Tag: ethics

Critical thinking about monsters

This morning I wrote my lesson for the ethics and critical thinking class on Monsters. It’s much more of a critical thinking class than ethics, this one. We discuss why people make monster stories and the inspirations for various types of monsters.

One thing I’m also doing is a survey of all the kids. I’ve been having an ongoing argument with friends about whether a mummy is a type of zombie, or a different type of monster. I thought this would be a good opportunity to survey a bunch of diverse people. So far, after the first three lessons this evening, the score stands at:

Mummies are a type of zombie: 4
Mummies are a different type of monster: 5

I’ll keep you updated on the end result after a week of classes. The other thing I did for this class was to go to a shop today to purchase a cheap Halloween mask, which I’ve been wearing while doing these classes. It’s kind of a skull thing with a black hood. Fortunately it doesn’t interfere with my Zoom headset, but it is very hot wearing the mask.

It’s hot because today was warm – the warmest day since the 4th of May. Sydney reached 26.6°C. And it was rainy, with heavy rain in the morning and a thunderstorm this afternoon, so it was again ridiculously humid. Within the next week we should break 30°C. The warm, wet, and very humid third La Niña summer has kicked off.

Storm passing

I took this photo after the storm, while taking Scully for a walk.

New content today:

Ethics of Greed

Tuesday is the start of the next ethics topic for my online classes, and for the first time I’m recycling a class I taught before – the very first one from when I began these classes early in 2021 – Greed. So I had a lesson pan already written, but I updated it and rearranged it a bit, with the experience I’ve gathered from teaching this class for over a year now. I streamlined the material and added some more in-depth questions to get the kids thinking. For instance, in the original lesson I never asked the kids “What is greed? How would you define it?” So I added that in.

The first three classes tonight went pretty well, but I do notice that the sort of questions I wrote back when I began were fairly simple and didn’t lead quite so much into extended answers from the kids. So I’m glad I did that restructuring.

Having a bit more time that I didn’t have to spend writing an entirely new lesson, I assembled some Irregular Webcomic! strips and a new Darths & Droids strip today as well. I took Scully for a long walk at lunch and had a seafood pie before getting her some running around exercise, doing sit and wait, followed by calling her to run to me. And for dinner I made pizza: pumpkin, asparagus, and walnut.

New content today:

Back to school for term 4

The final school term of the year started this week, so this morning I was back in the classroom for face-to-face ethics teaching. We finally finished the “Drugs in Sport” topic last term, so today we got to start a new one, on Fate and Destiny. I had the full class of 15 students today. They were interested in the topic, but several times started talking about it over the top of each other rather than sticking to one at a time.

I actually arrived a little later than I would have liked, due to a combination of traffic issues and a queue at the school photocopier where I needed to make a couple of copies of some of the material to use as handouts. There’s this pair of intersections I have to drive through, where there are two traffic lights in close succession. They recently changed the road configuration to smooth through-traffic, at the cost of making it a bit harder to turn. Now you can be caught behind the near traffic light, with the far one ahead showing no turn and cars queued back behind the near light. Then the near light goes red while the far turning light goes green, and while you’re still stuck behind the near light, traffic feeds in from the intersection just in front of you and flows through the turning light ahead. Then the turning light goes red, and the near light goes green, but the entire section between the lights has filled with queued cars from the other feeder street, so you still can’t move! This can repeat 2 or 3 times before you eventually creep forward enough to get through the first light.

And then when I got to the school I needed to use the copier to make just 3 copies of material for my class. One copier was broken, and a teacher was using the other to make about 50 copies of stuff for her class. I stood there waiting, and then another teacher came up and asked if she could push in ahead of me, since the bell had just gone and she needed to rush to her class. Well, she’s a real teacher and I’m just there to do the volunteer ethics course, so I said sure, and then of course she made like 50 copies.

Fortunately the kids are pretty slow to get to the classroom that I teach in. I think they assemble first in some area way on the other side of the school, because none of them ever arrive until at least 5 minutes after the bell goes. I guess maybe they get some morning announcements as well.

Anyway, after that class I tried to get some work done at home, but I don’t know where the time went, because I didn’t get much done! I went for a long walk after lunch with my wife (her day off work) and Scully, over to the Italian bakery, where we got some biscotti for dessert tonight. I baked some focaccia bread, since we had run out of bread. And made a vegetable lentil soup for dinner before my three evening online classes.

It felt like I was always busy. Time to relax before bed!

New content today:

Full and busy Monday and Tuesday

I skipped an update yesterday because I was too busy. I had three online ethics classes first up, finishing at 1pm. Then I took Scully for a walk, and came home and started working on my lesson for the new week of ethics beginning on Tuesday. The topic this week is Risk, so I did a bit of research into related topics, such as micromorts, risk itself, and risk compensation.

I didn’t have a lot of time to work on this because around 3pm I had a shower before getting ready to leave for my tutoring job at the university. I had to leave earlier, before 4pm, because my wife has started a new job and I needed to take Scully there to her office and drop her off (the new job is again in a dog-friendly office), before hopping on a train to the city. Taking Scully involved a half hour walk, past two train stations away form the city, so I ended up further away that and had to ride two extra stations compared to just leaving from home.

Once I got in, I grabbed a quick dinner: nasi lemak with beef rendang from a Malaysian street food place near the university. And then went to the lecture room for the tutoring. This week students were working on their first assignment, which is writing up plans and specifications for their image processing project. It’s due on Friday, so a lot of groups had questions and needed assistance, which is what I was there for. The sessions are scheduled from 6-9pm, but when regular lectures were on we usually finished early, so I got home not too late. But this time students hung out right up to 9pm, and I didn’t get home until almost 9:45.

By the time I dealt with evening chores and unwound a bit from the day it was after 11, so I went to bed and left this update to today.

This morning I got up and had to finish the lesson plan for the Risk topic. In between I took Scully out for a couple of walks, and also worked on an online puzzle competition with my friends, the EC Puzzle Hunt. And then tonight I just did the first three classes of the Risk topic with kids. I feel like this is a good one for discussion, and interesting as they learn some sense of gauging comparative risk of different activities.

New content yesterday:

New content today:

More about Fun

Continuing my online classes on critically/ethically thinking about fun, there was another interesting thing that happened last night in the three classes I had. I asl this set of questions:

Is it okay to have fun playing a prank if the target person is upset by it?
Is it okay to play a prank if the target gets a laugh out of it too?
Is it okay to have fun with a prank if the target is neutral about it – they’re not upset at all, but they also don’t think it’s funny?

There seemed to be a bit of groupthink within each class, as within classes they were fairly consistent, but across the classes the answers all varied. Here’s what each group of kids said:

  • Class 1: It’s not okay to prank anyone if they are at all upset. It’s fine if they enjoy the prank. If they are neutral about it, it’s okay because at least you enjoyed it.
  • Class 2: It’s not okay to prank anyone if they are at all upset. It’s fine if they enjoy the prank. If they are neutral about it, it’s not okay because even though you enjoyed it, it was still at the expense of someone else (even if they weren’t upset by it).
  • Class 3: If the target is upset, but not too upset, it’s fine to prank them, because the total fun outweighs their small upset.

The most notable thing about today was the rain. The first day of forecast heavy rain arrived, and we have more ahead of us. I think we have a very high chance of setting a new annual rainfall record this week. Sydney’s highest ever recorded annual rainfall was 2194 mm, in 1950. Up to the end of September we’d recorded 2100.8 mm, plus another 11.2 mm in the first two days of October, taking it to 2112 mm, just 83 mm short of the record.

In the past 24 hours we’ve added another 30.2 mm, and it’s still raining solidly now. The forecast rain amounts for the next four days are: 15-20; 5-10; 30-40; 30-45. So even the low end of each day’s range will add another 80 mm, comfortably breaking the record. Watch this space.

New content today:

Thinking about Fun

I drew up a lesson plan for this week’s new online ethics topic: Fun. I think it’s a good lesson, but some of the questions are very tricky. I set up a scenario where kids are playing a board game and aliens land and ask why they’re doing that – it doesn’t seem to have any practical purpose. The kids reply that they’re doing it because it’s fun. And an alien asks what fun is.

So I have the kids in the class try to explain what fun is to an alien who has no concept of fun or enjoyment. It’s a really tricky thing to wrap your head around! Many of the kids in the first 3 classes tonight struggled with it, but with a bit of prompting we got to the idea that fun is a reaction your mind and body has that makes you want to keep doing the same thing again. It’s an interesting class, to be sure!

Other than that, I looked after Scully today and took her for a big walk at lunchtime to tire her out. And I baked some sourdough rye bread, and made fried rice for dinner. I still need to season the wok more because the eggs are still sticking to the bottom.

With daylight saving having started last weekend, my last class tonight doesn’t finish until almost 10pm, so I’m getting a bit of a later night tonight. Fortunately I don’t have to be up in the morning!

New content today:

The scientific method

I started my new weekly ethics topic with three classes today, on the scientific method. I’m a lot happier with this topic than the last one on digital assets, which I felt was a bit too technical for some of the kids, and they didn’t really enjoy it as much. This one feels better. It’s really more about critical thinking, but since my class is advertised as “Critical and Ethical Thinking”, that’s not a bad thing.

It was supposed to rain here today, being stormy, but there was barely a sprinkle. We may have more move in overnight. The next few days are supposed to be very rainy. We’ll see.

Mostly otherwise I worked on comics, and did my 2.5k run, and took Scully for a walk.

Oh, and I got the agenda and schedule for the next ISO Photography Standards meeting, which is being held at Apple headquarters in Cupertino in November. I’ve decided not to fly over to California this time, but to attend via web conference. That means starting at 4am (9am in California), for three days in a row. It won’t be pleasant, but at this point I prefer that to flying to the United States, given COVID and the political situation over there.

New content today:

Stu-vac Monday

Today is mid-semester stu-vac (short for study vacation – I have no idea if this term is used outside Australia or not) at the University of Technology, so I don’t have my regular Monday evening tutoring class there today. And next week is the Labour Day public holiday, so there are no classes then either. I also have two weeks of school holidays off from teaching my Wednesday morning face-to-face ethics classes.

I used the extra time this evening to finish writing my class for online ethics. It was a tough one to write this week, taking me a lot longer than usual. The topic is the scientific method. Which I know how to explain, but I had to find ways to insert questions for student thought and interactivity throughout, which was tougher than I expected.

The morning was full of the final classes on digital assets. One was interesting, because it had a kid who for many weeks now has occasionally been bringing up NFTs as examples in his answers, and it’s clear that he has a very poor opinion of the concept. But he listened and contributed in a positive manner to the discussion, so that was good.

My wife and I took Scully on a long walk for lunch, and then this afternoon we took her to the dog park, for the first time in months. The old regulars there had missed us and wanted to know why we had been away so long. Much of the reason is busy-ness because of my teaching. I have some classes that start at 5pm, which doesn’t give me much time to get home from the regular meet-ups there. But that will change next week when Australia goes onto daylight saving time, and those classes move to 6pm (so they can stay at the same time for Asian/European/American students), giving me an extra hour buffer to get home from the dog park. So hopefully over the summer I can take Scully there a lot more again.

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And a busy Tuesday and Wednesday

I was so busy on Tuesday that I neglected to update this blog. I wrote my new class material for this week’s online ethics classes on digital assets. I talk about Bitcoin, then things like music downloads and piracy, and finish talking about NFTs. It’s a bit more technical than most of my classes and it took a bit of concentration and explaining of some of the concepts before the kids could answer questions about them. In particular, I go through an explanation of what NFTs are, using a few analogies, and then ask the kids if it seems like a sensible idea to have some sort of method of specifying who owns a digital asset, that can be sold and transferred. So far, after 6 classes, about half the kids think that’s a reasonable goal, while the other half think it sounds a bit weird or nonsensical. One kid said, “This is really hard, I have to think about this.” I’ve glossed over the implementation of NFTs using blockchain, and concentrated on the concept of transferable digital ownership, because the implementation is a whole can of worms I didn’t want to open.

Today, my wife was home and we decided to drop Scully off for some doggie daycare while we took the opportunity on a weekday to go to a nice restaurant for lunch – a place that is normally booked solid on weekends. We had a very pleasant lunch, overlooking a beach, and got to sit indoors for once!

Before that I had my face-to-face ethics class at the school, and we finished off the topic of drugs in sports. That was a good discussion too. At one point as I was going through the syllabus material, posing trickier questions, one of the kids said, “You’re trying to make us all change our minds, aren’t you?” Heh… no, at least not deliberately. I’m just following the course material and raising the tricky questions that it specifies!

And I also worked on some new comics again today… it never ends!

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Finding dog-friendly dining

I mentioned briefly last Saturday that my wife and I are taking a short trip next week, to the country town of Orange, west of Sydney. I said we had dog-friendly accommodation, so we can take Scully.

We’ve been trying to book places to eat that have outdoor dining areas, where we can take Scully as well. (In Australia, dogs—other than assistance dogs—are banned from indoor seating areas of establishments serving food, but are okay in al fresco areas.) But we’ve run into a bit pf a problem. There are many cafes with outdoor seating that serve lunch, but they are all closed for dinner. And despite a couple of days of searching, we’ve found only two places in all of Orange that serve dinner and have dog-friendly seating options. Neither of them take bookings either, so we just have to show up and hope they have a free table.

A friend of mine’s parents live in Orange, and he’s contacted them to ask if they have any other suggestions, but he hasn’t heard back yet. I suppose if worst comes to worst we can get take-away food from somewhere and eat in our hotel room. But oh well, we have other things planned and I’m sure we’ll enjoy the time away!

Today I had my face-to-face ethics class at the school. We talked about cheating in sports, and it was a really good and lively discussion. Several of the kids had pertinent examples for the questions, some from professional sports they have seen, and some from their own sports that they played at the school. One girl said that in one netball game they played against another school, the opposing team were being really physical, making a lot of illegal contact, and the referee wasn’t calling penalties. So she said her team “had to” start doing the same, in order to be on an even footing. She said she doesn’t even remember who won, but that it was most fun game of netball she’d ever played in!

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