30 October, 2018

Three weeks into term 4 and the seniors all finish up tomorrow so they can go and prepare for exams. I’m still dumbfounded at the amount of energy, time and money that goes into this one form of assessment. It’s very strange. Most of my students have worked their way pretty solidly through the year and it has generally been good fun. Watched a few good kids get down on the world towards the end of term 3. Always hard to watch.

My classroom is becoming a Design studio now with lots of little fabrication machines all dedicated to prototyping ideas. I’m focusing on small studio sized machines that are financially accessible to both the school and the students. The senior courses have been renamed to Product Design for ease of understanding but remain much the same in terms of student choice and management. Next year is looking busy but reasonably positive. It will be interesting to see if students warm to the more open and flexible learning opportunities or whether they will be beaten down by credits and exams again.

After a brief rework of some shoddy painting we are finally preparing to get the deck built. This house renovation has been a long term plan and this is the last major part. Once it’s built we are down to finishing the house painting and tidying up the property a bit more. Looking forward to just being able to live here.

After the rather untimely and sad loss of our kitten, two small guinea pigs joined the household and have taken up a corner of the lounge. They migrate outside on nice days to a rather luxurious hutch and have turned from small fluffy things into quite large fluffy things. So far they seem to have a good life that revolves around eating, sleeping, crapping … actually that seems to be all they really do. They were summarily named Rocky and Jojo by the resident 6 year old. The names seem to fit the little black and white brothers.

I recently migrated from my Pebble Time smart watch to an Amazfit Bip, partly because I could make my own watchface and partly because I wanted to have things like heart rate and activity monitoring. Leaving the Pebble still feels a bit sad but things move on I guess. I quite like the Bip and apart from missing the Pebble’s stunning timeline feature it does pretty much everything I need it to without the need to remortgage the house.

Life continues to be interesting …