Your final assignment for the course is a bit different from previous assignments. I’d like you to write a ~1200-word reflection covering the entire course, with two main components (and maybe a third depending on whether you’re satisfied with your current grade). You can do these sections separately, or they can be totally integrated. I don’t care much about the form as long as you’re addressing the issues suggested below.
The final reflection is where you make sense of the course as a whole. Instead of proving that you memorized every reading, you are showing what you can now do with the course: connect readings across time, explain how dietary expertise changes, analyze the rhetoric of health advice, and describe how your own thinking developed.
This matters because the course is not really about producing one final answer to “what should people eat?” It is about learning to ask better historical questions about health, evidence, trust, morality, bodies, science, and authority. The final reflection gives you room to show that larger learning.
Your reflection should do two main things:
You may also include an optional brief argument for what course grade you think best represents your learning and effort.
Using specific examples from the readings AND connecting themes across the course (as the overview videos should help with), tell me what you learned in the course. In addition to history of diet particulars, don’t forget big picture questions (like the Course Goals!), such as:
Describe your learning experience in the course. This is obviously totally subjective and there’s no right answer. Some questions to consider:
Please do not simply summarize course topics and themes as stated on the syllabus. Use specific examples from the course readings to illustrate your points. Specific examples let me see the actual shape of your learning: which readings stuck, which connections you made, and how your thinking changed.
This isn’t a writing class, so you’re not being evaluated on elegant prose. You may use AI to help smooth your writing after you have your own outline or draft, as long as the ideas are your own and you are transparent about how you used it. As always, do not use AI to draft your final reflection. It cannot yet fake actual human experiences, so you’ll get minimal if any credit for a significant assignment with no time to redo it.
AI or not, your writing must be clear enough that I can follow your argument and your survey of course themes. Your final reflection should be well thought out and carefully written, not a stream of consciousness off-the-cuff here’s-what-I-remember type thing.
The optional third component is to make a brief argument for what letter grade you should get for the course. It’s maybe a weird request for a final, but there is a specific reason: your effort to learn, and what you actually did learn, might not be represented in your final point tally. This assignment gives you a chance to argue that you’ve put more work in or learned more than your numbers indicate.
To be clear, you aren’t necessarily going to get whatever grade you ask for. However, if you have gotten some lower scores, but write a very smart final that uses lots of examples from the readings as evidence for your familiarity with them and connects reading material as done in the overview videos, you will likely get a higher grade than your raw point total equates to.
Submit a thoughtful reflection of about 1200 words. You can write the parts separately or integrate them into one essay; the form matters less than showing specific, connected thinking about the course as a whole.
Before you start writing, invest some time to REVISIT THE READINGS. This does not mean re-reading them, but just reminding yourself what you’ve read, or maybe reading a little more of something you could only skim before. Course videos can be tedious, but they try to pull together broader themes and explain how different weeks and topics fit together, which the readings often don’t do at all. Seeing some of the first readings after having done the course is a very different experience than when you first read them.
Specificity and clarity (in thinking and organization) is what separates excellent from mediocre work. To say that “I learned to think more critically about diet advice” will sound unconvincing unless you provide several SPECIFIC examples of the issues that you think are important to think critically about and WHY. If you make a vague statement about a topic on the syllabus without examples from the readings or connections among readings, I do not have much evidence of what you learned.
I hope you will use your final reflection to CONNECT DIFFERENT TOPICS AND THEMES AND READINGS for the course. The more you can tie themes together and speak about the course as a whole (while giving specific examples from the readings [yes, I’m going to keep repeating it]), the better you’ll do. Essays that speak very generally about one topic after the other in the order of the syllabus will suggest that you haven’t really made any connections. When I see those connections in your final, I know you’re putting in the work to make them.
I know everyone is fried at this point, and it’s therefore tempting to just bulldoze through the assignment to be done with the course. I GET IT! (and I’ve done it, too.) But taking some time to think back through the course makes a big difference in what you take away from it. I wouldn’t bother with this assignment if I didn’t think it makes a significant impact.
This assignment appears in Canvas as a letter grade. In general, it is graded as A, B, or C.