Tag: teaching

I started work at 8am, with four critical/ethical thinking classes online. With a break in between that took me up to 1pm, when I had a break for lunch.

Then at 2pm I had another online meeting, this time for Standards Australia where I’m still chairing the Photography committee. I had to report on my attendance at the Berlin ISO meeting back in June, going through all of the technical and administrative discussions there. And some other business related to adopting Australian standards based on international ones.

Then before 5pm I went into the city for this evening’s image processing lecture at UTS. I stopped along the way at a Japanese restaurant near the university to get dinner, and had some gyoza and takoyaki with rice, which was pretty good.

The lecturer is going to be away in two weeks, I learnt today, and he asked if I could fill in and give that week’s lecture. It will be on pattern recognition and machine learning in image processing, the introductory lecture to two further weeks of machine learning algorithms and procedures. This is lecture 5 in the course; in previous years I’ve given lectures 3 and 4, so I’m expanding into later material.

Time to relax before bed with some non-thinking TV…

Today I had two online classes in the morning, then I had to get ready for my visit to Wenona School, during the student lunch break when they had their Science Club meeting. I took a laptop loaded with the slide presentation I made yesterday.

After checking in at reception, I met the head of the science department, who escorted me into the science labs. These are in a very new building, and were super modern. We chatted a bit while waiting for the classes to end and lunch time to begin, then moved into one of the rooms where the girls in the Science Club would assemble. I set up my laptop to project on the screen.

The audience was about twenty girls from I think Years 8 through 11, plus several of their science teachers, and the lab assistant. I did my talk about human vision and cameras, showing the links between the biology and physics and going into details about colour vision and perception. I had to cut short the end to finish on time, since we started a few minutes late (the students were getting lunches and arrived in dribs and drabs).

Then we had question time. The first three questions from students were:

1. How does colour blindness work? I was happy to hear this, as one of the slides I’d stopped short of was specifically about this, showing how missing one type of cone cell in the eyes can make it impossible/difficult to distinguish red and green
2. Do we know if people are really seeing the same colours if they look at the same things? Oh my gosh… Believe it or not, this was exactly what another of the skipped slides was about! I moved ahead to that one and explained what we do and don’t know about this idea.
3. I heard this species of shrimp can see lots more colours than we can; how does that work? Okay, wow. I didn’t specifically have a slide on the mantis shrimp, but I did have one on tetrachromacy in birds, which is essentially the same thing, just not as extreme.

So that was amazing and really good. As the students left, some of them came up to me and said they really enjoyed the talk, and the teachers did too. So over all it was a great success.

The head of science then took me to a quiet room where we could talk about ongoing projects and how I could help. The Year 9 students are doing term projects on light, and could use some ideas and assistance with organising their projects. We ran through some of the fledgling ideas and I offered advice on what was doable and what might be tricky, and gave some suggestions for extending things in different ways. She seemed really happy with that, and our plans to work together this year.

One other thing: I found out their head of science studied physics at Sydney University, and was doing her undergraduate degree when I was doing my Ph.D. So there’s a chance that I actually taught her in the physics labs! Neither of us remembered each other, but it’s highly possible.

So I had a few things to do today. I’m visiting Wenona School tomorrow to give a talk to high school students in their lunch time science club. I told the teacher I’d do it on cameras and human vision, thinking I had a slide presentation ready to go. But when I checked, I’d sort of remembered two halves of different ones I’d done previously. So I had to spend some time deciding what content from each one to use, and then stitching them together into a single presentation. Which was complicated by the fact that one of them was very old and done in 4:3 aspect ratio at lower resolution, while the other was newer and in 16:9 at high resolution. I had to reconfigure and recrop a lot of the diagrams, so it took some time.

When I was done I uploaded a copy to Google drive and sent the teacher a link, suggesting she could download it to have a look, and maybe have a copy on a school machine just in case I have trouble connecting my laptop to their display.

Secondly, I’ve been trying to juggle a couple of requests from Outschool parents of two different kids who approached me about doing some additional classes for their kids. One wants a science class for a 10-year-old, and the other wants some one-on-one tutoring for a student starting Year 9 who needs help with formulating arguments in essays. I can do both these things, and would like to help them out – the main issue is finding time in my schedule. I suggested I could do them both on a Wednesday, during the day since they’re both in a good time zone for that (Japan and Australia). Now I have to make new class outlines and submit them to Outschool for approval.

In between all this I wrote a new Darths & Droids comic (which will have to wait until tomorrow to make), and picked up Scully from my wife’s work and took her for the long walk home. And then three classes on “Light and Darkness” this evening. Another full day!

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. 🙄

Today it was up early for an 8am start with critical thinking classes, up to 1pm. Then I walked Scully up to my wife’s work to drop her off there for the afternoon, so I could head home and get ready to go into the city for the first Image Processing lecture of the semester. I used the opportunity to run home via the 5k route I developed in the last couple of weeks. Today I managed to run below 27:30, which I consider a good time. And this is on a route that involves a road tunnel with about 30 steps down and the same number back up on the other side. I don’t run down steps as I’m too terrified of tripping, so this slows me down a fair bit.

I used to work with a guy who would leap down flights of stairs, taking 2 or 3 steps at a time. I tried it once and was so convinced I’d end up breaking a leg that I’ve never tried it again. I don’t know how anyone could do that.

One I was home and had a shower and changed, I had about an hour free before I had to go into the city. I worked on my Berlin meeting report for Standards Australia, getting another section completed. Only one part to go, which hopefully I can knock off tomorrow.

I got into the university about 5pm, giving me time to eat dinner before the lecture began at 6. But I was still full from the lunch I’d picked up on the way to dropping Scully off, after 1pm. The combination of a late lunch and a forced early dinner meant I didn’t want to eat much, so I just got a small box of sushi rather than sit in at a restaurant for a hot meal. Next week I’ll have to remember not to have such a big lunch, even if I’m hungry after the long morning of working.

The lecture went easily, as it was the introductory stuff about the overall subject and administrative details for the students. I didn’t have to do too much other than introduce myself to the students. We had a special observer today, a visiting lecturer from Ho Chi Minh University of Technology, who is here for collaborations and to observe our teaching methods. The lecture was very full; something like 350 students are enrolled in the subject!

This morning I did another 5k run. But after yesterday’s fast effort I took it easier and also my muscles hadn’t fully recovered, so I ended up being quite a lot slower. Never mind, the important thing is to do the exercise, not to be great at it.

I started work on marking the student assessment reports for Data Engineering. I need to get written reports and video presentations marked this week, so used my Sunday to get started. I only got one marked before my ethics classes in the afternoon, but at least I’ve started.

Not much else to talk about today – I didn’t go anywhere.