---
title: Honors 394
#description: 
author: Issa Rice
creation_date: 2015-03-15
last_major_revision_date: 2015-03-15
language: English
# accepts "notes", "draft", "in progress", or "mostly finished"
status: notes
# accepts "certain", "highly likely", "likely", "possible", "unlikely", "highly unlikely", "remote", "impossible", "log", "emotional", or "fiction"
belief: possible
# accepts "CC0", "CC-BY", or "CC-BY-SA"
license: CC-BY
tags: uw course review, uw honors
#aliases: 
---

This is my course review and assignments for Honors 394: Teaching to Transgress.
I took the course in winter 2015 with Frances McCue.

# Review

Most of the work for this course is in doing the assigned readings (something like 50--200 pages for each session, depending on the day; the class only meets twice a week though so it's not as bad as it seems as long as you space it out) and participating in the in-class discussions.
The assigned books were (in the order that we read them):

- *Pedagogy of the Oppressed* by Paulo Freire
- *How Children Succeed* by Paul Tough
- *The Smartest Kids in the World* by Amanda Ripley
- *The Death and Life of the Great American School System* by Diane Ravitch
- *Building a Better Teacher* by Elizabeth Green

I didn't think the in-class discussions were all that useful or high-quality (which is about as much as I expected), especially compared to the quality of discussions I regularly encounter on [Facebook](), [Quora](), and [LessWrong]() (even with those places you have to find the good discussions though).

I think the greatest benefit I got from the course was the ability to spend some time researching unschooling as part of the final project (which ended up also being useful for my [Cause Prioritization Wiki](http://causeprioritization.org))[^ironically].

[^ironically]:
Ironically, though, the final project ended up not being liked by the instructor and consequently brought my grade down.

# Assignments

Here are links to the major assignments of the course:

## Teaching puzzles

- [Puzzle 1](http://exp.issarice.com/pdf/puzzle1.pdf)
- [Puzzle 2](http://exp.issarice.com/pdf/puzzle2.pdf)
- [Puzzle 3](http://exp.issarice.com/pdf/puzzle3.pdf)

## Midterm

My midterm was a bit sassy, but you can read it here: "[Some Pitfalls When Discussing Education](http://exp.issarice.com/pdf/honors_394_midterm.pdf)".
It is an analysis of Paulo Freire and Paul Tough.