Tag: teaching

Completely forgot about yesterday’s post

Ooops! I intended to write a blog post yesterday, but I just completely forgot. It was a busy day. I had two ethics classes starting early at 8:00 am – an hour earlier than last week because of the daylight saving change on the weekend. This also meant that my 12:00 class—that I’d temporarily shunted to Tuesdays because it didn’t give me enough time to get into university for the Data Engineering lecture—could now be moved back to 11:00 on Monday. So I had that class too. Then I had one hour to take Scully to my wife’s work and hop on a train into the city and pick up some lunch on the way before the lecture.

This was the last lecture with new material, talking about complex systems and agent-based modelling. We have two weeks off now for the mid-semester vacation and then the Easter Monday public holiday, followed by four weeks of student project work tutorials.

When I got home, I made pizza for dinner and then had two more ethics classes in the evening, which chewed up the rest of the day.

Today we had some rain and cooler weather, which was nice. I wrote my new ethics class topic, on “Brands and Trademarks”. With some interesting questions like:

Should I be able to start a business called McDonald’s:
• that does shoe repair?
• that sells pizza?
• that sells burgers?
• if my surname is McDonald?
If I do start a shoe repair shop called McDonald’s, should I be allowed to advertise it with a red and yellow sign saying “McDonald’s”?

I also made some slides to show the kids with illustrative photos of businesses with modified names, and this took a while. So it took me longer to write this class than usual, and I didn’t get around to doing much else during the day.

Scully is finished her medication for her bloody poops last week, and seems to be fully recovered, so that’s good news. There was some other test the vet did which also came back negative. So we don’t really know what the problem was – probably some sort of gastro-intestinal infection I guess.

In other news, the Australian election campaign is progressing. Prime Minster Albanese is firming up in the opinion polls, while opposition leader Dutton is falling behind. At least part of this is the “Trump factor”, with Australian voters recoiling from conservative politics due to the destructive antics of Donald Trump in the USA. Dutton was initially a few weeks ago expressing a need for some Trump-like policies, such as reducing the size of the federal government, but this has backfired badly and he’s had to backpedal and change his tune. So if anything good can come from Trump, I’m hopeful that it makes Australian voters head for a more progressive choice, n the same way it appears to be doing in Canada.

Introing to machine learning

Today I was back at the University of Technology Sydney for the ongoing Data Engineering course which I’m helping to teach. Today’s lecture was an introduction to machine learning, which is a fairly advanced topic for an introductory first year course. But there are tools which let people code up machine learning examples and projects without too much difficulty and we want to make sure the students understand the basic principles behind them. Some will probably elect to use this in their assessment project, which they should start working on after next week’s final lecture.

Then we have a two-week mid-semester break. It’s normally one week, but Easter Monday eats up the next week’s lecture slot as well. Then four weeks of tutorial time to help the students as they work on their projects.

On the way home I stoped at my wife’s work and we had a pleasant walk home together with Scully. We were a bit concerned about the weather, as heavy rain was heading our way on the radar, but luckily it never arrived and we made it home dry.

I made pizza for dinner, topping it with very thin slices of one of those gourmet potatoes we bought at the farmer’s market on Saturday.

And we did some planning for our next trip, which is to Europe in June for the ISO Photography Standards meeting in Berlin. It’s a five-day meeting, so we’ll be there for that long, and then we’re planning to visit some of the central European countries and cities we haven’t been to before. A couple of days in Prague, then we plan to spend a week in Vienna, renting an apartment for the week instead of using a hotel. We’ll do side trips from there to Bratislava and Budapest, before heading to Salzburg to finish up before flying home. We have the itinerary sorted now after deciding on various options this evening. Now to book some accommodation!

Summarising data and learning Japanese

Beginning this morning, my morning classes moved an hour earlier, because of the USA going on to daylight saving time on the weekend. Since most of my students in the morning classes are kids in the USA doing classes in the evening, I adjust the class time so it stays the same for them, which results in them moving an hour earlier for me. Then in a few weeks when Australia goes off DST, the times become another hour earlier for me. So classes that began at 10am in summer will be starting at 8am in winter (for me). But for now they’re at 9am.

After two classes I got ready to head into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. Today’s topic was summarising data – basically how to calculate simple statistics like the mean, median, mode, standard deviation, quartiles, etc., plus how to compare and interpret them. There’s also some background material on probability distributions and statistical sampling, and the differences between populations and samples. So it sounds simple, but it’s quite detailed and is one of the longer lectures in the course.

I got home and made pizza for dinner. Tonight we had potato and rosemary.

My usual daily Japanese lesson on Duolingo today was notable for one answer in which I had to type in four different writing systems: hiragana, Roman, katakana, and kanji scripts. It was a listening exercise and the correct answer that I had to type in was:

このTシャツは五百円ですか

Which is said: “kono T-shatsu-wa go hyaku en desu ka”, and which means: “Is this T-shirt five hundred yen?”

I’ve been learning some of the simpler kanji as part of this course. I brought a few business cards back from my recent trip to Japan, from restaurants/bars that I liked. And yesterday when I looked through them I realised I could read 田中 as “Tanaka”, the name of the proprietor.

Pretty cool!

Back to the grind

Today was my first full day home from my trip, and it was a busy one. I had two ethics classes in the morning. Unfortunately about half an hour before the first class I got a message from my Internet provider saying that there was emergency maintenance being carried out, and my broadband connection would be interrupted, starting in 20 minutes!

As it turned out, it was a bit later than that. I had time to start the Zoom class and one kid joined in… and then my network dropped out. I’d had time to send a message to the students warning them that the class might be cancelled because of this. The net came back about half an hour later, so my next class was unaffected, but I had to refund the class fees for all the students in the first class.

After the second one, I had to quickly get ready and dash out the door to take Scully to my wife’s work, and then catch a train into the university for today’s Data Engineering lecture. I made it with a few minutes to spare, but had to eat a quick lunch of sushi that I’d picked up on the way during the first few minutes of the professor starting the lecture.

After the lecture was over, I caught a train back home and then went out for a run, since I haven’t done any for a couple of weeks due to my trip. It was warm and humid, and I’m still a bit tired, so I only did 2.5k instead of my usual 5.

I made pizza for dinner. Our usual pumpkin and walnut toppings. And then had two more ethics classes late in the evening before bedtime.

I processed some photos from the Japan trip today, but I haven’t uploaded any new ones. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll have a bit more time to show off some photos from the last day there.

Oh, I also think I won’t bring back the listing of new comics content to this blog. I didn’t have time to do it while travelling, and it’s just easier not having to do it every day. Anyone reading this probably doesn’t need the reminders!

Starting up data engineering again

Today was the first lecture session for the University of Technology Sydney first year course on Data Engineering. As in the past few years, I’m doing tutoring work on this course again. Unfortunately the scheduled lecture time clashed with two of my online ethics classes, so I’ve had to move them from Monday to Tuesday. I don’t think all of the kids can make the new day, so some will probably have to drop the class.

Straight after my two morning classes, I had to dash off and take Scully to my wife’s work and drop her off there, then dash to the Metro station and catch a train into the city. I stopped quickly at a supermarket to get some sushi for lunch, since I hadn’t had time to eat anything while travelling, and just made it to the lecture on time. I had to eat my sushi in the class as the lecturer began teaching! It’ll be like this in two weeks as well (next week I’ll be away in Tokyo so will miss the lecture), but after that the US goes on to daylight saving time, and I move all my day classes an hour earlier to adjust (since most of the students in them are in the US), so I’ll have an extra hour to get into the university and have lunch.

The lecture went pretty well. I expected more people in the class, but I suspect some stayed home today because there was a sort of shadow strike action on the Sydney trains today, with hundreds of train drivers calling in sick in what the government calls an unauthorised strike action, but which the rail workers union claims was genuine sickness. Being a Monday, and the first lecture of a first year course, it may well have been the first time these students had attended a university lecture.

I made it back homeward in time to meet my wife at work and we walked home together with Scully. I made pizza for dinner tonight, and am finishing off some final Irregular Webcomic! strips for this week, before heading into two more ethics classes from 8pm. Quite a busy day!!

New content today:

Finished marking. Nearly.

Today I tackled the last of the video assignments from the university image processing class. I had some… interesting… issues to deal with. I shouldn’t say too much about them, but a few students had done bad things and I had to consult with the professor to determine how to handle comments and marking.

I also had an interesting online ethics class this morning. The topic is still Rights, Privileges, and Responsibilities, and the first class I had with older 13-15 age group kids kept getting sidetracked into them bringing up a certain recent election and a certain previous President who is set to be President again as examples. I had to keep reminding them we weren’t there to talk about politics. Fortunately all the kids were pretty unanimous in their opinions (negative!), so there were no arguments.

New content today:

Video assessments

Today I got stuck into the individual video reports from the masters students in the image processing course. I had 17 to view and mark. I managed to get through 12 of them today. I would have done more, but I had a moment of horrific realisation when I reached the second group of students and had the suspicion that the paper subject they were talking about had nothing to do with their group project report.

I checked, and discovered to my shock that I had accidentally downloaded the report of the wrong student team and marked that yesterday! So I had to scrap that work, download the correct report, and spend a couple of hours reading through and marking that before I could get back to viewing the videos. That was pretty awful.

By 5pm I was wasted on marking and had a bit of time away from the screen to relax my eyes before launching into three consecutive ethics classes. Apart from a lunch break and that time, I was working essentially 9am to 9pm today.

So I’m going to take a well deserved break and watch the second half of my current movie on Netflix. A quite fun horror film called Abigail. No spoilers, but it’s playful and amusing.

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:

Games and marking

Friday was online games night. My wife and I went out to the local pizza place for dinner and I joined in games with my friends when we got home. We played El Grande and then Just One. People were in and out a bit doing things so we had a few interruptions.

The other main thing I’ve been doing both yesterday and today is continuing to mark university image processing assignments. I powered through the remainder of the undergrad ones today, both the written reports and the presentation videos. Now I only have three postgrad teams left to mark, but these will take longer because they have to submit individual video reviews of papers, rather than a single team video presenting their work. So I have seventeen 20-minute videos to go, having marked just four so far. So it’ll probably take me well into next week.

I did a 5k run today, barely scraping the distance under 27 minutes, which is a good time for me. Especially given it was 22.4°C and 75% humidity.

We had fajitas for dinner. I planned to do this to use up some halloumi which we’ve had in the fridge for a while. But when it came to chopping up the vegetables and cooking them up, I completely forgot about the halloumi!

New content yesterday:

New content today:

Back to the university

After two more Halloween special ethics classes this morning, I had some lunch (leftover Moroccan chick peas and rice from last night) and then went into the city to the university for the second last tutorial of the semester. The students are now working on their final assessment tasks and I’m there to assist and answer questions or provide suggestions and tips. It was a pretty busy session, as many students had questions arising from the first assessment report, which they just got their marks back from. Some of the teams are well advanced and looking good for their final reports, while others are a bit behind and trying to catch up on work. Hopefully the final reports I have to mark will be high quality!

Tonight I have two more classes online. Because we’re now into daylight saving time, they’re an hour later for me and I don’t finish until 10pm. In between I’m doing Japanese on Duolingo and watching Italian YouTube videos to practice my comprehension.

New content today: