Reflective essays

Every week you will have at least one reflective essay assignment. We are looking for stories about things meaningful to you, to be communicated in a way that they are meaningful to the reader. The goal of these essays is for you to reflect upon, capture, and synthesize what you have learned from this course, in a way that communicates this to the reader (the instructors). Good essays have solid content, clear style, are grounded in assertions, and communicate well. 

Good code, by the way, has exactly the same characteristics as good essays. It communicates well to the people reading the code. Excellent software developers tend to also be excellent writers. In the end, writing code and writing essays are both about communicating effectively.

Good essays draw in and touch the reader.

Our grading will reward essays that:

• Demonstrate how lessons from the course enabled you to do something that you were not able to do beforehand. This can include noticing things that you had not noticed before.
• Illustrates how this course is (or is not) changing your stories of what is, or is not, possible for you.
• Discusses how you have used lessons from this course in other parts of your life, or vice versa.
• Analyze things using tools learned in this course, and discuss how well those tools worked for you.
• Occasionally analyze things from a system perspective (discussed in second class).
• Are beautifully written.

The grading metric is a mix of subjective and objective:

0 = not turned in 

1 = below expectations 

2 = met expectations 

3 = surpassed expectations

Here are some examples of what I consider to be good reflective essays:

• Douglas Hofstadter

I like this essays because it tells a story about how he was surprised by a situation, how he struggled internally to make sense of it, and how it changed his beliefs about what was possible. 

After reading this essay, reflect upon:

• What interested you about this essay?
• What surprised you?
• Did you feel engaged? If so, why? If not, why?