Orientation in Four Parts

---

Part 1: The Occasional Bottomless Abyss

---

By the time you graduate from high school, you will have spent around 2,340 days in public education — about a third of your life up to that point, depending on how the hours are calculated. You might remember how it started:

http://www.theonion.com/article/6-year-old-stares-down-bottomless-abyss-of-formal–2510

That’s from The Onion. It’s satire, although some people don’t always get the joke. In our course, we’ll occasionally look at satire as one of the only ways of dealing with unsettling or upsetting stuff — here’s another, more recent Onion article on schooling, for instance, that speaks to some of the systemic problems we face.

You’ve been doing this for a while, though, and are close to the end of the experience. You’re used to those systemic problems. The first day of school, with its flurry of handouts and icebreakers and generally miasmic exhaustion¹ is familiar to you.

This course requires you to pay attention from the opening bell. We need to look at education — at your education — from a fresh perspective. Start with this video, which animates a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson:

That video was the initial inspiration for what you will experience this year in our classroom. That’s the philosophical crux, to give you another word worth knowing.

---

Part 2: The Syllabus

---

You’ll notice that this post addresses all of you, whether you are enrolled in AP Language or English 11. Each class period is separated on Google Classroom, which we’ll cover momentarily, but this digital space is shared in the same way our physical space is shared.

This is by design. All English Language Arts instruction addresses the same universal skills and traits, and we help you hone those skills and traits through the Humanities. There is a lot to gain from observing what your peers do, hearing their questions, exchanging ideas, etc, so this website expands your ability to do that.

The physical space is known as a makerspace. Load your course syllabus below to learn what that means². Start with the always up-to-date Google Doc version of it:

• Syllabus: Junior English (AP English Language & Composition + Regents English 11)

Read this syllabus as soon as possible. It hits some of the notes you’d expect from one of these things, but the tune is quite a bit different. Pay attention to those differences. It’s not the last time — not even the last time in this post — that the music will take some getting used to.

---

Part 3: Starting Up the Feedback Loop

---

As the syllabus tells you — as every instructional text will tell you, repeatedly — running a makerspace does not mean you’re without deadlines, homework, feedback, etc. Far from it. That’s why Google Classroom is indispensable to us: It gives you formal assignments, due dates, and requirements, all neatly linked to instructional posts.

To register for the right section to see those assignments, use the appropriate code:

• Period 2 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — vz2wur
• Period 3 [English 11] — ev8f5c
• Period 8 [English 11] — uv8afx
• Period 9 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — jr3ypu

Assignments and updates will appear in the stream. The resource section has a copy of the syllabus and other critical documents.

Now, feedback works differently in a makerspace, so you won’t receive scores through Google Classroom. Instead, we use the intricate and intuitive machinery explained here:

Mongering and Congeries

That post is essential reading. If it isn’t part of a formal assignment during the first week, it will be before the first three weeks have passed.

---

Part 4: Clarity from Effort

---

As you complete your first assignments and work with me and your peers, you will experience firsthand what the typical day in here looks like. You will see what each part of the interstitial classroom is for and learn more about how grade abatement functions. You’ll begin to learn what the interstitial classroom and grade abatement are.

In other words, you learn by doing in here. You also learn by reading lots and lots of teacher-written essays and posts. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, for instance, you can read this essay:

Circadian Dynamics

This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background lessons and texts are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with these brief 42 minutes³. We might circle up some days; we might talk in groups or meet individually; we might take practice tests or take a shot at timed writing. Without grades, there is enormous freedom to do what is needed, and you will direct most of the lessons yourself.

Your job, then, is to know what you are doing each day and to waste no time in doing it. That is the most important part of this course, so it gets a rare bolded font: When we are together in our classroom, you must be ready to work.

The interstitial/online elements are there to support this (and to make the Sisyphean grind of high school a little more manageable). Grade abatement is there to free you and empower you. Still, technology is only a tool. There is no replacement for the learning that occurs through discussion and collaboration when you share a learning environment with someone.

This essay explains more about how crucial our face-to-face work is:

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

(It also lets me reference Wu-Tang and Grindhouse kung-fu movies, which is important stuff.)

If nothing else, I want you to be able to answer these two questions each and every day:

1. What are you working on?
2. How can I help you?

If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know. I’ll redirect you. During the first week of school, for instance, you might need time to go over the syllabus with me. You might need help setting up your Google account. Or you might know that you need to do your first writing assignment in class, because you won’t do it at home.

You face no risk right now, so ask questions and try things out. The more you experiment and the harder you work over these first few days, the easier you will find it to begin generating evidence for your grade abatement profiles — a concept that will be second nature to you soon enough.

We’ll end this first post⁴ with an essay on what it means to take risks like this:

Molecular Learning

Welcome to Room 210, and to Sisyphean High.

---

1. That word, miasmic, is a really good one for far too many school-related situations. I first encountered it in this review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was part of a unit on horror movies and censorship years ago. It’s a particularly smart look at horror cinema, but it’s the use of language that made it worth teaching in the classroom. ↩

2. When I compile these notes into a more formal essay, I’ll give you that, too. I’m still figuring out what different social media and websites are most useful for when it comes to helping you all. ↩

3. The essays haven’t been updated to reflect our new schedule, mostly in an effort not to lose the Wu-Tang allusions. I suppose we could go with the answer to life, the universe, and everything, though… ↩

4. Which is much, much longer than most posts for a particular unit or lesson will be. This one has to be as dense as possible, because you need a few dozen chances to realize the most important truth: This course is different, and only by leaning into those differences will you be successful. ↩