 Fifty percent of a great class is its syllabus. Over the years I’ve had horrible syllabi and I’ve had good ones. The problem is that I sometimes didn’t know which was which until after the course is over. COVID and web-teaching don't make it easier If you’re looking for syllabus ideas or templates you can use this semester, I’ve included some ideas below. Most are relevant for in-person classes, but other things (like class previews) are even easier to pull off with mid-size and smaller courses on the web. I've also included an annotation of why certain things worked better than others, such as these: • It’s useful to have your most recent syllabus revision listed by its most recent date (instead of by it’s version number) • Students often ask: “What’s this class about?” & “What will we do in class?” One intro paragraph can answer both. • Non-native English speakers and shy students have a hard time participating in large classes. Class Previews help them. An hour before each class, I hold a Class Preview that tells people the discussion questions I’ll be asking that day, and then we discuss them ahead of time. Anyone’s welcome to show up. • For large classes, try to have TA office hours every day (or M-Th) • Try to be super specific about what you expect for an A assignment, and what your policy is on late assignments and missed classes. • Rather than having both the final exam and their project due at the end of the semester, I frontload the course with the most work and move their project up to the half-way point. • Letting students drop their lowest scoring assignment reduces their anxiety and the pressure they feel. • By having students turn in two copies of their project (one to grade and one to file), it helps ensure the same projects don’t show up year after year. • I have a screen-down, no-laptop policy. If people say they are taking notes, I ask them to send me the notes after class to see if what I’m teaching is coming across like I hope. • Class insight cards can give class contribution points to well-prepared, but shy students. • Extra credit opportunities are great. They help reduce student anxiety. • If your course is cross-listed with both undergrads and grads, the graduate students will need to do something more (usually about 20-25% more). I also have four specialized class sessions (and a dinner) only for them. • I try to organize the course into very discrete sections. This way I can frequently review each section in class before I start a new one. This way it very discretely shows how the parts of the course build on each other. • The Final Project was renamed “Integrative Assignment” and moved to the middle of the semester. They have to work a lot harder early on in the course, but the quality goes up, and their Finals Week stress level goes down. • You can get the most from a guest speaker’s visit if – before class -- you require students to read something written and published about the guest speaker. (It also makes the guest speaker more of a celebrity). On the day they speak, I will usually show a short Youtube clip of them before introducing them. • I want the last class session of the semester to be valuable. After they turn in their exam and their course evaluations, I give them the option to leave. For those who stay, I tell them stories of two big lessons I learned in life (the hard way), and how they can deal with challenges in the future. It’s an unusual way to end the class, but it always ends it on a high and memorable note. Good luck writing a great syllabus, having a great course, and having a triple-great semester. 
     
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 "School’s starting, and I didn't get anything done this summer.”
I’ve heard this every August, and I’ve said this every August. Whenever I’ve asked professors and PhD students what percent of their planned work they got accomplished over the summer, no one has ever said “All of it.” Almost everyone says something between 25 to 35%. Everyone from the biggest, most productive super stars with the biggest lab to the most motivated, fire-in-their-belly PhD student with the biggest anxiety. We are horrible estimators of how productive we’ll be over the summer. I was in academia for 35 years (including MA and PhD years), yet every single summer I never finished more than 30% of what I planned. How can we be so poorly calibrated? We never learn. We never readjust our estimate for the next summer. Next summer we’ll still only finish 25-35% of what we planned to do. There are only two weeks in the year when I’m predictably down or blue. It’s the last two weeks of August. It’s not the heat (I mostly stay indoors). It’s not the impending classes (I love teaching). It’s not all the beginning of semester meetings (I loved my colleagues and loved passing notes to them under the table). Ten years ago, I realized that I felt down the end of every August because I had to admit “school’s starting and I haven’t gotten jack done all summer.” The beginning of school is the psychological end of the Academic Fiscal Year. One solution to our August blues lies in understanding what times of the year we do like most, and to see if we can rechannel those warm-glowy feelings to August. If you had to guess the #1 favorite time of the year for most academics, you’d probably guess “The end of school.” The #2 favorite time of the year you might guess would be the “Winter or Christmas break.” What would you guess the third favorite time of the year is? Surprisingly, I’ve heard people say it’s when they turn in their Annual Activity Report (AAR). That’s the summary document they turn into their hard-to-please Department Chair that summarizes what they’ve accomplished in the prior 12 months: What they published, who they advised, what new things they’ve started, what new teaching materials they’ve created, and so forth. Snore. How could writing an Annual Activity Report be a highlight? Because it shows in black-and-white that we didn’t sleep-walk through the year. It reminds us that the publication that we now take for granted was one that we were still biting our nails about last year at this time. It reminds us of our advises who were stressing over their undergraduate thesis a year ago and who have now happily graduated. It reminds us of the cool ideas we've into hopeful projects -- ideas we hadn't even thought of a year ago.. Going back in a 12-month-ago time machine shows us what we did accomplish. It turns our focus toward what we did – and away from what we didn’t. Once we cross things off of our academic To-do list, we tend to forget we accomplished them. August might be a good time to do a mid-year AAR. It might not turn our August blues into a happy face yellow, but might at least turn it to green. A green light for a great new school year. Have a tremendous school year. A Springtime Resolution: Trick Yourself into Eating Better2/28/2023
0 Comments You can easily set up your kitchen (and some habits) to trick yourself to eat less. The guy in this video came out to visit me this weekend and he'll show you how. A while back "Trick Yourself into Eating Better was the title Quartz used for a catchy story on some of our research. It’s about 3 minutes long and has a lot of eye-opening tips and insights. They interviewed one of my post-doctoral fellows, Aner Tal. What’s unusual is how Aner describes why these work in a suave James Bond style and how Quartz cleverly illustrates them. Too cool for school. Here’s some of what they mentioned: 1. Use lighter plates 2. Use smaller plates 3. Cut your food into pieces 4. Don’t watch TV when you eat 5. No scary movies 6. Don’t shop when you’re hungry (you don't buy more, you buy worse) 7. Deprivation always backfires Some of these might sound pretty basic, but it’s Aner's description of how they work and Quartz's funny illustrations that really make them pop. Aner flew out to visit me from Israel a while back, and we were talking about how people react after they hear about some of these discoveries. Some people hear about suggestions like these and say to themselves “That would never happen to me,” so they don’t try to do anything different, and nothing changes in their life. Other people say to themselves, “Yeah, that makes sense” but they never do it, so, again, nothing changes in their life. No one is going to hear about 7 discoveries and make 7 changes in their life. It’s too much. But you can make 1 or 2 of them. After they become habits, you can always come back to the table for another course. |
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