Tuesday, October 16

 

 

This morning proved an almost perfect autumn day. The trees shone in yellows, oranges and reds, the air felt brisk but not cold, and for some reason very few people roamed the streets.

I got to work to discover that only three students had returned today’s assignment, which will cause me problems this afternoon. An email from Jutta later and I understood what had happened. They had spent so much time trying to complete the final assignment for her UI course that they had pushed my assignment to one side.

I spent the morning going through what I planned to do this afternoon, now that the first half of the afternoon would not get filled with a show-and-tell. I decided to use this as an opportunity to look at the Wordpress loop in even more detail, and I made a new plan as to how to work through it step by step.

I kept to my original decision that the students will have to read articles on the web, teach themselves, and then ask questions. However I added a long introductory section in which I will explore some background concepts, such as what => actually means in php and, to explain that I will begin by revising the idea of an array with some explicit explanations of the use of associative arrays. I will also go through a very simple example of the loop line by line.

In the afternoon I will do all of this and more. Most of the class will leave about 16:15 but three students will stay behind with a question: how could we pick a random category and then display the category name in a headline with the posts in that category below. Twenty minutes later we will have a working model.

I race home to let the cat out, because Naa will take Irma out for a meal at Kappeli as a late birthday present. On the way into the house I pause at the shed which contains our rubbish bins and notice the grain of the wood on the doors. Well, I don’t think I have ever photographed that, I will think, before promptly photographing it.

The cat will go out and I will spend an hour and a half sweeping leaves from the garden, until darkness begins to set in and I return indoors.