After yesterday’s apocalyptic rainfall predictions, today turned out less wet than expected. Although that seems to be because the low pressure system causing all this rainfall is moving south a bit slower than expected so it’s just taking a bit longer to get here. The morning wasn’t too bad – a few heavy showers, light rain, and even a break or two. The really heavy rain has waited until late this evening, and is now expected to extend well into tomorrow. Some parts of Sydney have had around 150 mm today, and we’re expecting another 150 mm tomorrow, followed by smaller amounts (around 30 mm) every day for the next week.
This morning I had my second face-to-face ethics class of the year at the school. Some of the students away with COVID last week were back, but there were still half a dozen or so kids absent. But I had another 4 kids who said they thought they should be in ethics, but weren’t on the class roll, so I added their names. That brings the class up to about 20 kids, which is near the maximum size of 22. We started the first topic, which is about “a fair society”. And the kids were really good! They got into the discussion, and were giving good, thoughtful answers, and they were all behaving well, raising hands to talk and not interrupting or talking while others were speaking. It’s early days yet, but I think this may be the best behaved class I’ve had in my 6 years of teaching these classes.
Back home, I worked on some comics – I needed to make a Darths & Droids strip, and a few Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week. I didn’t do a full batch of the latter – that will wait until next week.
And this evening I had three online ethics lessons in a row, on the new topic of humour. I posed the question if it’s okay for people in difficult or tragic circumstances to joke about their situation as a coping mechanism. One kid said he’s seeing a lot of that now, since he’s in Romania, near the Ukraine border, and there are a lot of refugees passing through his town. And they’re all making jokes about their situation. I knew this kid was in Romania, but I didn’t know what city he was in, and had no idea he was near the Ukraine border. Last year for a few classes I had a kid who was actually in Ukraine. It was several months ago and I haven’t heard anything from them since, but I hope they’re okay.
New content today:
My grandparents on my father’s sides were Ukrainian Jews, like President Zelenskyy and his wife. It feels a bit personal to me, too.
After yesterday’s apocalyptic rainfall predictions, today turned out less wet than expected.
It showed up here in Israel instead. We got a sudden rainstorm that looks far stronger than was originally predicted; it wasn’t supposed to hit Tel Aviv at all.
It’s early days yet, but I think this may be the best behaved class I’ve had in my 6 years of teaching these classes.
It’s been six years already?! I’ve been reading your blog since the beginning and it feels like only 2. How time flies.
I posed the question if it’s okay for people in difficult or tragic circumstances to joke about their situation as a coping mechanism.
A curious question. Why would it not be okay? They’re not going to take offense at themselves…