Tag: ethics

Planning up to Christmas

Yes, it’s that time of year already. I’ve been making plans to go visit my mother for a pre-Christmas lunch. She lives over an hour’s drive away, so I don’t get over there to see her very much. I’ve invited my brother along too, but it’s a long trip for him as well, so I’m not sure if he’ll make it or not.

I also spent some time today planning future ethics class topics for the weeks in December, leading up to a break which I plan on taking over Christmas and New Year. I’ve had special Christmas/holiday themed lessons at the end of the past few years, but I think I’ve run out of related topics, so this year I’m planning a fun hypothetical lesson, getting the kids to imagine what the world would be like if various strange scenarios happened. For example: What if likes could be used as money? What if people had wings? What if nobody agreed what colour anything was?

Otherwise my day was busy with lots of online ethics classes. I’m really enjoying this current week’s topic on Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities, which ends today.

New content today:

Is marking assignments a right, a privilege, or a responsibility?

Lots of teaching related stuff today. I started by writing my lesson plan for this week’s ethics topic of “Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities”. I got that done fairly quickly, and I think I have plenty of material.

Then I got stuck into marking more image processing final reports. I wanted to power through the final three written reports today, leaving me with just the 16 individual paper review videos to do. I managed it, and then entered all the marks so far into the university system. I found a faster way to do it than I’ve been doing the past three years. Instead of sequentially pasting remarks into each individual student’s page, having to copy/paste the same remarks 6 times for each member of the team, I opened all six team members at once in different browser tabs and pasted each remark 6 times with just one copy. It saved a significant amount of tedium.

In between I took Scully for a walk up the street to the shops and got some sushi for lunch. Scully was off her food today with a tummy upset, but seems better this evening.

Tonight I had the first class with the ethics topic. After going through some questions on the differences between rights, privileges, and responsibilities, I had a triangle diagram with one at each corner and asked where the kids thought things like “medical care” or “driving a car” or “voting” are. The voting one was very polarising. One kid said it was halfway between a privilege and a responsibility, but not a right. One said it was dead in the middle of all three. And the third kid said it was all the way in the “right” corner – he said everyone over the age of seven (!) should be allowed to vote and nobody should have that right taken from them.

New content today:

Annoyances and comics making

Today I had a few tasks: Write up my class notes for the new week’s ethics lessons, on the topic of “Annoying Things”. I came up with an interesting fun question for the kids:

If you had an annoyance superpower that could make other people annoyed by things, how would you use it?

When I asked it in the first class tonight, the kids laughed and had a great time answering it. They said it probably wouldn’t be good to use it on most people, but you could potentially become a crime-fighting superhero by using it on criminals to distract them when they’re committing crimes.

One of the kids was a new 8-year-old. I’m always a bit worried when parents sign up kids this young to classes meant for 10-12 year olds. But she turned out to be mature and intelligent and have good enough English (not her native language) to participate without problem.

After I completed the lesson plan, I finished writing my latest batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips. By then it was time for an early lunch time walk with Scully. We went on a long walk around to Grumpy Baker and the harbour foreshore. I got a mushroom pie (vegetarian) from the bakery, and then did some ball fetching with Scully on the grass by the water. She was pretty worn out by the time we walked back home. The day was mild and cloudy, but a bit humid.

After lunch I photographed the sets for the new comics and assembled one for tonight. The I switched over to Darths & Droids writing, and hammered out another strip for that.

For dinner it was pizza night. We had a mix of pumpkin and asparagus today. Maybe a bit unconventional, but in my Italian video practice tonight I watched a video with a guy making a “zuccamisu” – a pumpkin spice tiramisu.

So if the Italians can do it to their own food, I don’t see why I can’t!

New content today:

Chinese Lebanese pizza

My back is much better today. So much so that when my wife got home I went out for a run. I took it a bit easy and only did 2.5 km, instead of my usual 5k. But it went well and I’m very happy that this episode of back pain has healed up quickly.

For lunch today I took Scully for a bit of a drive a couple of suburbs away to try a new place. I actually wanted to go visit the bottle shop to restock on some liquor, and chose a place to eat nearby. It was a Lebanese bakery, which made Lebanese style pizzas and pides and stuff. It was called Cedar Dough Lebanese Bakery, and the sign outside had the cedar tree of Lebanon on it, overlaid with Arabic text. Very authentically Lebanese. And when I went in to order something, the woman behind the counter was Chinese. Not exactly what I expected, but she was friendly and took my order for a folded pizza stuffed with cheese, mushrooms, and olives. I ate it sitting at the table outside with Scully, and it was pretty good.

In the morning before that I wrote up my next ethics lesson plan, on the topic of Hobbies. Tonight I had the first class. it went pretty well, except for one question, which I think I might have to excise from the class.

I asked: Are there any hobbies that could be harmful or raise ethical issues?
I expected: things like hunting, or trail bike riding.
I got: stealing things, committing crimes, bullying people.
In hindsight I’m glad no kid said serial killing…

New content today:

Final witchcraft Monday

I slept much better last night as my sore back felt better, and it continues to improve today.

I had my last 6 classes of the Halloween topic in my ethics class: Witch Hunts. it’s actually a fairly complex topic for some of the younger kids, and in one class today I had to take it quite slowly, but I think it was successful.

In one class, a kid was wearing a Star Wars shirt. I said cool, and asked him which movie was his favourite. He said, “Oh, I haven’t seen any of the movies. I just play the video games.” 😱

I just finished my last class at 10pm… so I’ll keep this short and go watch some TV before bed.

New content today:

Restarting ethics classes, Halloween witch hunt special

This evening I had my first online ethics class since stopping for a week to make time for last week’s ISO meeting. I wrote the lesson plan yesterday, and it’s on the topic of Witch Hunts, since this is the last full week (Tuesday to Monday) before Halloween. I start with the Salem witch trials to set historical context, and ask some questions about why those events happened and how something so grossly unjust could take place. And then move onto modern figurative witch hunts, where people are accused of something with little or no evidence, and what sort of consequences may occur.

It’s a fairly complex topic for the age group of the kids I’m dealing with, but most of them are pretty bright and I think they can handle it. Except today I had a new enrolment, and I did the full 3-minute introduction to the class, then launched into the backgrounds tory and starting asking questions, and when it came to this new kid she just looked like a deer in the headlights. I had to ask several times if she was thinking, or if she understood the question, or if indeed she understood English, before determining that her English skills were quite rudimentary. I had to remove her from the class, and then afterwards refund the class fee, unenrol her, and write a message of explanation to the parent.

At lunchtime today I took Scully on a long walk, with ball chasing time. She’s missed out a little lately, so it was good to get out in the fresh air for a good long while today.

This afternoon I catalogued and photographed more Magic cards for listing on eBay. A few hundred cards from the Unglued, Unhinged, and Unstable comedy sets, and a few hundred from Throne of Eldraine.

New content today:

Lightning fast blog post

It’s late already and time to mention what I did today:

First thing in the morning I made a Darths & Droids strip, because I completely forget to do one yesterday!

5k run: I took it easier than yesterday, considering I’d managed a great time then. And I still ran under 27 minutes today! Maybe I’m getting better at this??

We went out to my mother-in-law’s place for lunch with her and my wife’s brother and sister. Just some chicken bread rolls and catching up with family.

I got home and made sourdough bread, which is now baking in the oven after rising through the evening.

Three ethics classes. Super interesting class tonight. 3 of 4 kids thought it was okay for someone else (not JK Rowling) to write a new Harry Potter book and sell it. One was in China, and she actually said there are lots of these books for sale there. 🙂

In between I made okonomiyaki for dinner.

New content today:

Another full day of teaching

So, two ethics classes this morning, on the Copying topic. Followed by dropping Scully with my wife for the afternoon and heading into the university to teach at the Image Processing tutorial, while students are working on their final project assessment tasks. The professor is away this week at a JPEG meeting in Berlin, so it was just us tutors handling the students today.

And then back home for two more online ethics classes. In this topic I got an interesting take on copyright questions from one of the kids. She said that whether it’s okay or not to copy someone’s work and make money from it depends on how famous the work/author is. In the sense that it’s more okay if the work is more famous, and less okay if the original is less well known. When I asked her why, she explained that if you copy something well-known, then everyone will know it’s not your own work, and any amount you make off it will be tiny compared to the original creator. Whereas if you copy something relatively unknown, people will be deceived that you made it, and you could make more money than the original creator.

It’s not the direction I thought anyone would go when answering that question, but her logic was sensible and she’d clearly thought about it to try to come up with some reasoning. So I consider this a success!

Scully had another somewhat restless night, but not as bad as the past few. She went in and out a bit, but eventually settled down to sleep for the remainder of the night in our room as usual. So… maybe she’s getting used to whatever the disturbance is? I guess we’ll see tonight. I had a talk to the nearest neighbour who I suspected might be the most likely cause of ay new noise, but they said they haven’t started using any new equipment of any sort recently. Depending how tonight goes, I might have to write and copy a note to stick under the doors of several other apartments to try to locate the source.

New content today:

8 kilos of cards mailed

Today I worked on a new Darths & Droids strip in the morning. Then before lunch I had to pack almost 8 kilograms of Magic: the Gathering cards to be mailed off. Someone had bought a huge stack of common cards off me, and a smaller number of uncommons and some rares. It added up to a fair value, but it’s also good to simply get rid of a large shoebox full of cards!

It was too heavy to consider walking up to the post office, so I drove up with Scully. I was hungry so we sat at the fish & chip shop first and I had a chicken burger for lunch. Then I went to the post office and sent the package. I also sent off a copy of each of my two Irregular Webcomic! books to a reader. I still have a few copies of those available (in case anyone reading this wants some).

This evening I had three ethics classes on the new topic of Time Passing, which I started yesterday. I think this is a slightly tricky topic to get the kids talking about, as some of the questions are a bit abstract and open, and their thinking is still a bit limited. As in they’re imagining restrictions to possible answers that aren’t really there. For example, I ask them “What are some things that change over time?” and a lot of the answers are focused on technology, while ignoring other potential avenues such as nature, culture, or societal values. I’m still working out how to encourage broader responses without too much prompting. But hopefully it’s a good exercise in getting the kids to think more broadly, rather than setting their own restrictions.

New content today:

Busy Baking Bits

I made sourdough bread today, and I made pizza for dinner. Tonight we had mushroom pizza, which is a topping we don’t have too often.

Again, it was a pretty standard day. I had a bunch of classes to teach. And in between I worked on next week’s new topic, which is Time Passing. I’ll be asking the kids questions about what things change over time, how fast, why, and what’s good and bad about how things change. We’ll also look at aspects of nostalgia, and looking forward to the future.

The reason I did it today instead of waiting until Tuesday like I normally do is that tomorrow I’m planning to go out in the morning and spend the time doing some stuff I wouldn’t normally get to do. This is because my wife is going to take Scully to work, so I won’t have to look after her at all, and I can go places that I wouldn’t be able to take a dog. I’m thinking I might do the Bondi to Coogee walk.

New content today: