I hate to admit it, but I haven’t seen The Wire. Something that I know disappoints Raaghav, since he would love for us to have this shared experience to discuss and hyperlink from. Despite that, Raaghav’s piece on The Wire, and his core insight, that great art and teaching both show rather than tell, resonates deeply. Perhaps it’s fitting that we’re making the same argument from different films we haven’t watched together: his Wire, my Die Hard. Different screens, very different genres, same lesson.

I want to expand on a thought that he opened up and that has to do with the pacing of the showing, the rhythm of it. Because in film and in the classroom showing isn’t just about what we reveal. It is also about what and when we hold back, when we speed up, slow down, and when we pause.   

Film and teaching are both temporal art forms. Good cinema is all about making deliberate, intentional aesthetic choices, visually, thematically and temporally. Raaghav shared a few in his post such as the parallel framing of the police hierarchy and the drug crews, Omar’s one-liner delivered without musical cues, the slow institutional suffocation of a teacher who actually cares. In none of these scenes is the viewer hit on the head with these ideas. On the contrary, the ideas are allowed to unfold, because the director at heart trusts the viewer.

The equivalent of the film script is the syllabus. And the same idea of unfolding plays out there as well, at least in the way I think about teaching. A semester to me is not a content delivery schedule. It is, or should be, an unfolding narrative, a story of becoming. It has rhythm. It has rising action. It needs breathing room. And most critically, it needs those quiet moments right before the climax.

Here is my favorite example of that last idea, a scene just before the climax in the movie Die Hard.

There’s a moment in Die Hard, right before the final explosive confrontation, where Bruce Willis’s character, bloodied and exhausted, has a quiet, almost tender radio conversation with Sergeant Al Powell. Two strangers connected by voice alone, sharing vulnerability in the middle of chaos. That scene is what gives the climax its emotional weight. Without it, the explosions are just noise. Compare that to something like the movie Crank, which goes nonstop, never giving you a moment’s respite, which means that the viewer never really gets a chance for the people to become people, to become characters.

So what does all this mean for a syllabus? I think it comes down to three things: rhythm, pause, and the big finish. Taking each in turn.

Rhythm. I teach pretty open-ended classes, which can be terrifying to students since there is almost too much choice. What I have learned (the hard way) is that this openness has to be matched with structure, and that structure usually manifests itself as a deliberate, repeating rhythm. The projects may be open-ended, but the way the class moves is not.

For instance, in a recent offering of my Education by Design class, every class-session followed roughly the same pattern. We’d begin with students sharing examples of good and bad design in the world around them, rotated by groups. That would be followed by a discussion on the readings, often paired with some kind of creative activity: write a poem about the key ideas, create a poster in the style of X to capture a tension in the readings, or design something collaboratively under deliberately absurd constraints. I would often have a short lecture about key themes and ideas I felt were worth highlighting, often developed the night before to be sensitive and responsive to whatever felt right for that week. Then, we’d have open time where groups or individuals could work on their projects while I moved around the room, conversing with each person or group. And there would be a final closing out.

Every class, same structure. It usually emerged early in the semester and we stuck with it the entire time.

There was a method to the madness. And I’ve found this pattern holds across very different courses I teach, from design to creativity and AI. The content changes completely, but the underlying rhythm doesn’t. That predictable beat is what makes the openness bearable, even exciting. Students could take risks in their projects because they knew exactly how each class would hold them. It’s the same principle as film: you need the repeating beat so that when you break from it, whether with a pause or a crescendo, the audience feels it.

Pause. Towards the end of the semester, I deliberately schedule a week with no new readings. Nothing new to consume. I tell my students: go back, look at your notes, revisit the readings, look at the slides. We’ll have a conversation about what’s emerging from the experience you’ve had so far. Let’s give ourselves a moment to reflect, since we know end of semester mayhem is just around the corner. The deadlines, the final papers, all of it. But first, a breath. This is my Die Hard moment, right before the climax, explosions in one case, and end of semester madness in the other.

It sounds small. It’s not. That week does for the semester what the Willis-Powell scene does for the film. It gives everything else its weight. And honestly? Those conversations are usually the most generative of the entire semester. Because otherwise you’re just on a treadmill, boom, boom, boom, week after week.

I, as the professor and the person who designed the class, have a big picture in my head about what the class is about. Students don’t always get a chance to see that. They’re seeing slices, zooming by week by week. That forced pause gives them a kind of zoomed-out view, and I think that’s really powerful.

The big finish. In almost every class I teach, the semester culminates in a public showcase, an event where students present their work not to me but to a real audience. In the past two classes I have taught, we had over 150 visitors coming to our final event. Visitors ranged from high school students to faculty from across ASU, engaging with interactive stations the students had designed and built themselves. This is the equivalent of the final act, where every thread in the film converges and pays off. The readings, the discussions, the creative experiments, the weeks of open-ended project work: it all becomes visible and coherent in that moment, not just to the audience but to the students themselves. They see the whole for the first time, and they see it through each other’s work.

But there’s something else happening here that connects back to Raaghav’s argument. A showcase is the ultimate act of showing rather than telling. Students aren’t summarizing what they learned in a paper for an audience of one. They are performing their understanding, embodying it, making it legible to strangers. The semester stops being my story that unfolds for them and becomes their story that they tell to the world. That, to me, is the most powerful kind of closure a class can have.

But of course, to have that rhythm, that pause, and that big finish, you have to be willing to question the default architecture of a semester. The standard approach treats fourteen weeks as a container to fill: fourteen topics, march through them. But that logic is the logic of efficiency, of optimization, what I’ve written about elsewhere as the difference between “becoming better” and simply becoming. “Becoming better” implies optimization toward a predetermined goal, with metrics and benchmarks and usually someone else’s definition of success. Becoming embraces the uncertainty of human development. It recognizes that learning is fundamentally about unfolding, not arriving. This is what I mean by calling a semester a story of becoming: not a march toward a fixed destination, but an experience that unfolds, with room for surprise, reflection, and transformation.

A film doesn’t work by front-loading all its information. A novel doesn’t dump its themes in chapter one. The Wire, as Raaghav beautifully shows, works because it trusts the slow reveal, the structural rhyme between institutions, the moment of quiet moral clarity in a courtroom. The aesthetic power is in the architecture of the experience.

Raaghav is right that students learn from what we do as much as from what we say. I’d add: they also learn from the shape of the experience we create for them. When Raaghav writes that The Wire “trusts learners enough to let complexity remain visible,” I think we need to do the same. This means trusting them not just with complex ideas but with the shape of the experience itself, its rhythm, its pauses, its arc. A predictable rhythm so students can take creative risks. A week to simply sit with what they’ve learned. A stage on which to make their understanding visible to others. These are all acts of trust. They say: the ideas we’ve been working with are rich enough to reward reflection. And you are capable of doing something with that space. Ideas don’t arrive on schedule. Understanding is not linear. And the most important insights often come in the quiet moments, not the busy ones.

That’s showing, not telling. And it’s an aesthetic choice about the architecture of a semester, one worth making, and one worth talking about.