teaching – Page 14 – dangermouse.net

And a crazy busy Monday

I was flat out today. (For anyone who doesn’t know, this is an Australian expression meaning “extremely busy”.)

I got up early, gulped down a breakfast, then went out for my 2.5k run. I wanted to get it done, and recover and cool down before my 10am ethics class. I felt quite good today during the run, despite the humidity being 94% (and the temperature was 23°C), and I was astonished to see that I’d run my second best time, 12:19. So that was a good start to the day.

After stripping off sweat-soaked clothes and having a big cold drink, I cooled down for a bit and checked news and events online. Then I mixed up a sourdough loaf and kneaded it and got it ready for baking later in the day.

By the time I’d done all that, it was time for my ethics classes. The last two lessons on this topic about art took me up to midday, when I had lunch and baked the bread.

Straight after lunch I got stuck into making this new batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I’d put off for a week. The photography involves clearing off my desk, getting out several boxes of Lego figures and parts, and then spending time building each of the sets, arranging figures, photographing each scene, moving things around, deconstructing sets and then repeating the whole thing with each new theme. While doing the photography, I refer to the dialogue scripts that I’ve written, and often also end up tweaking some of the dialogue as I get new ideas during the process.

Photography was done by late afternoon, and then I had to pack all the Lego away, and start assembling the comics from the photos using Photoshop. I did the new comics for this week, and then started writing annotations and uploading those, ready for updating on the website. I managed to get tonight’s comic done in time – but then I forgot to change the configuration to update to a new comic rather than the reruns that I’d done last week! So for about half an hour the “new” comic was another rerun, until I rewound that update and redid the update with the modified configuration file. Phew!!

I’ve also spent a bunch of in-between time today handling parent requests on Outschool. The extension class for my ethics class (mentioned a few days ago) is now live, which means parents can actually see that I’m offering private extensions for this class – and I got a request from one to set up a time for their kid to do it. So I messaged back and forth a bit, and found a timeslot and set it up, and then I had to modify my art class notes to make some explicit extension.homework questions, and send those off tot the new student.

And… haha… wow. While writing that paragraph, I got another request from a parent to add a new class. Gosh… it’s going bananas! And my calendar is getting very full of classes.

New content today:

Ticking off tasks

I did a bunch of things today:

Picked up the groceries that I’d ordered online. I had a couple of weird mistake with my order. I’d ordered a tub of ice cream, which was missing. I’d ordered one packet of medium sized garbage bin liners for the kitchen waste bin – these are the right size obviously. But they also included two packets of large size bin liners, for no apparent reason. I have no use for these, but okay.

Prepared class notes for my private science class, to share with the student for Tuesday’s class.

Prepared a new course description on Outschool for an extension class for my ethics class. A parent has requested additional work on each week’s material for her son. I suggested I could send them my class notes with all of the questions, usually including some that I don’t get time to ask during the class, and he could write responses to them, and then we could go through them in a private follow-up class. This sounded suitable to the parent, so I went ahead and wrote and submitted a new class description to Outschool today.

I went through all my backlogged ISO Photography Standards emails. I had to send a bunch of emails and organise some administrative stuff. The next meeting we have is in the last week of February, so it’s coming up relatively soon, and there are some tasks for me to do as the head of the Australian delegation.

Tonight is board games night online with my friends. We’re currently playing King of Tokyo, which I always lose for some reason.

New content today:

Thinking about art

Today I had a Zoom meeting with the university lecturer I’m working with on this data engineering course, to discuss our progress and plan the next week or two of work. We’re making progress on things and integrating stuff to keep the curriculum flowing from week to week. He also mentioned that a colleague was looking for some proofreading for journal paper submissions, to see if I was interested in a bit more casual work. So after the meeting he contacted her and put me in touch with her. So hopefully this will lead to a bit more paid work for me.

My wife decided it would be a good day to send Scully in for doggie daycare so that she can socialise with other dogs. Scully really enjoys it there. I took her in and she got super excited when she realised where we were going. After dropping her off I went to the hardware store to buy some humidity removing crystals and containers. I found a little mould in our garage storage cupboards yesterday, and given how ridiculously humid the weather has been for the past few weeks, I think it’s necessary to take steps to reduce the humidity in those cupboards.

From the hardware store I drove over to that new bakery at Naremburn that I’ve been enjoying occasionally, to get a pie for lunch. They also had chocolate custard tarts today, so I tried one of those for dessert, and it was really good.

This afternoon I had to work solidly on writing the new ethics class for this week. The topic is art, and it’s really more of a critical thinking topic than an ethics one, although I included a few ethical questions in there. The main thrust of the questions was to get the kids thinking about what art is, how it might be defined, what counts as art and what doesn’t, and why we make art. I just got it finished in time for tonight’s triple classes, which mostly went pretty well. Phew!

New content today:

The dreaded hiatus, and tidying up

After yesterday’s cogitation on the matter, I decided I had to take a brief break from making new Irregular Webcomic! strips, in order to get some higher priority things done. My buffer has run out, and I just didn’t have time today to photograph new comics – and I really want to reserve some time this week to work on other things. So I’ve officially declared a hiatus of at least one week, during which I’ll rerun old comics instead every day.

The work I need to get done, specifically, is to get cracking on the course notes for the university data engineering course that I’m helping my friend to redesign for the upcoming semester. We have a deadline near the end of February, so I need to schedule some time to do the work that the university is paying me for! This means comics have to fall by the wayside for a little bit, but hopefully it shouldn’t be too long. I’ll try and squeeze them in some time next week if I can.

It’s the combination of having to do this, plus restarting my online teaching stuff again this week, plus my wife starting work-from-home again last week due to COVID, that have all added up to a lot of distractions.

And there are of course other things that are usually too trivial to mention here that eat up parts of each day as well. Today I gave myself another COVID haircut, with a bit of help from my wife to tidy and even things up a bit after I’d hacked my own hair enough. And we gave Scully a bath – the first one since her groom just before Christmas.

Oh and we all went on a walk up to a doctor’s office for my wife to get her COVID booster. I’m booked in for mine next week, and I’m just trying desperately not to catch the disease before then. The case numbers are skyrocketing like crazy here in New South Wales at the moment, as omicron is defeating our currently relatively feeble attempts to control the spread.

Our government appears to have just given up trying to slow it down, and rather just hope that the hospital system can withstand the strain. Australia’s infection rate per capita is now above both the UK and the USA, for the first time in the entire pandemic. They said we had to avoid any further lockdowns for the health of “the economy” but apparently they didn’t realise that with so many people off sick the economy was inevitably going to suffer anyway. Supply chains for food have almost ground to a halt, and supermarkets are struggling to keep anything stocked. When I bought groceries last Friday, there were no oranges (which I wanted), and almost no apples, and short supplies of many vegetables. Reports this week, both from my friends who’ve been shopping and the media, say that supermarkets now have virtually no fresh fruit or vegetables left at all, and meat is in short supply. The shortages are expected to last at least another few weeks. We’ll see what’s left when I do the next grocery shop on Friday. Fortunately we still have a COVID lockdown pantry box with non-perishable food that could last us about 3 weeks if we absolutely had to.

New content today:

Starting biology

The Christmas break is over. My wife got up early this morning, and so did I. She’s working from home again, due to COVID, so we’re back into that routine again.

I spent much of the day making slides for tonight’s resumption of online science classes with my one-on-one student. Last year we started with physics, going through atomic theory, electromagnetism, and light. I thought we could start off the new year by changing fields into biology. So today I made a presentation on cells. I found a fantastic collection of public domain microscope images and videos of cells on Flickr, by the Berkshire Community College Bioscience Image Library. And an incredible collection of public domain biology diagrams by one very generous Wikimedia Commons contributor. Together they made a great presentation.

New content today:

New Year’s Eve eve

I spent much of today wrangling Matlab with various datasets, writing code and extracting statistics. I’m working on developing student exercises for the Data Engineering course at the University of Technology, Sydney, for the next semester (as I’ve mentioned a few times before). I ran into some issues with the datasets that I’m using, and need to figure out how to deal with them. Some of the numerical data is aggregated across multiple entries and needs to be divided according to an indexing variable… eh, it’s a bit complicated, and I still haven’t figured out what to do with it.

A couple of nights ago I finished reading Troy by Stephen Fry, his retelling of the Trojan War, and third in his series of Greek mythology. (I’m very much looking forward to the fourth book, which will cover The Odyssey.) He begins with the earliest causes of the war, and of course ends after it concludes and the Greeks begin heading home.

I’ve never read The Iliad, but I know it’s Homer’s epic covering the Trojan War. However I was very surprised that about halfway through the book, and most of the way through the war, Fry mentions in a footnote that “This is where Homer’s Iliad begins”. And then about 3/4 through, before the war is over, and even before the Trojan Horse is mentioned, there’s another footnote: “This is where Homer’s Iliad ends”. I checked and it turns out that The Iliad indeed doesn’t cover the whole war – it only covers a relatively tiny slice of a few weeks towards the end of the ten-year siege of Troy. So that was an interesting discovery.

The next book on my list is William Shakespeare’s The Merry Rise of Skywalker, the 9th in the series of Shakespeare-esque retellings of the Star Wars movies by Ian Doescher. It’s reminding me of a few things from the movie, that have prompted new ideas for Darths & Droids. So I’m reading it with a notebook by my side to write down things to include in the planning for our comics.

I took Scully for a walk around lunch time, and then another with my wife along as well before dinner.

Dinner tonight was “leftover veges fried rice”, to clean out the fridge before new groceries tomorrow. We have special plans for tomorrow’s dinner for New Year’s Eve. We often do a cheese platter and crackers thing, but this year we’re going to try some baked brie and crusty bread as a variation.

Oh! And the other big thing I did today was clean all the windows! (I was sitting here typing and wondering what I did all day, and forgot about it until now!) This is a fairly big job, since we’re two floors up, so to clean the outsides I need to remove the moveable window pane, then remove the insect screen, and then lean out the window with a long-handled squeegee. I wash the moveable pane in the bathroom, and also the insect screen, and then replace them all, and clean the inside of the fixed pane with window cleaner. Then repeat for all the other windows.

The other part of the job was replacing the rollers on the moveable pane for the bedroom window. For some reason the rollers keep seizing up and so after a while the window only opens by sliding, rather than rolling on wheels, which makes it much more difficult to open and close. The rollers come in little plastic cartridges, which slot into the window pane frame. But the fit is very tight. Last time I just hammered them in, but that made them difficult to remove today. So this time I decided to sand them down a bit to make them fit a bit more easily. Fortunately I had some fine sandpaper in the garage.

Anyway, with all this wrangling it took a few hours to clean and repair the windows. But now they’re so shiny clean that it looks like empty holes in the walls. Of course they’ll end up dirty again before too long…. but that’s life.

New content today:

Gaming Friday + Trekking Saturday double update

I didn’t have time to do an entry yesterday as it was board games night with my friends and I was out all evening. I did my run and exercises in the morning and some Darths & Droids work.

In the afternoon I worked on making some tutorial exercises for students in the university data engineering course. I wanted to make some fairly simple exercises involving calculating means and medians and standard deviations and such stuff from a dataset. I found several sites with free datasets that could be used, and went through them looking for something interesting. The first I found was a Kaggle dataset on avocado prices. That seemed okay, but then I found a cool site with other datasets, including one that was almost 2000 different people’s guesses as to the weight of a cow in a guessing competition. That looked amusing, and it has some interesting statistical properties. And then I found another site which has a set of data about the passengers on the Titanic, including nationality, sex, cabin class, fare paid, and whether they survived the sinking or not. I think this could be really interesting as you can ask questions like the average fare paid by survivors compared to the average fare paid by people who died. I still have some work to do to analyse this myself and turn it into student exercises, but I think this is a good start.

Games night was face-to-face, but we only had four participants. The first game we played was Hadrian’s Wall.

In this game each player is a Roman commander in charge of an outpost on Hadrian’s Wall. You get a bunch of meeples representing different types of people, and “resources”, and you spend these things to develop your outpost. The game is played by marking checkboxes on a pair of playsheets – each time you pay the cost for something in meeples and/or resources, you mark it off on your sheets. Marking off certain boxes grants you more meeples or resources, or alternatively points which are scored along four tracks: renown, piety, valour, and discipline. There are a lot of interactions and much of the game is optimising your spends to cascade into more meeples and resources that you can then spend to get more stuff. There’s a lot going on and many many options.

I kind of enjoyed it and would play it again once or twice, but I feel like it wouldn’t hold my interest after a few more games. It’s a very solitaire-like play experience – there was virtually zero interaction between the four players, and we spent most of our times heads down examining our own scoresheets to try to optimise our turns, so it felt a bit antisocial as well. I ended up “winning”, with 80 points to the second player on 77, but I made a mistake at one point and did a few spends on things that I shouldn’t have had access to until I’d developed something else – it’s a very easy mistake to make on your first game.

The host’s wife arrived back home while we were playing, and asked us what we were playing and if it was fun. Another player said, “It’s a bit like we’re all working on spreadsheets, and yes, it’s fun.” I agree with that assessment – it felt a lot like optimising a mathematics problem, and it was kind of fun, but for me I think it would wear thin within another few games.

The second game we played was 18 Holes, a golf simulation.

I think this game could have been good, however we got kind of messed up during the set-up. The owner suggested playing the “chaos golf” variant, and we set up the board for that. But then when he described how to play it – everyone just aims at any hole they like and we all go around the course in whatever individual directions we want to try and complete unscored holes before other players – another player said that sounded silly and can’t we just play a normal round of golf? So we did that, but we kind of had half the chaos golf rules and set-up still, and honestly it got a bit tired and repetitive, and it became clear that because of the “chaos golf” club sets that were handed out, certain players had significant advantages over other players. So it was rather unsatisfying. I feel like if we’d played one or the other version according to the rulebook it would have been fine, but we ended up in a weird non-rules-legal hybrid that didn’t play well. I’d try this again, but I’d want to play it strictly by the book next time.

I got home late, so didn’t write this up until just now. Today we had a long drive out to another suburb because my wife had an appointment there, so we went together, and I took Scully for a walk at the nearby wetlands park while we waited for her. This is a nice place for a walk as there are plenty of birds, including many species that I don’t get to see around where I live.

We got home and relaxed for the afternoon. The day has been hot – it really feels like summer finally. We had 31°C in the city, up to 29°C in some suburbs (the city is always cooler as it’s on the water).

This evening we went out to a nice seafood restaurant for dinner. It’s one of our favourites, but a little expensive so we don’t go as often as we’d like to. It’s very nice sitting outside, in warm evening air, with light still in the sky and a cool breeze to soften the heat a bit, and have some really well prepared seafood.

New content today:

Last science lesson of the year

And today I did the final science lesson for the girl I’m teaching individually online. Today we rounded off the last 11 lessons on physics by discussing wave properties, including refraction, dispersion, and the Doppler effect. We’re having a break in this course over Christmas too, and I think next year I’ll start on biology.

I spent much of today preparing the lesson, making diagrams and slides. I also took Scully for a couple of long walks to tire her out, since my wife said she’d been being getting into mischief at her office.

Not much else to report today, and it’s a bit late, so I’ll leave it there.

New content today:

An evening to relax?

I had a busy day. I got stuck into photographing the latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips first thing this morning, straight after breakfast. It usually takes me to lunch time, but today I had an online meeting at 11:30, so I was racing to see if I could finish in time. I made it, just.

The meeting was with the lecturer of the image processing course I helped tutor recently, to discuss our ongoing work in revamping his data engineering course for first semester next year. We had a third participant, the woman from the university curriculum assistance team (I can’t remember what the actual title of the department is) who is helping us to make sure we hit a bunch of higher level learning goals.

For instance, she asked us if we have any exercises in reflection in the coursework – tasks where the students need to look back on what they’ve learnt and assess their own learning practices, how effective they’ve been, and which ones they should modify. It’s a sort of meta-learning skill, and the university tries to make sure that several such skills are integrated into the coursework along with the technical skills that the students learn. We came up with some ideas. The tricky thing is that you kind of have to do these meta-learning things by stealth, because the students themselves often see little point to them and simply won’t do them unless there’s a more compelling reason, such as it being part of an assessment task that they have to do.

Anyway, we have a good structure and good ideas for integrating the course into the wider university experience. The main issue we have is the amount of work to be done and the fact that the university doesn’t have budget to pay for additional people to work on it. The lecturer has a busy time schedule, while I have some spare time and desire to work on it, but he doesn’t want me to do work on it without compensation. He did indicate that he might be able to get some additional funding from the faculty, so that would be good if that works out.

This afternoon I worked on assembling some of the comics I’d photographed this morning. And we had a huge thunderstorm. The sky went black about 4pm, and there was intense thunder and lightning, as well as torrential rain. The storm passed in about an hour though, and the sky cleared up a bit afterwards. Apparently this pattern is due to repeat for the next couple of days.

This evening… I have no classes to teach! And for the first time in ages my wife has no outstanding dog bandana orders to fill, so she can relax from the sewing for an evening. So we might just be able to sit back and do nothing for a bit. Phew!

New content today:

The end of the spring that never was

Tomorrow is the first day of summer, making today the last day of spring, despite it not really feeling like late spring. La Niña has made a mockery of spring, as we experienced wintery temperatures and unusually high rainfall for the past several weeks. Indeed, the Bureau of Meteorology reported today that New South Wales just had the wettest November since 1917. (Despite the cold, wet conditions in south-east Australia, the north-west is experiencing extreme heatwaves already.)

I mentioned how unusual it was that the sun came out briefly yesterday – well today it didn’t appear at all again. We had heavy, low overcast, with tall buildings disappearing into the low cloud, and it rained a bit around midday.

This morning I went on a trek into the city, to the University of Technology, to meet my friend who is the lecturer of the courses in Image Processing (that I tutored for this past semester) and Data Engineering (that I’m helping him redesign for next semester). The plan was to go over our course plan, discuss various issues, and decide on what needs to be done next to get it ready in time. I also picked up my university ID card, finally, which had been waiting for me in the security office since August.

After the meeting, I walked around to a book shop to pick up a copy of The Dire Days of Willowweep Manor, the first graphic novel by Shaenon Garrity. I had to get it, considering I know Shaenon and we try to meet up every time I travel to the San Francisco Bay Area.

I also picked up a copy of Troy by Stephen Fry, since I found one in the smaller size that matches my copies of the previous two books in his Greek mythology series. I saw it in another book shop the other day, but they only had the larger paperback size for some reason, so I passed it up, and thought I’d have to wait months for the smaller size release. But it’s good to have it now!

And I went to the game shop and picked up a couple of Dungeons & Dragons books. Fizban’s Treasury of Dragons has just been released, and they also had a sale on Candlekeep Mysteries, which I’d declined to purchase some time ago because I don’t really need more books of adventures, but which I figured I’d grab for the bargain price when I saw that it was a compendium of one-shots which I might get use out of, rather than an epic campaign that I’m much less likely to use.

I spent the afternoon writing a lesson for tonight’s one-on-one class with my science student. She’s into art, so I decided to do a lesson on colour mixing, and why what people say about “primary colours” is so confusing and often wrong. She really seemed to like it, and get a lot out of it, so that was good!

New content today: