Like a well-crafted “Start Here” or “About” page on a personal website, a beautiful syllabus has the potential to set the tone for a course and spark kinship between students and instructors. This page is a psych box for bottling inspiration, raw emotion, and connection in this regard. Each section below is a draft of a section that I might include on my syllabi.
Semester’s end
It may be the end of the semester, but your learning journey with me doesn’t need to end here. The end of the semester is an arbitrary dividing line (like a p-value cutoff of 0.05!). If you would like to keep learning about the ideas in our course and keep in contact with me, please do. Some suggestions:
- Write about course ideas in a public venue (e.g., a blog post). Share your published writing with me - I’d love to read your piece.
- Start a side project. I’d be honored to be your intellectual sparring partner and joyful feedback-giver.
On grades
When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure. Goodhart’s Law
This idea is profoundly relevant for grades. When grades become the target of learning efforts, they become meaningless as measures of true learning. (If you’ve ever witnessed a negotiation over points, you can appreciate how true this is.) Also, the practice of representing something as complex as learning by a single letter baffles me in its utter uselessness.
I know that there is something reassuring about
Or is it?
Pause. Put yourself in an employer’s shoes. Think about what goes through their mind when they see an A on a transcript.
Now compare that to what goes through their mind when they see a kick-ass homepage for your course project.
What would you rather have them see?
The point of this class is not to earn an A. The point is to:
- Engage with fascinating ideas
- Create something amazing
- Do the above in community with genuine thought partners
The structure of this course is meant to propel towards these 3 goals.
Earning the grade of your dreams will be a byproduct.
Sharing your work
You’ve created something awesome - what a win! What you created shouldn’t live only on your hard drive to never be seen again. Here are some venues where you might share your work
- OpenLab: a platform for sharing projects so that they can inspire other projects
- Significance Magazine has an annual writing competition for data-driven stories. Entries are generally due May 31.