teaching – Page 12 – dangermouse.net

Busy day quick update

Mondays are my busy days. I did three ethics classes this morning, then took Scully on a long walk for lunch. We did some ball throwing/chasing down at the grassy area near the harbour, which is always fun. We met another puppy down there.

This afternoon I added text to the science slides I prepared for the previous science lesson I did for the girl on Sunday, so I could send her a file with the material. I still need to do the cloning topic that we did on Sunday as well. I’d forgotten about the previous topic until then. So I need to catch up on that.

And then this evening I had tutoring at the university for the image processing course. I went in to have dinner in Chinatown beforehand, at Chinese Noodle Restaurant, which is on the same block as the different establishments named Chinese Noodle House, and Chinatown Noodle Restaurant. I didn’t actually have noddles – I did last time I was there. This time I tried the special braised eggplant, which was really good.

New content today:

Teacher shortages and secret project unveiling

Those two things in the title are unrelated.

First up, this morning I received a message through Outschool, from someone who said they were a parent, but also affiliated with a private school in Texas. They said they had an emergency situation and were looking for a teacher to take the school’s final year high school class in optics and astronomy. For 8 hours a week, for six weeks. They said face to face was preferable, but they could do it by Zoom if necessary given my location.

They must have checked my Outschool profile, and possibly also my LinkedIn and academic publications, because this is well within my capabilities and experience. And honestly if it had been a school where I live in Sydney, I would have considered it. But Texas school hours are roughly midnight-6am here…. so that would be pretty terrible. (And there’s no way I’m travelling to Texas for this.) So I declined. I’d heard that there’s a shortage of teachers in some parts of the US, but I didn’t expect schools there to approach me!

While on Outschool, besides two ethics classes on Art today, I had another science lesson with the girl who has been doing those with me sporadically for a while. Today we went over the science of cloning, and applications of the technology. I cheated a little and used some of the material and slides I made for the ethics topic on cloning a couple of weeks ago, but I added more scientific explanations.

I did another 2.5k run today, backing up from yesterday. I did a good time yesterday after pushing myself, but today I decided to take it easier, and ran almost a full minute slower.

The other thing that happened today is the secret project I’ve been hinting at over the past several weeks has finally gone live! It’s a Darths & Droids related project, and if you haven’t noticed it already, you can find it linked from today’s new strip. If you look carefully…

There’s been a lot of work put into this, and I’m very excited that it’s now live. I’m waiting for the reader reactions to start rolling in as people discover it and start commenting about it.

Oh, and here’s Scully at the pizza place where we went for dinner last night.

(No, she didn’t get any of the pizza. We don’t feed her from the table.)

New content today:

Cloning pets

I finished up the last lessons of the week’s cloning topic today. In the very last class I raised the same question I’d asked in all the others: Would it be okay to clone dogs or cats if people wanted a new pet that was like their old one? And then I mentioned that the company Viagen exists and has been doing this for 7 years.

And one girl in this class erupted: “Oh my god! I have to clone my dog! I didn’t know they could do this! I’m going to tell my parents! I don’t care how much it costs!”

…

Okay… I hope her parents will be able to deal with this!

And this evening was lecture 2 of the image processing course at university. We covered image and video formats and then some basic image preprocessing operations. This is the easy stuff before we get stuck into full-on image filtering next week.

For dinner before the lecture I had ramen at a nearby Japanese place, which is fairly good. I had a bad ramen at a different place near the university earlier this year, so I went to the place that I know is good.

New content today:

Starting image processing again

Today was the first lecture in this year’s iteration of the Image Processing and Pattern Recognition course that I helped teach at the University of Technology Sydney last year. Last year the whole course was taught online via Zoom, but this year we’re doing it face-to-face at the university (like the Data Engineering course I taught earlier this year).

This morning I did the final three online ethics classes with kids on the subject of superstition. Then I took Scully for a short drive over to a nearby suburb to get some lunch, and on the way home pop into the hardware store to buy some damp absorber crystals. This stuff has been out of stock for ages because of high demand from everyone in Sydney dealing with mould problems due to all the rain we’ve been having. But I noticed it in stock at the supermarket last week, and decided to check if the hardware store had any (since it’s much cheaper there). They did, so I bought a couple of large containers.

Then late this afternoon I headed into the city. I stopped off for an earlyish dinner at a Thai street food place, before getting to the university in time for the 6pm start of the class. Being the first class it was a pretty easy introduction and finished early. Next week we’ll get stuck into the technical material and helping students with the tutorial assignment questions.

New content today:

History off the rails

This morning I had some spare time, and my golfing friend had suggested we take the opportunity to play a round at the short “par 3” course that we go to sometimes. We had to check the weather this morning, as rain was forecast, but the morning was sunny, so we met at the course and managed to get our game in before the clouds closed in. We played two balls each, and I started well, hitting the ball cleanly in the air and putting decently. But unfortunately my game deteriorated a little as we continued and I ended weakly, posting rounds of 75 and 76 with the two balls, just shy of my best score of 71 on this course.

After the game we went to have lunch at a nearby bakery, where I had a sausage roll and a salted caramel tart as we watched the dark grey clouds roll in.

Later in the afternoon I went to pick up Scully from doggie daycare, just before the rain came down. It’s been raining moderately heavily throughout the evening.

And this evening I had three online ethics classes in a row. The third one went a bit off the rails, as the kids were all keen to interrupt and provide comments about stuff that became increasingly tangential to my lesson plan. I had a question about the Black Death, regarding how we can be sure that such an event actually happened, considering it was almost 700 years ago. But one kid started asking questions about plague doctors and why they had masks with pointy noses, and then two other kids started taking about the various things they had stuffed into the noses to try to filter out the plague, and it kind of took off from there. I don’t mind too much, as long as the kids are enjoying the class and hopefully learning something, but I did try and get it back on track. It was exhausting though, and I understand why school teachers have breaks for recess and lunch – so they don’t have to handle kids for more than 2 hours in a row!

New content today:

Back to ethics and games

I got a bit more sleep last night, but didn’t sleep through, waking up for a couple of hours in the middle of the night. I think one more night should reset my body clock to the right time zone.

So I was still quite tired today. But I had the first two ethics classes, restarting my teaching after my trip. It was little a bit of a struggle against yawning, but not too bad once I got into the material.

And tonight was face-to-face games night with friends. We did COVID tests before going there – all negative. I picked up some Thai green curry chicken from the Thai place near where we used to work, since the hots lives near there. It’s the best Thai place I know, and I seldom get to eat there any more, so it’s a special treat when I can.

Four of us played some casual Apples to Apples while waiting for the fifth player to arrive. Then we played a new game: Nusfjord.

This is a worker placement/action selection game played over 7 rounds of 3 actions for each player. There are several actions you can select, involving gaining various resources: fish, wood, gold; building ships or buildings; recruiting village elders; and issuing shares in your fishing business or buying shares in others people’s fishing businesses. The buildings, ships, and gold are worth points at the end of the game.

Unfortunately I made a critical mistake in interpreting the rules and wasted about a dozen fish on one turn that I thought I had planned out, which set me back a lot. Another player also made a similar mistake, and we ended up on significantly fewer points than the other three players. Oh well… first game is always a learning game! It was fun – I’d definitely try it again.

New content today:

The Solar System

Today I had another science class with my online student from England, who I’ve been teaching intermittently for some months now. I decided we could move away from biology and start looking at some more astronomy. I prepared a lesson on the solar system this morning, pulling together lots of cool images form various space agencies and observatories. The great thing about these is that most are either in the public domain, or very liberally licensed, so fantastic images are easy to find and use, which is not the case for some other subjects.

And in between teaching that class and two more on the ethics of human rights, I got a message form a parent of a student who I had in ethics a few months ago saying that she was looking for a D&D group for her daughter and stumbled across my gaming group on Outschool. She signed her daughter up right away, and asked me if I had any plans to run actual game sessions in classes. That’s exactly what I plan to do some time in the near future! So I told her, and she said her daughter would be thrilled to be one of the first one to try my adventures online.

So that’s very cool – and it provides motivation for me to get this idea up and running as soon as I can. It will need to be after my trip to Germany in 2 weeks, but hopefully some time in July/August I can get it running.

New content today:

More marking – done!

I spent most of today marking those data engineering project reports from the university. I had reports to read through, and then presentation videos to watch. The videos were meant to be 15-20 minutes long, but some teams submitted longer ones – the longest was almost half an hour! I had to mark the reports and videos on 11 separate marking criteria,. assigning marks for each criterion and writing comments for each one. Then I had to paste all the comments and marks into separate fields in the university grading system, so 22 separate pasted entries for every student. Multiplied by 5 teams of 5 students each…

So that was about 2 solid hours of copy-pasting, at the tail end of all the reading, video watching, comment writing, and mark assigning. It was exhausting, and I’ve just finished now, after 10pm. But it’s done!

The only other things I did today were one online ethics class this morning, and then after that I took the car to get new tyres fitted. While it was in the tyre shop, I took Scully for a walk and got an early lunch at a patisserie about 20 minutes from the shop. And, um… that’s today.

New content today:

Report marking

I got stuck into marking final reports for the university data engineering course today. I’ve been putting these off because I’ve been busy with other things, but the deadline is Friday, so I really need to work on these now.

And it was really cold today. The forecast temperature would have made today the 4th coldest June day in the last decade, though it got a fraction of a degree higher at 14.8°C, so I’m not sure where we ended up in those terms. But it wasn’t only cold, it was very windy, with gusts over 70 km/h for much of the day.

I went out with my wife and Scully at lunch time for a quick trip to the post office, and it was pretty miserable out there, despite the sunny sky. Leaves were swirling everywhere and small branches were scattered around having snapped off trees all over the place. Scully didn’t like it much either and raced home.

New content today:

Rain and assignment marking

It continues to rain. The Sydney reddit group is just full of people complaining about the rain, being sick of the rain, dealing with rain-related problems like mould, asking when it’s finally going to stop raining, and so on.

I spent much of today huddled inside marking assignments for the data engineering course. This is the project plan for their final project, so it lays out what they propose to do, where they’re going to get their data from, what analysis techniques they will use, and the motivation for the topic they chose.

The topics are diverse, including: predicting favoured movie genres from demographic data; predicting favoured cuisine type from survey data on more general food-related behaviours; modelling performance of wind and solar power generation dependent on weather conditions; analysing traffic accident statistics in conjunction with weather data to search for correlations; modelling relationships between house prices, inflation, and interest rates over time. It’ll be interesting to see what the students come up with as conclusions for all of these projects!

New content today: