The rules that apply across the whole course. AI, attendance, extensions, what the room decides for itself, and where to get help.
Every rule here exists because a class actually ran into it. They are short on purpose.
AI#
This course is strictly against using AI to produce your assessed work.
The reason is not integrity theatre. This course is about your thinking. Noticing your own loop, in your own words, and finding out what stops it. An account of what you overthought, written by a language model, is not a lighter version of that work. It is the absence of it, and the only person it takes anything from is you.
Here is what that means in practice.
| Using AI for | Allowed? |
|---|---|
| Grammar, spelling, tidying up your formatting | Yes |
| Making a submission read clearly and present neatly | Yes |
| Researching techniques that help with overthinking, to bring to class | Yes, encouraged |
| Writing your log entries, your forum post, or your capstone | No |
| Asking it what you are overthinking, or what to think about it | No |
The middle row is the interesting one. Going and finding out what the internet recommends for rumination is genuinely useful. If a model points you at a technique nobody here has heard of, bring it. Say where it came from, we will look at whether the evidence stacks up, and if it does it goes on the list the room votes on. Research is thinking. Outsourcing the noticing is not.
The rest of this site tries to model what we want from you. Every claim checked, every source named, and the guesses labelled as guesses. Do that and you will be fine.
Respect#
This course asks people to say out loud that they re-read a message forty times. That only works in a room where nobody will be made to regret it. So this is the one rule here with no dry humour attached to it.
Be respectful and considerate. Bullying, mockery, or any deliberately harmful behaviour will be acted on seriously, and quickly. That includes the Ed forum, the anonymous threads, group work, and anything that happens on the way out of class. Mocking what someone admitted, quoting a post outside the forum, pressuring anyone to explain a pass, or using anonymity as cover all count.
Anonymity is not a loophole. Posts in the anonymous thread are anonymous to other students and to markers, but a moderator can identify an author when a post is reported. That is a deliberate design decision. A forum where nobody could ever be identified would be a forum with no way to protect the people being honest in it.
If something happens to you, or you see it happen, report it. Tell a tutor, tell the convenor, or report the post on the forum. You do not have to be certain, you do not have to have it fully worked out, and you will not be asked to handle it yourself. Reporting something and being wrong costs you nothing.
Attendance#
Attendance is part of your mark. See Showing up for how it works, and for an honest account of the evidence for requiring it. The practical version.
- Your best 9 of 12 weeks count in full, so three misses cost nothing and need no explanation.
- If you are ill or something has come up, tell the lecturer beforehand. An email or a message before class is all it takes, and it is easier for everyone than reconstructing it later.
- If you go past three misses and there is a real reason behind it (illness, caring, a life event, a body that does not run to a timetable), talk to the convenor. A mark for turning up should never be the thing that breaks a semester.
- Classes are recorded. Recordings are for catching up on a week you missed, not for attending.
What the room decides#
Some of this course is not set by the teaching staff, and the Ed forum is where those decisions get made.
- Where the lecture happens. Lectures are outdoors and the venue moves. Suggest places and vote; the winner is posted by the Friday before. The only hard constraints are that everyone can get there and everyone can arrive on time.
- Which techniques we try. After the anonymous thread, every technique students reported gets collected, stripped of identifying detail, and put to a vote. The ones the room finds most interesting get tried in class, one per week, for the rest of semester.
- What gets a lecture. If there is a topic you want covered properly, propose it on the forum. Proposals get voted on and the ones with real support are worked up into later lectures. Several of the current ones arrived this way.
How the voting works. Every vote runs as an Ed forum poll, which is where the one-person-one-vote part comes from. The forum knows who you are, so it will not let you vote twice, and this site could not enforce that on its own. This site is a set of static pages with no login and no server behind it. A poll embedded here would either be open to anyone on the internet or un-auditable, so the vote lives on the forum and the result is posted here once it closes. Live running totals stay on the forum while a poll is open.
None of these votes are decorative. If the room picks something the teaching staff think is a dead end, we will say so on the page and run it anyway.
Extensions and late work#
Two of the deadlines are already soft, and you do not have to ask for those.
- The anonymous thread is due at the end of the first week of the mid-semester break, and you can take it through to the end of the break. The early date exists so the thread has something in it to reply to, not to catch anyone out.
- The log has a day or two past its deadline, no questions asked. It is the last thing the course collects; manufacturing a rush over it would be absurd.
For anything else, just ask. Before the deadline if you can manage it, after if you couldn’t. You do not need a document, a diagnosis, or a paragraph explaining yourself. The work in this course is deliberately scheduled away from everyone else’s crunch so that extensions are rarely necessary. But lives do not read the assessment calendar, and asking costs you nothing.
A standing caveat#
This course is taught by people who have not mastered any of this.
The title has two readings and both are meant. A spiral is unfinished thinking, which is the argument. But so is this course, and so is the research behind it. Half the studies cited here are small. Several are contested. The course’s own central claim has never been tested directly. Nobody has finished thinking about any of it.
Quality of life is not a thing anyone finishes either. Nobody in this room, staff included, has stopped overthinking, and a course that implied otherwise would be selling something. What is on offer is a set of techniques with honestly stated evidence, a room in which to practise them, and the expectation that you will keep learning about this long after the semester ends, from sources that have nothing to do with us.
Which is also why the log asks what you found elsewhere that worked better than anything we taught you. Those answers change the syllabus. Staying humble about this is not modesty. It is the only thing that keeps the course honest.
Where to get help#
The Ed forum is the best place, and it is not a last resort. Most questions have already been asked there, answers stay visible for everyone who has the same problem next week, and you can post anonymously. If you are deciding between the forum and an email, post on the forum.
After that, in rough order of how fast you will hear back.
| Who | Good for | Speed |
|---|---|---|
| Ed forum | Anything. Genuinely anything. | Fastest, other students answer too |
| Your tutor, see People | The crits, the assessments, something that came up in class | Same or next day |
| The convenor | Extensions, attendance, anything about how the course is run, anything you would rather not post | A day or two |
| Revathi Menon, our visiting meditation teacher | Questions about the practice itself | Slow, do not wait on it. She is here for one class and teaches elsewhere, so a reply may take a while or not come at all |
That last row is not discouragement. She is happy to be asked, and it is the only way to get an answer from someone who actually works in the tradition. Just do not let a question sit unanswered in her inbox when the forum would have solved it in an hour. Best of all, ask her in week 3 while she is standing in front of you.
For anything about the course itself, asking in the room where it came up beats an email a week later.
Support beyond the course#
- ANU Counselling. Free, confidential, and appropriate for anything this course opens up that you would rather not handle alone.
- Access and Inclusion. For adjustments, including to how attendance works for you.
Nothing in this course is therapy or a substitute for it. It is genuinely useful and it is not treatment, and the distinction matters most exactly when you would prefer to ignore it.