If you’ve invested time and effort over these first two weeks, you’re already beginning to unlock the second course described here. You’ll also want feedback to know how you’re adjusting. Here, take this:
This is a reimagining of the pop quiz. Read about it here, ignoring the irrelevant stuff1:
Another way to view this sort of quiz is as weaponized feedback. Your ability to answer those questions will be combined with recent observations of your in-class work and formal writing. You can think of it as sorting you more broadly than the GAP scoring protocol does in order to attack procrastination, anxiety, etc.
I’ll write brief descriptions of where you’ll be after the quiz, and then I invite you to note that this is why cheating doesn’t make any sense: It would only bring on more work and responsibility that you are unable to do.
Weak performance in class, weak performance on quiz | Start by treating these posts as you ought to treat lectures, textbooks, and test-driven packets. This is the instruction. Read it all thoroughly and repeatedly, ask questions, etc, and isolate yourself in class until you’re caught up.
Weak performance in class, strong performance on quiz | There is always more to do, and you can start by helping others understand what you’ve figured out. Teach them, unlock that deeper curriculum, individualize the work. Anything else is disrespectful, so it’s an explicit path to anti-amenability, which is Tier 1.
Strong performance in class, weak performance on quiz | Don’t worry. This means you need more direct feedback, more guided discussion, and probably some extra help with tricky concepts. If we do that, you’ll be able to teach others, which means you’re knocking on the door to an 8 or 9.
Strong performance in class, strong performance on quiz | Great. Start working with others, designing interstitial ways of honing our collective understanding, and figuring out how to make the room more efficient and effective.
Before we even look at the data from this quiz, I can already tell you that most of you need to work harder at the instructional posts. You can’t read them casually or skim the contents. That’s just as harmful as daydreaming during a lecture or falling asleep while reading a textbook.
The other predictably necessary adjustment is something that never stopped being true: If you aren’t on task throughout the period, you aren’t meeting the basic requirements of the course, which means you should not score higher than a 4 on our GAP scale. That 70 should be your ceiling, especially if you’ve been warned to refocus.
This is functionally similar to being made to change clothes for physical education, to clean up your workstation in science, or to complete homework for points on your final average in Math. These are the rules of the classroom, and you can’t break those rules without a penalty.
On the other side of the motivational scale, there is always something to read or write or discuss in here. You will never run out of things to do. These posts are built to be deep and ramiform, and the work is always about an ongoing process; but if all else fails, somehow, you have me to redirect you or suggest further work. So it doesn’t matter if you are bored, tired, angry, possessed by demons – the room is built to help you be productive, regardless.
Ask questions about this below.
Sooner or later, I’ll update this essay to make it more universal. For now, focus on the obvious connections to what we’re doing. ↩
Why is this page referred to as Onomatopoeia? I know it is a device where words are used to symbolize sounds, but I don’t really understand why that has any meaning to this.
Akshay, do you think it could be some sort of reference to this..
Onomatopoeia, like you said, “it is a device where words are used to symbolize sounds.” This quiz was about seeing how much we’ve read and the time invested in the course. So, do you think that this quiz was meant to see of of words, (grade we are giving ourselves for the GAP), is the same as what we should get? That may be confusing so I’ll put it another way. The word “buzz” is a word that uses onomatopoeia, correct? The sound of the word buzz matches the sound of the action. So, if we put this in AP English Lang. & Comp., do you think it could mean that the grade we are giving ourself matches that of our actions. What are your thoughts? Hope this helped a bit.
Yes, your explanation makes a lot of sense Brendan. Basically, something onomatopoeia does is matching a word to an action, and our quiz questioned if what we have done, learnt, and understood matches the grade we gave ourselves. Thanks for responding.
I understand the phrase “onomatopoeia quiz” as a description of a specific type of quiz- noticeably not a “pop” quiz. As the Medium article linked above explains, there are extensive drawbacks to pop quizzes, namely the pressure on the students of an unexpected assessment, which often inhibits their ability to perform well on the quiz. Furthermore, pop quizzes are part of one of the drawbacks to the way we use grades now: quizzes encourage the gamesmanship of school instead of testing what you truly know. Therefore, pop quizzes as we know them would be useless in our course; we have to redefine a pop quiz to make it less anxiety-causing and more representative of what students have internalized over time (this kind of quiz is detailed further on the Medium article). Now we need a new kind of onomatopoeia to describe that new kind of quiz, and since that word hasn’t been found yet, we use “onomatopoeia” as a placeholder.