Friday 24th March 2023, 12.05pm (day 4,229)
I think I might finally have provoked the students into some independent thinking. They were talking about something, anyway.
Independent thought
Being 42
Life, one day at a time
Tag Archives: class
The Last Class: photography ceremony
Tuesday 13th December 2022, 10.45am (day 4,128)
It’s the last class of the semester, and the done thing among students now is “get a photo of themselves with the lecturer” at this point. I acknowledge this but it did require leaving at least 20 minutes at the end of the session so the ceremony could take place: what you see here is the queue after at least half of them had already had their time. I was feeling like a cardboard cut-out of myself by this point, although not an unhappy one. Here I said, ‘right, I’m taking a photo of all you lot while you wait to take a photo of me’… and this is the result.
The students do some work
Tuesday 18th October 2022, 10.15am (day 4,072)
Well, they can do some work now and again. It’s what they’re here for, after all. This morning, they discuss the book as an information technology — which it definitely is, and if you’re not sure why, then come to my next class. And yes, they are all Chinese and female, which is also the way it is in higher education at this time.
Poster day
Tuesday 14th December 2021, 10.10am (day 3,764)
The last taught class of the first semester, and of 2021. The students show off the ideas they’ve been working on in groups over the last few weeks — including, here, 3-D printing being used to create replicas of famous artworks that people can then touch and interact with, which seems a reasonable idea to me. It was an engaging, interesting class, and one that if I had listened to my paranoid employer, I should have hoiked online at 12 hours’ notice. But I didn’t listen, and the life of everyone involved was all the better for it.
The new students get thinking
Friday 1st October 2021, 12.10pm (day 3,690)
I regret the fact that they all still feel the need to wear a mask. I regret that so many of them have not yet been able to arrive, thanks largely to airlines ripping them off and governments (worldwide) still using Covid as an excuse to be mean to foreigners. But I’m still glad they’re here. This is only the second day in more than 18 months — the first being 4th December 2020 — in which I’ve been able to hold a face-to-face class. There seemed to be some work going on at this point.
In a room, with people!
Tuesday 22nd September 2020, 4.40pm (day 3,316)
As Our Glorious Leader mumbles, fumbles and bumbles, people with lives to live get on with their jobs. For the first time since 8th March, I got to be in a room with other people, and taught. As it happens, I was teaching other teachers, the good folk of Manchester Grammar School, a venerable establishment that has been around in some form or other since 1515. In the grim year 2020, this felt like an explosion of humanity.
My students try out the Raspberry Pi
Monday 1st December 2014, 2.50pm (day 1,194)
The Raspberry Pi is a small computer which one can buy for £25 and is targeted at kids who can use it to learn programming. That’s it visible bottom right of centre, with all the wires connecting it up to the keyboard and monitor so you can see what you are doing on it — Mandy and Sarah Jane here were using it to compose a version of ‘Jingle Bells’ as it happens. It’s nice to get a shot of people being this engaged in a class…
Being 42 