportunities for installing AC, for example.
The night temperatures have also been quite high, around 20 Ëš C where I live. The lack of rain is also an issue, I think it has rained two or three times in the last month here, and at least a couple of times were only short downpours, like fifteen minutes or so.