3
I said grades are bullshit. And I meant it. Committed. Who would have ever thought that a visit to the Super S Truck Stop would have had such an influence? The owners strived for everything to be OK. They talked about OKRs and being the best truck stop they could be. Well intentioned. That’s what I try to be too.
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Final Project
I think we’ll do this.
Scoring:
- Overall class score.
- Create KPIs that align with these objectives.
- Ability to think analytically.
- Ability to problem solve using programming. 2x50 point days.
- You won’t know.
- 10 points equivalent will be from me.
- Score and rate yourself in Canvas.
- Upload work to Canvas.
Day 1:
- Create KPIs.
- Get setup pulling data from API.
- Play around with pulling and formatting data in pandas and python.
Day 2:
- Talk about splines.
- We’ll do some plotting.
Day 3:
- Get into clustering.
- Discuss the clustering methods and the correlation distance.
Day 4:
- Plotting.
- Fun.
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This is the class’s final. It’s unfortunate that in the last couple of weeks I think I finally hit my stride. A solid 3 mph average. There’s some gaps and questions for sure. However, it sings a song that I like to think would put Jigglypuff to sleep. I’ve talked to a few people now to know the current paradigm isn’t working. The other incentives are too strong. Students want currency that moves faster than knowledge.
You won’t get far misting a cat:
- “Warm kitty, soft kitty, little ball of fur; Sleepy kitty, happy kitty, Purr! Purr! Purr!”
We’re trying Educational OKRs. By all appearances it’s the backdrop for excellence. This forces us to all align on explicit goals. The students set their own standards. I’m no longer subjecting them to the tyranny of the majority. If they’re anything like me, some of them will score themselves to a level needing objectivity. We get to set very high goals. The intention isn’t to accomplish everything. There’s no need to. We’ve set our trajectory and measure along the way. Even being familiar with splines and clustering puts us in a class well beyond 4000 if we can achieve it.
Reflecting, I’ve gone rogue. I truly can’t explain why when I hear the words academic freedom it makes me go berserk. It causes me to invite women to talk about their career and bring a higher perspective from someone who manages me under normal conditions. A trans person in tech, I’ve tried to persuade. Let everyone drink it up, I guess. Someone recently reminded me there’s potentially standards and I don’t need to compromise those. That freedom though, the capital “F” kind. It’s makes me want to reach escape velocity. As a kid I wanted to be either an astronaut or a cartoonist. Right now, I’m a jester in the space kingdom of the weird nerd. My day consists of trying to make AI less bad and fun things for the students. My future consists of resisting reply all jokebots and corporate subjugation. I’m left looking for ways to scratch this itch. The itch to be an insane human; to be human as fuck.