Tag: teaching

Too busy for comics again

I have a very busy couple of weeks coming up, and unfortunately I’ve run out of buffered strips for Irregular Webcomic! Rather than try to squeeze in production of a new batch, I’ve declared this week another hiatus week, and am doing reruns instead. I hope to be able to make more comics in time for next week, but I’m not convinced that will happen, so we’ll have to see.

This week I have to concentrate on getting some more work done on the Data Engineering course for the University of Technology. The course starts next week on 24 February. The lecturer and I have weeks 1-4 mostly sorted, and I need to work on slides and exercises for week 5, while he works on week 6. I’m planning to work solidly on that tomorrow.

Today I finished off the ethics topic on Tourism with two more classes, plus an extension class for one student. I’ll also need to write the new topic on Patriotism for classes starting on Wednesday. And the other thing I had to do was sort out my schedule, because of clashes with the upcoming Data Engineering course.

Unlike last year when I did the tutoring work entirely from home, the university is opening up to face-to-face teaching again, and I’ll need to travel in to do the tutoring work. The class runs from 6-9pm every Thursday. The university is a 20 minute train ride and about 10 minutes walk away, so I’ll need to factor an hour to take care of contingencies and arrive on time, and I won’t get home until close to 10pm. So it clashes with my current two ethics classes on Thursday evening, which I’ve decided to move to Tuesday at the same times (currently my “day off”). So I had to write a note to inform the parents of all the students about the shift, and ask them to either confirm that their kids can continue on the new day, or look to transfer them to some other class time.

The other thing that will occupy much of next week is the next ISO Photography Standards meeting. It should have been in Yokohama, but we are still doing virtual meetings due to COVID travel restrictions. It’s on from Tuesday 22 to Friday 25 February. The good news is that it’s at a very reasonable time for my time zone this time, with sessions beginning at 2:15 pm and ending at 5:45 pm. And, incredibly fortunately, that only clashes with one Outschool class, which hopefully I can move to a different time. However the Thursday ending clashes with the time I need to leave home to be at the university for the first lecture of Data Engineering, so I’ve told the chairperson that I can’t attend the final technical session on Thursday, and he’s scheduled the session that I am least interested in for that timeslot. So it won’t be too bad. It’s definitely better than doing a Zoom meeting for four days after midnight! (Which will probably happen for the next meeting in June…)

Oh, and as if I didn’t have enough to do, I had an idea for a new class I could teach on Outschool: Philosophy of Science. Although I think I wouldn’t call it that – it needs a snappy name that won’t scare kids away. But the basic idea is a one-off class that teaches them about the scientific method, Occam’s razor, the fact that science builds models to explain observations, etc. Basically a primer on what science really is, and what it isn’t, to correct/forestall many of the popular misconceptions of how science works. I’ve recorded the idea for now… hopefully I’ll get to work on it some time in the not too distant future.

New content today:

Engineering data…

On my day off from doing anything ethics related*, I worked on making exercises for the university data engineering course. I completed a couple of exercises, and wrote Matlab code to be an example solution, and then uploaded them and passed them on to the lecturer so he can integrate them into the lecture for the relevant week. These are fairly simple exercises on calculating summary statistics from a bunch of data, and making conclusions about the data based on them.

Then I started work on exercises for the next week’s lecture on data presentation. I’m partway through that, and hope to finish it off later this week.

Tonight I tried a new thing: sourdough pizza dough. It didn’t rise nearly as much as dough made with yeast – it would have been good if I could have let it rise for longer, but the timing is tricky with sourdough starter. I fed the starter this morning and then made the dough about an hour before dinner. I probably should have fed the starter last night, made the pizza dough in the morning, and let it rise in the fridge most of the day and taken it out for a final hour or so at room temperature.

But despite that it turned out pretty well! The pizza crust was nicely different and it didn’t really matter that it hadn’t risen much.

* That sounds wrong… I mean, I didn’t specifically do anything unethical today.

New content today:

Scully’s grooming day

Today I dropped Scully off at the dog groomer for her regular clip.She was getting quite shaggy, but now after the grooming she’s trim and velvet-fuzzy again.

In between I did my last couple of ethics classes for the topic of Artificial Intelligence. I did some comics stuff. And now that I’ve finished off the paper proofreading that occupied last week it’s time to start working some more on the data engineering course that I’m helping out with. This week I need to produce some exercises for students to do on summary statistics and data presentation, and also make some graphics for the data visualisation slides for the lectures.

This involves writing some actual code for the first time in ages. Both Matlab, and also some Python to massage some of the raw data downloads I’ve found into better shape for exercises.

Oh, and when I was outside doing stretches in the park across the street after my run, I saw about a dozen ravens circling right above my home. I can only presume this means something ominous. And for reference, I know that our place is built on the site of a former church, which must have been demolished to make way. So… it’s entirely possible that the place I live in is built on a former graveyard…

Maybe I’ve been watching too much horror on Netflix.

New content today:

Friday/Saturday double post

Friday I was very busy, doing the last part of the paper editing, so I could get it sent back to the author by the end of the working week. Then when I’d completed it and sent if off, the author wrote back to remind me that I also had their response letter to the journal to go through! So I had to do that as well, and cross-reference all of the comments regarding changes they’d made to address concerns raised by the referees, to make sure they were consistent between the edited paper and the letter. I had to change a couple of the edits I’d made. Finally I got it all done and sent off. Then the author wrote back to remind me that I had to draw up an invoice for the labour!

I had a couple of ethics classes before dinner, and then my wife and I went out to a Turkish restaurant near us to unwind and enjoy a nice meal. We tried a new dish, red lentil koftas, which I liked, but my wife thought they were very spicy.

After dinner it was virtual games night with my friends. I was joining late because of the dinner, but got in games of 7 Wonders, Kingdomino, Coloretto, Azul, and Wavelength. I neglected to post a blog entry because I was playing games.

Today my wife was doing a few things, and I took Scully out for a walk a couple of times in the morning so she wouldn’t get upset at my wife leaving. Then in the afternoon we all went for a walk together and to give Scully some ball-chasing exercise. The weather was unsettled, with intermittent sun, showers, and some heavy rain. We got caught in the rain when out with Scully, but it stopped and we’d dried out by the time we got home.

New neighbours moved in downstairs today. They have a cavoodle, and unfortunately Scully was barking and growling for much of the afternoon, hearing it running around in the yard down there. I posted a note under their door to introduce ourselves and suggest that we let the dogs meet each other some time soon, so they can get to know each other to eliminate the territorial behaviour. They messaged back and sounded nice, saying some time tomorrow would be good.

Late this afternoon I took some time to do a taste test on four bottles of gin. I’ve almost finished one bottle, and had been waiting for a chance to do this comparison test before emptying it. I was comparing Bombay Sapphire Sunset, Buffalo Vale Clair de Lune, Backwoods High Country, and Backwoods Muscat Gin (a special limited edition, no longer available). I find the differences between gins to be fairly subtle, and can only really pick it with side-by-side tasting, which is why I do this occasionally with as many bottles as I have, comparing the old ones just about to run out with the new bottles that I’ve recently acquired. The muscat one is unusual because of the sweet muscat grape infusion, but the other three are all conventional gins with subtle differences that I took notes on: Sunset was warm and spicy, with citrus peel notes; Clair de Lune is earthy and woody with lemon/lime hints; High Country was orangey, floral, and a bit grassy.

New content today:

A full-on day of work!

It’s been a very busy Wednesday. I went for a run early, and it was raining. The change in weather is welcome – it’s cooled down significantly compared to the past few days of heat.

I had to be ready for a virtual meeting at 10am, with the lecturer of the new data engineering course we are designing for this year, plus a guest lecturer from MathWorks, who will be giving one of the lectures on how to use MatLab for advanced data processing.

After that I had to write my new lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic on artificial intelligence. Which I ran this evening in three classes in a row. I think this is a better lesson than last week’s topic. It has more open questions and led into some disagreements and open discussions more easily. Oh, and I had a new girl from the Philippines in one class – another country to add to the list. I also had an extension follow-up lesson on the wealth topic with one student.

And I also spent an hour working on the paper that I’m editing.

And that’s pretty much a wrap. It was a solid day of work. I didn’t even cook a proper dinner – I just had some grilled cheese sandwiches and my wife made eggs on toast.

New content today:

Start of the week, end of the week

It’s Monday, which is traditionally the start of the working week. However for me I treat it as the end of the week, because it’s the last day of teaching the current ethics topic on Outschool. I start the new topic on Wednesday (and on Tuesday I have no classes). So it was the end of the Wealth and Poverty topic. Honestly, it’s one I’m happy to see the end of, because it was a tough topic to navigate without making the questions too leading for the kids. By today I’d managed to mentally rearrange things to get the best out of it and make it flow better than my initial ordering, and I’d come up with some extra talking points and questions on the fly that I incorporated in later lessons.

I managed to sleep decently well last night. I did wake up a couple of times – I always do, I’m a light sleeper – but I managed to drift off again before the noise of the past two nights got into my head. It was there again, but I successfully defeated it. I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that again tonight. This evening I tried knocking on the neighbour’s door that I estimate to be the most likely source of the noise, but they didn’t answer. I’ll try again tomorrow during the day.

So I slept in this morning, not getting up until after 8 o’clock. That meant I didn’t have time for breakfast and making/kneading a sourdough loaf and going for my run before my first class at 10am. So I delayed the run until later in the day. My wife wanted to go to the gym during her lunch break (from working from home), so I took Scully out on a big walk and grabbed some lunch on the way.

It was pretty hot in the middle of the day, so I delayed my run until later. I eventually got to it about 6pm, when it had cooled down to 26°C, which is still really a bit warm for running.

During the afternoon I worked on assembling new Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week. I also made a D&D monster for the January challenge in my Outschool D&D group. I post a monthly design challenge for the kids in the group, and at the end of each month we share our designs. For January I suggested designing a hybrid creature monster, along the lines of the classic owlbear – melding together two unexpected animals. So here’s mine:

Sharkle stat block

New content today:

The ethics of wealth

Today is Australia Day, which is always a bit of a weird day. Ostensibly it’s a public holiday to celebrate Australia, our national day. But it’s always accompanied by news stories and opinion pieces on how it doesn’t represent the Aboriginal people, because the date chosen is when Europeans first arrived in Australia. So to many Australians, both Aboriginal and not, it feels wrong and even oppressive to celebrate today. Personally, I think this debate is going to rage on until the date is changed, and until that point it’s just going to feel more and more uncomfortable every year.

I spent most of the day working on the new week’s ethics class. I wrote the lesson, which is on the topic of wealth and poverty. And this evening I ran it three times in a row. I think this isn’t one of my best planned lessons, because the questions are maybe a bit too leading. I might try to revise it slightly tomorrow for future classes to encourage more diverse answers from the kids.

I also had to fill out a new police background check for Outschool, for their annual security update. It’s been a year since I signed up as a teacher on their site! It started slowly, but I’ve grown to offering 14 classes a week, and the ethics one is very popular.

New content today:

Boosted!

It was a cooler, rainy day today. By cooler I mean 24°C. But still over 90% humidity, so it felt a bit stifling. This morning, after my daily run, I wrote the rest of this week’s Irregular Webcomic! annotations.

At lunchtime I had my appointment for my COVID booster third dose. It was at a medical centre I’d never been to before. It was very pleasant and I actually saw the doctor a few minutes early. After waiting the 15 minutes to ensure no reactions, I left and went to a nearby food place for some celebratory fried chicken for lunch. My wife met me with Scully, out on her lunch break walk, and we walked home together.

This afternoon I made a slide presentation for ethics of data engineering, for the university course I’m working on, and uploaded it to the share site for the lecturer. I also played a bit with Mentimeter, which is an app that the university uses for interactive lectures. I made a few slides asking questions about ethics of different data collection examples, which the students can vote on in real time during the lecture, and also post comments for everyone to see, and potentially the lecturer to read out and respond to. It seems to be a neat tool for getting interactive feedback from students during a lecture.

For dinner tonight I cooked some dhal from a kit that my wife got as a Christmas gift. By the time it was ready to eat, I was feeling a little bit nauseated – I think possibly a side effect of the COVID booster. It wasn’t so bad that I couldn’t eat, and the dhal tasted good.

Now I think I’ll relax and take it easy for the rest of the evening.

New content today:

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: