I realize that I never formally said some things that might wonder about:
- We do keep score. Participation is a large part of how I know that you’re learning things in the class. We keep track of whether people show up, if they do show up do they participate, etc.
- If you don’t like to participate in the conversation, there are other ways for people to show me that they are learning (for example, one student sends me notes summarizing what he learned from the class). But participation means more than just taking in from lectures: it means giving back to the class.
- If you are assigned to work in a pair/team, I assume the work comes from the whole team unless the team all tells me otherwise. I will not try to assign different credit within a team (unless the entire team says so).
I will be better about providing feedback (it’s something I realize that I am bad at).
You have all given me a great deal of slack as I try to figure out how to make a class like this work. I promise to be equally understanding when I need to evaluate people.
In case you’re wondering, the elements of the class (as far as grading) will be (I am finally far enough into it that we can predict it):
- Participation and readings
- Assignments (besides readings) and challenges (like the critique assignment and the design challenge)
- Project(s) – my plan is to have people do projects after break. The idea is to break things in two (2 projects) with the idea that if the first one goes well, the second one can be an extension of it. But if you make a bad choice in your first project, you can try something different for the second half.