The word of the day is antediluvian.
Interstitial Discussion: Another Update
Let’s talk, once again, about how we talk to and work with each other. First, comments.
Comments are grouped, archived, and emailed to me by this website. They appear by post and comment thread. Below is a screenshot of the inbox dedicated to this process. It was taken Monday, November 27, around 6AM. I cleared the previous batch before going to sleep at 9PM on November 261.
Comments are also recorded on the website. The dedicated page for this, which was created on October 1, sorts them by time. Below is a screenshot of some of the comments left on November 26 (or in the midnight hours of November 27). If the inbox I maintain helps sort GAP evidence, this website page helps you sort opportunities to collaborate and to discuss.
The most recent post on how and why this interstitial approach works is here: In the Spaces in Between. It was published on November 20. Previously, you had posts that directly instructed you on using these resources, including The Ironic Use of TL;DR and The Aft Agley Gang, which were both published on October 30; Habits and Habitats, from October 20; Scripta Manent, from September 28; a post answering the question, “What Do I Do Next?” on September 22; and these two posts that opened the year. There are many more.
You’ve been told to use these interstitial resources. You’ve been shown why it matters. The work was never optional2. We absolutely need to figure out why it’s not being done.
Riders in the Storm
Comments are just one part of the interstitial classroom. They extend in-class discussion and allow you to think in writing, which gives you another angle on the instruction, feedback, and formal assignments that comprise the rest of the interstitial work we do.
The calendar offers an example of why this matters. Between the Thanksgiving holiday, last Wednesday’s assembly, several lockout and fire drills, teacher meetings, and the occasional illness, we haven’t had much time together in class. That inconsistency will continue in December with snow, which will give us the weird and muted joy of cancellations, delays, and early dismissals. Individually, you will miss time for sickness.
Without this website and a shared focus on interstitial instruction and learning, that fractured a schedule makes learning unsustainable. You lose the momentum necessary for productive reading and writing. Your academic muscles atrophy. You forget what you were up to, back when you had class, and often shrug your way past that feeling.
Or you try to use the survival skills you’ve learned elsewhere to make up that lost ground. You rush through work at the last second. You skip steps, copy answers, make excuses. That’s why there has been a flood of activity today. We are all creatures of habit, and here, again, that creature is a rat trapped in a Skinner box.
What happens is this3: You load Google Classroom, see an assignment, and spam the switch that looks like it will give a reward. If the assignment asks you to copy your notes and submit them, you might have to create those notes. If it asks you to copy ongoing work and submit it, you might have to churn out whatever you can during the class period. Reminded that you must contribute online, you might add several comments to different posts without reading much of what your peers have written.
There is limited efficacy in that. The sudden influx of comments really is too great for any kind of close, careful reading; instead of the ebb and flow of a digital conversation, there is a deluge. Your peers can’t monitor a thread when there are dozens of them appearing at once. I can’t provide ongoing feedback, because your contributions aren’t ongoing.
Similarly, when you try to take a week’s worth of notes in a single period, that deluge drowns any real learning. The work manages to be perfunctory and overwhelming at the same time4. You are rushing to fulfill a checklist, and that’s not how this kind of learning happens.
This sort of perfunctory and sometimes panicky approach also prevents you from recognizing comments that open up discussion, like this one:
That was one of the few comments left before the flood today. It is also a post driven by in-class feedback from me; the question is an attempt to galvanize others to apply Graham’s logic to an unrelated (but interesting) discussion. It would have helped you practice how to write succinctly and how to sign up for follow-up comments. Instead, it sat there for a week, unnoticed and unremarked.
The Chain
Of course, students who rush through assignments are still doing the assignments. That’s something. There are folks reading this who need to admit to greater need, and there are folks not reading this at all — or not reading it until it has been pushed on you by a teacher, either digitally or through printed copies5.
To take notes on this instructional post, all of you should answer one or both of the following questions about what most motivates you.
Do you want a good grade?
Start looking at your desire for a good grade more closely, then. You aren’t entitled to anything, and in here, your performance is all that matters. What you do is all that matters. And that includes when you do it.
If you want to do well, you mean that you’d like a 90 or higher. That requires you to keep up with instructional posts just as much as formal assignments and central texts. That fourth tier of profiles requires you to be metacognitive and reflective, to do those things consistently and insightfully, and to contribute meaningfully to the class as a result of your introspective work. You have to do that over time.
You might be able to justify a GAP score of 6 or 7 without a regular habit of reading, taking notes, and responding to materials. You might be able to meet the criteria by rushing at the last second, since that last-second work still teaches you more than you’d learn by doing nothing (and there are students doing nothing, as always). It’s unlikely, however, that your last-second work is brilliant enough to make up for your lack of assiduousness, organization, self-awareness, amenability, and self-efficacy.
If you want a good grade, you have to work interstitially.
Do you want to future-proof your skills?
In this question, “future-proof” means to give yourself the skills and knowledge to get into college and/or a career, to make the most of your relationships, and to thrive in whatever future you find. I can’t imagine anyone saying they don’t want that sort of strength, but it might be that you don’t see how reading this long post or leaving a comment gets you there.
Which is when I remind you that we’ve gone over the skills and traits of this course, including their connection to the skills and traits employers and colleges want. We’ve done it so often that it’s almost redundant to link to individual posts, as every post covers this. Here’s the one on empathy, for example. You’ve seen me emphasize self-control repeatedly (and through strangely violent metaphors). If you take the time to read Paul Graham’s essay, you’ll see how important writing is to any career, to say nothing of its importance to understanding yourself and your life. We started the year with the importance of reading, especially as it relates to empathy.
The only way to build these skills and traits is to chain them together, one link at a time, with an eye toward overall progress. You can’t fake your way into a good writing process. You can’t take shortcuts to empathy. You can’t sustain an insincere focus on collegiality for very long, and you won’t be productive while you try.
These posts get at the need for regular practice. They link to readings that emphasize other skills and traits. When you contribute interstitially to discussions, you get to practice organization, collegiality, and amenability. You can use the ramiform resources here to practice autodidactic and individualized instruction. You are always encouraged to lean into the kind of feedback that makes the most sense.
Desultory or perfunctory work barely creates the appearance of progress. It will feel like busywork, because you aren’t building anything; you’re rushing to get credit for what you haven’t been doing all along.
If you want to future-proof your skills, then, you have to work interstitially.
This is not really the place to discuss the work you do late at night, but it’s at least worth a footnote. You know, because it is your lived experience, that work done late at night is work done less effectively. Even if you are a nocturnal kind of person, you don’t get to be that kind of person while you attend school. You get to wake up and attend classes at 7:45 in the morning. We need to figure out how to budget your time and work with foresight for a number of reasons; that your work suffers late at night is one of them. ↩
In the sense that the option not to do it carries penalties. You can always choose to ignore instruction, avoid feedback, neglect assignments, etc., if you’re willing to accept the repercussions. ↩
It should always be repeated that this is not true for everyone. It’s rarely true for the kind of student who reads footnotes. It’s true for enough students, however, that those of you reading this footnote should ask yourself a question: Which peers can you direct to this feedback, because you know they need it? You are stronger together, as the logic goes, and ought to think of how to help each other. ↩
That word, perfunctory, is a helpful word to internalize. It means to go through the motions — to do something without much effort and reflection. Another helpful word is desultory, which indicates a lack of planning or logical connection. The etymology of desultory provides an interesting image, too, that might help you realize how important consistent habits of mind are. You can’t keep jumping from horse to horse. You’ll break something. ↩
But we will avoid printed copies as much as possible. It’s a surrender to your lack of planning, when it happens by default. If you want a printed copy, you should print one; that’s why we have a printer in our classroom, which is a unique resource. Central texts that require direct annotation will be printed. This kind of post? That should be a decision you make as part of your own learning process. ↩
Starting out some conversation and feedback here I think it is important to talk about how interstitial learning never has a real end. There are always posts to look at on your own time making it easier to organize yourself and get everything done in a timely fashion. Especially during breaks this type of learning is super beneficial. As it said in the reading just as your muscles atrophy, what you learned so far in a course goes through a similar process over a break. (Atrophy means to gradually decline in effectiveness or vigor due to underuse or neglect.) Having a learning environment like this gives you the resources to avoid this decline. It allows you to continue to learn even when you are not physically in the classroom. This obviously includes many benefits such as saving time because when you forget material over a break you have to take time to go over it when you could be learning something new. Overall, this way of learning has the potential to fix many problems in normal teaching styles.
I agree — like Mr. Eure said earlier in the year, there should never be a time when you have nothing to do. There is always more work to do and posts to read and instruction to learn from. It’s Sisyphean, never-ending.
I think what matters is that this sort of learning is what you’ll have available to you after you finish your formal educations. It’s why self-control matters so much. You have access to limitless teaching on every subject imaginable through the device you’re using right now. How will you use it? It’s not as simple as telling you to turn off the games and Snapchat, either, as that’s ignoring the need for mindless decompression and distraction. Those are healthy things, if they’re done in moderation. It’s much more complicated, which is why so few people in the non-school, non-academic world ever venture outside of their echo chambers. We’re all tired at the end of the day, and often during the day; it’s difficult to weaponize those interstitial moments in order to learn something. We have to hold each other accountable, I think.
I think it’s important that you noted that our learning is never ending here in this classroom as it is in the rest of the word. English is something unlike any other subjects. In science or math or social studies, we go in knowing that we are going to learn completely new material. But with english, we go in already knowing that we have learned the basics previously and we are just expecting to merely build on those and practice our skills, therefore believing there is not much “new” material to learn. However, this class and website changes that, it teaches us a new way of learning and approaching. It is up to us to make the decision that we want to learn it, and it is easy for those who don’t make this decision to feel like they aren’t learning anything at all.
My favorite thing about this class is the universal skills and traits..because while they aren’t spoken about or taught in other classes, are still very useful. Even after we graduate, they are skills we can and should use in college, work, and even our personal life.
I totally agree. This course is great because while it does teach us valuable skills that pertain to reading, writing and analysis, the course also teaches us about life. It’s generally about self growth and metacognition.
You guys seemed to have some misconception about the differences between metacognition and reflection. But, metacognition, thinking about how you think, is a crucial part of this self growth.
The goal in this class has always been progress and growth, with the goal being good writing, so we are sort of like the 76ers with a “Trust the Process” mindset, wanting to be a good team, knowing what they need to do, but not knowing exactly what the end result will look like. I think it would be helpful to have a concrete goal in addition to the goal of growth, so that we can visualize what the work we are doing now will eventually develop into. I think being able to read some of the pieces that previous years’ students wrote would be nice. Just a thought that came to mind while reading this page.
I agree that it would be a great improvement to our learning process if we could gain access to past students’ work. I remember with Ms. McTigue last year, we were often introduced to a new writing assignment by reflecting and annotating the work of other students. I personally benefitted from reviewing these pieces because it gave me a sense of direction. One of the most difficult aspects of this course is growing accustomed to the almost suffocating amount of freedom. Transitioning from an educational environment where most things had a more systematic structure, it may be helpful to see where we’re headed in this course with some past years’ work.
I’ll see what I can do to cobble together a collection of student essays and GAP reports. You have to think differently about goal-setting and emulation, though. Your goal isn’t to emulate previous students; it’s to emulate the writers and thinkers we study. That’s why we’re approaching the course at such a slow burn: to give you time to see that end goal. You are each capable of exploring and creating at the level of the people we study, and I want to help you get as close to that level as you can while we’re working together. You can employ the ETA strategies, for instance, assigned to you in AP. It doesn’t matter if the author is a famous writer, like Stephen King or George Orwell, or a writer you’ve likely not seen before, like Dustin Rowles or Paul Graham. To think and write and create like them is your goal.
An example of process is harder to come by, so I’d suggest bugging your peers who have scored high at those three-week GAP intervals. You’re someone who could help others, for instance, when it comes to organization and metacognition.
I think it’s interesting that you chose the word “suffocating” to characterize the freedom we have in this class, because those words are rarely used together. That being said, I do see where you’re coming from. It was initially overwhelming for me to have a lack of deadlines and to not have my priorities set for me by a teacher. It means that we have to rise to the challenge with new levels of organization, self-control and autodidactism.
I agree that it could potentially be beneficial to have some sort of attainable goal, but it’s important to do so without compromising what the class environment is intended to be. Personally, I have never experienced a class that is carried out in such a way, where the day-to-day agenda is almost completely controlled by the student. That being said, I still struggle with the workload at times, as I have always done best with firm deadlines for the assignments I’m given. I’m aware that this class is meant to move us away from this traditional style, and I understand why it is necessary. But, I feel that some form of deadline could be helpful. In the beginning of the year, the posts had loose “deadlines”, if that’s what you would consider them. And, although these were never totally formal, they gave me a sense of where I should be in terms of my work (what posts I should’ve read, what essays I should’ve annotated, so on and so forth) letting me know if I’m behind or not. I know these were removed to give us even more freedom, and cause for even more self control, but I think including them again could be overall beneficial.
I definitely see what you’re saying, Meagan. Deadlines are certainly useful for helping us establish where we stand, although the case could be made that once our learning is individualized, establishing a uniform standard of timeliness becomes impossible. However, I agree with you that deadlines alter our motivations to such an extent that they sometimes reshape our learning process. I feel that the best case scenario would be if deadlines aided our continual self-assessments instead of acting as a form of extrinsic motivation that circumvents the need for self-control. Of course, for this to be the case, we’d all have to be completely rid of the Skinner Box mentality. Since this could be considered unrealistic due to the habits we’ve formed in the past decade or so of our education, I feel that the best way for us to evaluate our progress is to rely on our peers, not on deadlines. By protecting the herd mentality and being responsible for each other’s learning, checking in with one another and motivating each other when we fall off task, we could avoid needing deadlines that we feel we need now: we would still get a sense of where we stand without feeling bound to an artificial pressure that puts limits our learning environment.
I agree tremendously with you Meagan. Ive always been the type of person to be on top of things when there’s deadlines because then I know when I have to get certain things done and I will sit down and finish it. I still struggle with this style of learning. I honestly did not like it at all in the beginning of the year, I felt I wasn’t getting an understanding of how the class works and I do still have trouble with it and at first I did not want to understand this teaching style but I am willing to open my mind to it and grasp the learning in the classroom. I am aware it will take time but I will put a lot of effort in it. I do like the sense of freedom we are allowed but sometimes once I am out of the class my life takes over and it is hard to keep up with all the readings, this also does play a role in the classroom, maybe sometimes I have to be more focused and use my time wisely. I do appreciate when I am told if I am behind on something but sometimes when i’m told I am behind it is already too late because it is very close to the end of the quarter. I believe that this style of teaching is okay but it is difficult for me and I want to be able to have a good understanding of it.
I agree with Victor, that a concrete goal could be beneficial, even if it does go against some principles of this course. That would help some students see vaguely into the future, and at what they should work towards. Also, what stuck with me in this piece is working outside of class, and going the extra mile for your own benefit. Like a muscle, you have to work every day to keep it strong, and in this class, to really succeed, you need to work and work, beyond the 42 minutes we have, so you can benefit in the future. This reminded me of something my cousin told me this weekend about golf, and how after not playing for a week or so, you lose your shot, and it takes about 100 shots to get back to where you were. Like this example, if you only rush your work in class, you have to restart every morning, and work to get back to where you were mentally. That is turning a 42 minute period to maybe a 37 minute one, and then you have to subtract time for distractions. Work outside of class is needed to earn tier four grades, and also to accomplish what this class wants you to accomplish.
The line that spoke to me the most in this post was this, “It will feel like busywork, because you aren’t building anything; you’re rushing to get credit for what you haven’t been doing all along.” This resonated with me because like many others, I sometimes rush through work to get it done so that I can say that I did it, not because I’m focused on developing certain skills or accumulating knowledge. The last part of that sentence provided the push in the right direction that I needed to hear: “You’re rushing to get credit for what you haven’t been doing all along.” This really makes it clear that busywork helps no one. Consequently, I will be motivated by that and think about it when I’m putting something off or turning it into busywork and I’ll be reminded of the lasting benefits of doing my work properly. Trying to get credit for something you didn’t do is obviously pointless so why try instead of doing right in the first place? To improve your skills, to build the chain, one has to work constantly and consistently over time, not rush to get through work at the last minute.
Looking back at all my work from last year in English 10 (which was in this class as well) and these past few months, the best things I’ve written took a long time to write. (Some took weeks, even.) The worst things I’ve written were busywork. Things I was rushing through in order to receive credit, and nothing more. The frustrating thing is I still feel like I have to write things like that sometimes, even though I’ve been in this class for over a year. I’m going to start taking more notes so I can internalize the instructional posts and essays and articles shared w/ us more, so I can write something meaningful, instead of poorly writing something just to get it done.
All of the assignments and posts and resources that are put out to us are for us. They’re for our own personal use and learning we just need to use them. I find that every single one of the resources we’ve been given have the potential to help us in some way. Every one of them provides the possibility of personal reflection and internalization- we just need to find the time and motivation to do it. I know personally, I don’t mind writing reflections and reading the posts it’s more a matter of making myself start. Once I start writing a reflection I can always find value in it and I no longer need to force myself to do it, I begin to want to do it but getting started and finding the time to get started is more challenging for me. That’s why I like deadlines, not so I rush through the assignment at the last minute, so I make sure I set aside time to do it. When there are no deadlines I push the assignments in order to allow space for other more pressing tasks and then things don’t get done. However, the fact of the matter is, we shouldn’t need deadlines in order to get work done, we should be responsible enough to set aside time to do it but that isn’t necessarily an easy task when we’ve been trained for the past 11 years or so to do assignments in a timely fashion and turn them in on their set due date so I think it’s a skill we all need to work on developing.
I agree with what Olivia is saying about how deadlines help us to set time aside to get things done (I commented something like this on a previous post). The reason why my writing for the Alligators of the Mind assignment has not been completed yet is because there hasn’t been a deadline pushing me to do so. Sure, I’ve been working at it however, I have worked harder to finish other assignments that have a deadline because there will be a consequence if that deadline is not met. I have also been focusing a lot of my time on the Age of the Essay assignment, so there’s that as well. Am I wrong for doing this? Is there even a right answer to that question? I really don’t know. Maybe I should have prioritized the Alligators assignment more than I have however, there was no doubt in my mind that I was going to complete it to my best ability. I didn’t want to rush the assignment and turn in something not so great so, I have been waiting to complete it and turn it in when I have the time to dedicate to it. I had planned to finish it before the conclusion of the quarter so, does it matter when I finish it exactly?
Another thing I wanted to discuss was leaving comments on the posts. I had read all of the recent posts however, for some reason it was not clear to me that we should be commenting on all of them. For example for the Age of The Essays posts, my thoughts were in my written response and I didn’t really think to comment and nothing really triggered me to make a comment. I know that I could have commented anything (I could have talked about what I wrote in my response, added onto someone else’s comment, etc.) but I didn’t and that’s definitely an error I made. Once I was reminded that commenting on the posts was extremely important I dug a little deeper and commented when I had a free moment, which happened to be late Sunday night. However, these comments were still insightful so, does it matter so much when I posted them? I know I should have found time earlier, or better yet, commented on them when I first read them but I didn’t, and I think being able to recognize that mistake is more beneficial than doing everything perfectly in the first place. To be honest, I’m still trying to understand and figure out some elements of the course.
Erin I completely agree with you and think you’ve put into words what we’ve all been trying to express for a very long time. If there are no deadlines pushing me to get my work done, it almost doesn’t really feel like an assignment, just something “extra” that I know I should do but end up waiting a week to do so. I know that it is our job as students, particularly AP students, to invest as much of our energy as we can into our learning, but there are flaws with that idea just as much as most of school is flawed. One of them being that we are exhausted and dividing your energy between eight classes and extracurriculars and family time and looking at colleges and a social life is a lot. For example, I’m writing this comment past midnight, it’s currently 12:18am, and the rough part is is that I don’t even consider that late anymore, and I know many of my peers probably feel the same way. Also, if I have work, especially work that is optional, over a break, it is guaranteed that I will not do it. Personally, I find regaining my energy and spending time with my family who I never get to see anymore because I’m constantly busy, is lightyears more important than an assignment, regardless of what class it is. However, it is sad that we as students use our breaks to destress and gain some energy back, only for it to be sucked out of us the moment we go back to school. I recognize this is no excuse for not getting our work done, but maybe it can help clear the air about why we were scrambling yesterday in class to get all of the checkpoints handed in. It’s not that we don’t care or don’t want to, it’s that we are trying to, and actually probably did do a lot of thinking about the posts, we just didn’t have many notes on them. Also, I’d like to say that many of my “notes” are through conversation with the people at my table. I almost always find that I understand something a whole lot better if I discuss it, and usually what I learn sticks in my head, so I don’t write it down. I hope this doesn’t come off as a whole list of excuses as to why responsible students aren’t doing work, because that was never my intention. This comment is to simply agree with the people commenting above me, and give my own personal insight on these varying topics.
Agreed. This is what I wrote in my reflection:
Also, I think it is necessary to recognize the difference between doing an assignment later than the day it was assigned, and rushing through the assignment the day it is due. I often won’t have time for everything in the first day, so I will wait until I am free to complete a certain assignment, but I’m not rushing through it — I’m going through it just as I would if I had done it two days earlier. One thing that Ms. McTigue said last year was that since the assignments in the class didn’t have set deadlines, or had deadlines that were weeks away, they will likely fall down students’ priority lists, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since we have other responsibilities in multiple other AP classes, but the assignment still has to be done, and it should be done well.
Erin, you’re right: some things are hard to keep track without deadlines. But I think the two best ways to self-regulate and gain a sense of your progress without deadlines are to check in with your peers, and to ask yourself if you are filling the time. If you are working hard throughout the whole class period every day and a chamber or so at home every night, you’re probably not behind, in the same sense that if you are surpassing the body of work of those around you, you’re probably not behind. Sure, practicing self-control and self-awareness is harder without deadlines but some things in life don’t have deadlines, so those are skills we have to develop to be ready for that.
You say that you spent a longer time on The Age of the Essay. I think that could be a good thing if it means that you handled the text a little bit differently or took it to a different depth than your peers. That means you’re individualizing your learning, and that’s great because you’re making the material relevant and useful for you. The problem is when you aren’t aware of your process or if you aren’t taking advantage of class time. But if you look back at your work and see that you learned a lot from it and were focused on all the layers of it, well, I can’t see a problem with that.
As for your commenting, I believe that any insightful comment you post is worthwhile. You’re still practicing organization and self-awareness by posting it (even if no one sees it). But if you post it in a place and at a time where your peers will see it and respond (either in writing or in thought), that benefit multiplies. That’s when amenability and self-efficacy and collegiality come into play. I think you should try to post comments at a time when your peers can see them, but the great thing about posting something online or in writing (think: verba volant, scripta manent which is written above this comment as I’m typing it) is that I’m looking at your comment this morning even though you posted it last night when I was asleep. That’s why you should avoid straying away from commenting just because you think no one will see it or have the chance to respond.
I have mixed feelings about the lack of deadlines in this class. Yes, as many have said, they push us to finish our work before a certain time. However, our work submitted may not always be our best work. I like the idea of no deadlines because it forces me to organize my time in order to be successful. Time management is a critical part of school and life in general. All the pieces posted to classroom are more opportunities to expand our knowledge and thinking, as well as getting a good grade in this class. The responsibility is all in our own hands and those who do them consistently and “on time” benefit from it, and those who rush through, or don’t do them at all are only hurting themselves. The thing I find myself struggling with is keeping up with all these posts. I think I would have the same issue even if there were deadlines. All of the readings are very lengthy and full of information. Also, there’s often many posts up at once. Attempting to comment and reflect on all of these in 9th period and the few study halls I have a day is very difficult. However, it comes to a point of well I’ll do very well on this post and have to leave the “optional one” for another day, quarter, or just leave undone. I think this class tests our abilities to decide what’s best for us as students and what we have to do to be successful.
I think you’re right, Haile. We have to practice self-control and self-awareness even when there are no deadlines. Deadlines can cut out the need for self-control because they replace intrinsic motivation with an external pressure. Then when we need our self-control to do something, that skill hasn’t been fully developed. We have to be put in a situation where we have to practice organization, autodidactism and self-awareness in order to learn those skills, especially in a setting like this one in which it is much harder to fail than succeed.
I completely agree with Haile. Usually, there are multiple posts up at one time, and they are all full with important information regarding the class work that needs to get done. However, due to the lack of deadlines, I will often push it aside because I have other work due that needs to get done by a certain time. Then, I find myself rushing to get your work done, and it probably is not the best work that I could do. This process happened with the optional work that was assigned to us. I know, as students in this class we are expected to do more work than what is given to us(like optional work), and have the skill of setting aside time for doing this work, even though no deadline is given to us. However, this type of teaching and learning is extremely different than what we are used to due to the school system. So, I think that this skill will develop as the year goes on, and hopefully by the end of the year, we will be much better at organizing our time and be more on top of the assignments.
I also wanted to comment on what this post mainly talks about, and that it commenting and interacting on the different posts. At the beginning of the year, we were told that we would have to comment on the posts by asking questions, interacting with our peers, reflecting on what we just read, etc. However, while reading this post, it stated that we shouldn´t treat commenting as a checklist or commenting on something that was a couple posts back because no one will see it. Personally, I don´t think it matters when you comment on a post, but as long as you are understanding it, and benefitting from it. I think that this type of learning is something that we have to grow into understanding, so we might have to read a post a couple of times to fully understand it, and then we could comment on it and ask questions later on.
For some people, the idea of work never ending can seem quite intimidating. However, that is what interstitial learning is. This doesn’t change the fact that having no deadlines puts some kids in an uncomfortable position. These students don’t feel like they know how to budget their time when the tasks they must complete are open ended. Learning to embrace this kind of learning, however, would be quite beneficial for everyone. When we enter room 210, we need to refocus our minds to fit the functions of the classroom. Habits as described above that we have developed from other classes cannot be used anymore. Some of us have adapted faster than others to these new standards, but with every triptych that goes by it becomes more and more apparent who hasn’t.
When reading through the post, I stumbled upon the line “Of course, students who rush through assignments are still doing the assignments. That’s something” When thinking deeper about this it forces me to think about all the times that I have spent 5 minutes on a assignment that should have taken me much, much longer. But what’s interesting is the assignment is still accepted. But when we enter the real world, it won’t be. Where is the line, the line where on one side we still get participation ribbons, but on the other side of that line we are met with anger about not finishing the task. That’s where the online posts step in and help us gather our thoughts and be able to succeed. We need to learn to self advocate, just like when we want to order food, our parents make us call it in, or how when we are presented with a difficult homework assignment, our teachers don’t spoon feed us the answers. All of these actions are able to build us into better, more hardworking people. It teaches us to organize our time, so the day we go out on our own we aren’t completely overwhelmed with the freedoms that we have. So when we notice the new post on Sisyphean High, although it may not be required, we still need to work hard, and go the extra step, because that’s how we become successful.
I agree with Brendan, especially when he says “We need to learn to self advocate, just like when we want to order food..” The first time my mom presented me with a cell phone and said that I was responsible to call, I refused. Why would I have to call this time? Giving demands to a complete stranger was outrageous and not something I was ready for, yet here I am years later, and when dinner isn’t ready fast enough, I pick up the phone and self advocate for myself. Similar to this, walking deadlines now exist. The responsibility is in our own hands, and we need to practice self control and still complete the assignments. At first I was hesitant about them, knowing I’m a huge procrastinator and up until this year had little self control. Although as the weeks pass I realize that the more Mr. Eure posts assignments on Sisyphean High, the more motivation it is to conquer them. Being successful in this class still consists of the same requirements, yet taking responsibility for self advocation is just another skill we will obtain along the way.
When I first started to see assignments being posted without a deadline, I was kind of thrown off by it. As I started to begin the readings, knowing that there is no set due date to get your thoughts down hovering above your head is a good feeling and relieved a lot of stress. I often find myself rushing to get things done before a certain due date, just so I have it done and don´t have to stress about it. When this is the case, I tend to not get as much out of the reading as I would if I were to have as much time as I need to use, since I tend to be more of a slow reader.
Originally when I saw that there were no set deadlines for the posts, I was excited because I feel like I had a lot more time to do certain assignments. Therefore, I would take my time and not pound in an hour or so of work for this class every night. But then towards the end of the quarter when we got more posts and more things to reflect on, I feel like I also was a little thrown off. Whenever I’m not given a set deadline to do something, I feel like I have a ton more time to complete the assignment than I really do, which is why I don’t spend as much time on it per night like I stated above. I can also agree with Natalie in saying that when something like this happens, I do not get as much out of the assignment or reading as I would had there’d been a deadline. This is because when I space out my reading when I don’t have a deadline, as suppose to doing the reading in a shorter amount of time with a deadline, I tend to forget some of the things that I had read a few days earlier. Some may tend to agree, while others may disagree with what I’m saying. But in the end, I think it all comes down to time management and prioritizing. I’m guilty of having very poor time management, and I guarantee that there are many other people that are poor with time management as well. Since that’s the case, I feel like it’s better for us to have a deadline for these posts instead of giving us the entire quarter to work on these posts.