teaching – Page 19 – dangermouse.net

A new Outschool course

Today I worked on preparing a new course that I’ll be teaching on Outschool. One on Critical and Ethical Thinking. I have a good idea what material will be involved and how to teach it, and I don’t need to prepare any slides for it. But to put a class on Outschool you need a cover image. And again I couldn’t use anything under any sort of copyright or accreditation license. I either need public domain images or to make my own.

So I spent a fair bit of time firstly thinking about how to represent the topic in an image with no words, and then drawing this:

I think that should work!

I also made pizza for dinner tonight – and for the first time I made the dough from scratch myself.

I topped it with tomato paste, mozzarella cheese, pumpkin, walnuts, feta, and chilli flakes.

And after a quick bake in the oven it looked like this!

Yum!

Oh! And the rain finally stopped today! There was no rain for much of the afternoon. Although the clouds were still thick and grey. I haven’t seen blue sky for a week now.

New content today:

Vision and market prep

Today was hectic. I had another class to teach my Human Vision course on Outschool. Then it was time to prepare for tomorrow’s market at Kirribilli.

I’m helping my wife to start selling some of her dog bandanas as well, and we had a checklist of stuff to run through: doing a sign with prices, setting her up to process payments using Square, taking some photos of Scully with sample bandanas so she can post on Instagram – she’s calling her brand Scully xo. Check it out!

And I really needed to wash the car. The park where I take Scully every week has nearby parking, but it’s all under fig trees, and the rainbow lorikeets hang out and chew on figs and drop sticky bits of half chewed figs all over the place. So it gets peppered with this sticky residue and needs to be cleaned regularly, but I haven’t done it for a long time.

And… gosh… that actually ate up the whole day. Tonight it’s an early night, so we can get up at 5:30 to haul stuff to the market and set up…

New content today:

Outschool class 2

This morning I taught my second class on Outschool. It was another session of the class on Human Vision. Again I had only one student, but I don’t mind that as it’s good to get comfortable with small numbers of students before having to handle multiple all at the same time. This time it was a boy, and he seemed to to enjoy the class.

I spent much of the rest of the day assembling the batch of Irregular Webcomic! strips that I photographed yesterday. I’ve also been helping my friend with his Bisecting History Twitter project, by finding interesting events for different dates. We’re putting in quite a bit of research for this thing. And I’m incidentally learning the relative timing sequence of various events that you don’t normally think of as related to one another, such as certain books being published in the same year as certain wars or scientific discoveries, and so on.

Not much more to report. I’m pretty much racing to get everything done that I need to before heading out on a road trip holiday with my wife next week.

New content today:

First Outschool class

This morning I had my first class on Outschool! Two students had signed up for the class in Human Vision and Colour Perception, but when I woke up this morning there was a request from one of the parents to move their child to a class next week instead. I transferred the student, which left me with just one attending today’s class.

As it turned out that was actually good, because it was a good chance to practise using Zoom to show the slides I’d made and talk through them, without too many students to keep an eye on as I went. I paused a few times to make sure she was keeping up, and she sounded genuinely interested and engaged. I got through the material pretty much right on time, and the girl seemed very happy with what she’d learnt. So it was definitely a success! And for the class next week I already have the other student already signed up. Hopefully a couple more will join in over the next week.

The rest of the day I concentrated on writing Darths & Droids comics, since we’re a bit behind in our buffer at the moment – because I spent to much time last week working on my class material.

New content today:

Human vision slides

It was another day of working on my diagrams and slides for the Human Vision course I’ll be teaching on Monday. Writing up the actual content of the course made me realise more diagrams I needed, so I had to draw some of those. And I needed photo examples for a few things too, so dug through my own photos for suitable scenes to illustrate some of the concepts.

That was pretty much my day. Last night I watched The End of Evangelion, the movie made as a wrap-up of the 26-episode series of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which I completed watching last week. If you know the show, then you probably have a good idea of my initial reactions. If not, I’m not going to spoil it for you. It was definitely interesting, and I’m glad I finally got around to seeing this series.

New content today:

Running and sliding

It was time for another 5k run this morning. Nice cool weather, after the past few days of late summer heat. I clocked 28:15, over 40 seconds faster than the last two efforts. Strava also told me that I ran the first mile in my best ever time over that distance, a flat 8:00 minutes. I suppose I could probably do a mile faster than that, but I’ve never specifically run that distance and then stopped.

Back home I baked sourdough. I’ve tried increasing the semolina content again, this time to a full third of the total mass of flour. The dough was noticeably softer than usual, but seemed okay. The baked bread tastes fine, with a slight nutty flavour, and there’s a noticeable slight granularity from the semolina, but it’s not bad at all. I’d say it worked just fine.

I spent most of today working on slides and class notes for my Outschool class on Human Vision. I only got a few slides in when I realised I need more diagrams, so I switched to drawing diagrams for a bit. This is the way it goes… I hope to have the slides ready by Friday at the latest.

This evening I helped my wife go through the instructions for using her new sewing machine. She’s done sewing before, but not for a long time, and she needed to get familiar with the machine and remember how to do all the various things. She did some practice runs on scrap cloth, and it all seems to be going well.

New content today:

More vision, and a class listing!

I’ve listed my first class on Outschool! Human Vision and Colour Perception. The first date I’ll be offering this class is Monday 1 March (Sydney time – it corresponds to Sunday 28 Feb afternoon in the US).

I’ve aimed this class at students from 12-14 years old. If you have (or know) kids this age who might be interested in learning about how we see and how colour perception works, please feel free to sign up for the class! It’s available to anyone in the world.

I spent this afternoon drawing some more diagrams for the course. I’m very proud of this eyeball:

And here’s the human visual pathway, showing left and right visual fields:

After making these diagrams, I had enough material to finally put together my class promotion image, which is necessary before you can publicly list the class. This was the last step I needed to complete, and so that’s why I got the class up and running today.

This morning I had to go see my doctor again about my tonsils. The course of antibiotics I’ve just completed hasn’t made the swelling go down. He wants to give some stronger antibiotics a chance, so I’m on those for a couple more weeks, then will have to go back for another appointment if the tonsil is still swollen.

After the appointment I took a roundabout long walk home, stopping off to get a snack on the way, and sit by the water while I ate. It’s nice to spend some time out in the fresh air.

New content today:

Drawing vision diagrams

Today I relaxed a bit after yesterday’s manic work at the market. By “relaxed”, I mean I went for a 5k run first thing in the morning. I tried running the loop at the halfway mark in the opposite direction today, which meant uphill sections on either side of a downhill, rather than vice versa. I don’t know if it made much difference overall, but my time today was 20 seconds slower than last week.

After the run, I got stuck into drawing some diagrams for my planned class on human vision and colour perception for Outschool. I need to draw my own diagrams to avoid using copyrighted images. Here’s my take on the layers of the human retina:

I got most of the diagrams I need done, but still have a couple of tackle tomorrow. But now I can at least make a title image for my class to upload to Outschool, and start signing up students!

New content today:

Getting things done

This morning I thought I wanted to get another 5k run done, because I’ll have limited opportunity for the rest of the week, due to having an ISO Photography Standards meeting. It’s an online meeting, from 8:00 to 11:30 every morning in my time zone. I don’t really have time to do it before, if you include having breakfast and cooling down and probably having a shower to be comfortable for the meeting, and the afternoon is not a great option in our summer, and evenings are usually busy with other stuff. (I don’t think I’ve ever done a run in the evening.)

But this morning I also had to get some blood drawn for a cholesterol test, after fasting, so I couldn’t have breakfast before. So I wanted to get that done as soon as the pathology lab opened, and then go home and have breakfast… and by the time I was ready to go run it was approaching 10 o’clock. But fortunately it’s very cool today, with overcast skies keeping the sun out. So I got ready and went for the run.

I wanted to see if I could break 30 minutes for the 5k on the street route I’ve worked out, which is about as flat as I can find in this area. But it’s still a bit hilly, with an elevation gain of 87 metres over the 5k. I started hard, but when I hit the uphill sections about halfway through I thought maybe I’d gone too hard and would run out of steam before finishing. But I pushed through and managed to complete the 5k in 28:39! Much better than I’d hoped for.

Energised, I got stuck into writing a lesson outline for my planned initial class on Outschool: Human Vision and Colour Perception. I wrote out a list of bullet points of topics to cover. Then I made a list of diagrams and illustrations that I want to have. Many of these I could find on the Internet – however Outschool insists (justifiably) that you have legal rights to use any images you present in your classes. Which rules out most of what you can find – doubly so for scientific diagrams. There are a many good diagrams, but all covered by copyright, or which need to be purchased, or which are at least Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike, which is no good because I can’t easily include correct attribution in class materials and don’t necessarily want to release my material under the same licence.

So I’ve decided I need to draw the diagrams myself. So I have a list of diagrams, and now I need to sit down and draw them all. I did manage to get one done today, after fiddling with a couple of different drawing apps on my iPad. I’ll get stuck into the rest tomorrow.

I also had a combination of thoughts prompted by two things:

1. Earlier today I saw a question on AskReddit:

To those who think to themselves, “I should do this today,” and then end up doing it: is it possible to learn this power?

With several answers along the lines of: “When you think you should do something, just get up and do it, don’t put it off.”

2. I was thinking I really need to watch more of Neon Genesis Evangelion to get through all of the series, but how the heck am I going to find the time to do that…?

This made me realise that watching TV is one of the things that I procrastinate and never manage to get done. I always have too many other things that I want to do, so much so that I often end up thinking “I should watch some TV” and then never get around to it.

So maybe in order for me to achieve this goal, I need to stop putting off watching TV and just sit on my arse and DO IT.

New content today:

More running – 5k on the streets

After yesterday’s 2.5k run, I felt inspired to go out again today. I was all ready to go after breakfast, but when I got out the front door it was starting to rain. A quick look at the radar told me it was going to get heavier, so I called it off.

But after lunch the rain had stopped and the clouds looked lighter, so I ventured out. This time I tried to find another flattish route different to what I did yesterday. I walked up the nearest steep hill to the top of the ridge, and from there ran along the road that follows the ridge down to the harbour. This way I avoided most of the constant up and down climbing into and out of valleys. Of course heading downhill meant most of the back half was uphill, but thankfully the slopes weren’t too huge today.

By the time I got to the end of the ridge, down near the water, I’d covered 2.25 km. Coming back I went down some side streets instead of the main road, so it was a little longer and I hit 5k just before I got home, so the distance was good. I was pretty worn out by the end of it though. The weather was 22.1°C, 73% humidity. Nice and cool, but that humidity was nasty.

But I was happy to have covered the distance without slowing to a walk.

The other thing I did for most of the day was work on my Outschool class materials. I need to find diagrams to illustrate human vision and colour perception. There are plenty of good ones on the net, but I need them to be public domain, or royalty free, and that restricts things a lot. By the end of the day I’d only really found two half-decent images I could use, both old diagrams out of copyright.

But I’ve now decided that it’ll be easier for me to just draw all my own diagrams. I’ll put together the class notes, and decide what diagrams I want, and then sit down and draw them all in a batch. So that’s the task for the next few days.

New content today: