This is what I see in my own metaphorical mirror, of course, although I’m never quite sure which character I am.
The Metaphor Is the Message
“It’s human nature to conceive of abstract ideas through more immediate, concrete experiences,” goes the beginning of this Mental Floss article on the hidden etymologies of certain words. We use metaphors to make sense of the world around us, and the language of those metaphors shapes our thinking.
Certainly that’s a recurring idea in our study of truth, lies, and memory. It’s a theme in 1984, and you’ll actually grapple with the idea of “dying metaphors” when we study another bit of writing by the same author. For a moment, though, focus on “The Ways We Lie” and the emulation-through-analysis prompts you were given in this post:
Remember that posts like that are written to teach you, not just to present you with assignments and deadlines. That post, for instance, forces you to read slowly and carefully, if you want to know what to read and what to write. It provides context and plenty of opportunities for enrichment.
Google Classroom, meanwhile, contains a much more linear and rote version of our work. You’ll still need to be organized, but it’s harder to get lost — in the sense of developing curiosity and self-awareness.
Regardless, you’ve now had three weeks to read Stephanie Ericsson’s essay, “The Ways We Lie,” which is third in your reading packet, and make your way through the ETA and essay prompts, which are in your writing packet. The essay prompt is built around the following quotation, and you’ll notice it has its fair share of metaphorical language:
Martin Buber once said, “The lie is the spirit committing treason against itself.” Our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish.
How much do we tolerate before we become sick and tired of being sick and tired? When will we stand up and declare our right to trust? When do we stop accepting that the real truth is in the fine print? Whose lips do we read this year when we vote for president? When will we stop being so reticent about making judgments? When do we stop turning over our personal power and responsibility to liars?
List out the metaphors in the first paragraph alone:
- cultural cancer
- shrouds
- moral garbage
- as water is to a fish
Your own essays are likely to use metaphors in a similar way. That will be one aspect of our in-class workshops over the next few weeks. Pay attention, as you embark on the writing process, to the metaphors you use. (I just used “embark,” for instance, because the metaphor of a journey or river fits our writing process.)
Back to the Looking Glass
That classification and division essay is one of many assignments you must complete over the next few weeks. You’ve been given a complete list through Google Classroom, but I will link to it and embed it again here:
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You have a predictive calendar covering every day for the rest of the year, too — load “What You Need Right Now” at the top of the home page — which is a reminder that you are also reading 1984, hacking high-stakes exams, and working on your Pareto Projects.
You are busy! That’s by design. And it gives us a chance to do what was always planned for the end of the semester.
What Was Always Planned for the End of the Semester
Each of you will meet with me, one at a time, to review your performance. We will go through your evidence from the most recent GAP panel, but that’s not all we will consider. If you are in a co-taught class, these performance reviews will include Ms. Olson, too.
First, you should recognize that this takes an ungodly amount of class time to do. We can afford to do it once, only once, and only because of the interstitial instructional and feedback model we use.
Second, the governing metaphor continues to be the mirror, specifically the looking-glass logic of Alice. Here is the metaphor in November:
The final line of that instructional post is this: “You are what you do, and you must be honest about what that means.” We have returned to that need for collective clarity and personal honesty again and again, until the need bubbled over into a day of storytelling and lectures:
The Mirror
That image and link lead this site’s top-right menu now. Its lessons are more important than ever, especially the TL;DR of it: Stop shifting the blame in this course. Take responsibility for the choices you’ve made, or accept that your frustration and lack of learning is the choice you’ve made.
That’s the half-empty looking glass, to mix a couple of metaphors together. The half-full: Some of you remain a bit lost, and a conference will help. You need help fighting the dishonesty, cynicism, and selfishness that surround all of us — the “cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish,” as Ericsson puts it.
So I want you to think of Alice and her looking glass. What we do lies on the other side, and you pass through by stepping into your own reflection.You must confront who you are and what you’ve done. There is no other way through.
Once on the other side of the mirror, the environment changes and a lot of the old rules stop applying. That’s what I promised on the first day of school, and it will stay a promise on the last: There are two courses taught in Room 210, and one of them can change your life.
Before you cross that membrane, however, you have to look critically at the reflection in front of you. You have to confront the truth. And that means recognizing the dishonesty and cynicism that throw that truth into relief.
That’s why Ericsson’s metaphor is so powerful. We become numb to lies because the world, unfortunately, is filled with dishonesty. Reason is under attack all around us. You are encouraged, sometimes by people who ought to have your best interests at heart, to blame others and foster distrust. These people, your age and sometimes older, reorder reality. They spread that cultural cancer.
But there are no “alternative facts.” There is absolutely a point after which an uninformed opinion becomes an error of fact. There is right and wrong, truth and fiction, and we can separate the one from the other if we are careful.
Through the mirror, there is an invitation to do good. There is an invitation to dialectical discussion. There is empathy. There is an opportunity to guide your own learning in defiance of a 100 years of broken educational policy.
I can help you pass through that mirror to a place where you have complete control over what you learn and how much it helps you. If you’re already there, I can help you make sense of what that means. But you have to work for it. It can’t be handed to you; that’s another metaphor entirely.
Remember that you’ve already been invited to stop blaming others, to learn self-control, and to break out of the Skinner-box machinery of traditional education. The only difference between that approach and what we’ll start tomorrow is that the language (and metaphor) of invitation will shift to the language of requirement. We will meet, one at a time, for as long as it takes.
90% of you will walk away from that conference in a much better place. (I actually think it will be 100% of you, in defiance of Sturgeon’s Law, because you’d have to be as stubborn as a Flat Earther to stay cynical or misinformed afterward.) That brief loss of choice will ultimately give you more choice than ever.
Meanwhile, you will work on the learning that has been provided for you, interstitially, using the makerspace as necessary.
Ask questions about this — any of it, from metaphors to etymology to Alice in Wonderland to the structure of a conference — below.
I agree that these conferences will have a positive impact on everyone, or most everyone. Personally, I didn’t care very much for our GAP discussions last year in Pre-AP English. I had always been more comfortable with traditional grading rather than arguing for my grade. Towards the end of the school year, though, I began to better understand the logic behind this approach. It can be more constructive for students to have a conversation with their teacher about grades because it’s less ambiguous than regular grading. The students will become more certain of what they’re doing correctly, and what they can improve on.
Great comment. You bring up three points worth discussing:
1) Grade abatement should never be an argument. It’s not about persuasion. It should be an exercise in fact-finding and pattern recognition — a clinical look at what the student has done.
2) I was always more comfortable with traditional grading, too. That comfort is the result of indoctrination — of years spent in a system that uses grades as the currency of learning. In many ways, traditional grades in public school act like violence in a prison: a currency that warps all transactions and creates an insular and toxic environment.
3) These conferences will bring clarity to a lot of folks, but the reason you’re right that it’s “less ambiguous than regular grading” is this: The profiles, skills and traits, and assessment protocol never change. It is all consistent and 100% transparent.
True paradigm shifts should feel like paradigm shifts, and that’s what you’ve described. It takes time for the logic to sink in. When it does, all stakeholders, like you, become more certain of what they’re doing.
I completely agree that these conferences can be beneficial to everyone, as long as people are willing to accept constructive criticism and adapt. Some people prefer to work face to face, instead of interstitially, so this is a great opportunity to ask questions and try to understand why they fall into a certain profile.
I’d like you all to start using “interstitially” more precisely. It isn’t a synonym for “online,” although it is only possible through technology. (You need a way to read lectures and ask questions at home, and I can only talk to you now, at 7:20 in the morning, through the website.) To learn interstitially is to learn whenever the opportunity presents itself. It might be a face-to-face question at the end of class, a conversation during a study hall, a scheduled meeting after school before practice starts — those brief moments, and many more, are interstitial. The flipped elements of instruction allow you to get lectures and instructions online, sure, but I’ve always stressed that the most important part of learning is what happens in person: https://goo.gl/96bKVr
I agree with Charlie that traditional grading is much more comfortable probably because for a very long time that is the only type of grading we have been exposed to. Traditional grading started to become routine to us until we were introduced to grade abatement last year. I think at first it was hard for all of us, we had a million questions before our first conference but by the end of the year we were pros. I think one of the reasons this style was so hard at first was because you knew which profile you deserved before you even started talking. You knew if you only had a few pieces of evidence it was likely that your grade wouldn’t be exactly what you wanted and that all was your fault and fell on your shoulders. It was all about responsibility and accountability and there was really no way around it.
I agree with Charlie, that the conferences should be beneficial to everyone, whether you’re excelling in the class or struggling with it. I too am much more comfortable with traditional grading, but I do enjoy meeting in conferences. I feel that talking about grades and what you have accomplished with your teacher can show you where you stand in the class, and how you’ve grown throughout the year. The conferences provide the necessary looking glass that is needed to grow, or in other words, the self reflection. I would like to add that I loved the line, “We become numb to lies because the world is filled with dishonesty.” The world is a dishonest place unfortunately, and it is important for one to be honest to themselves and others.
I believe that these conferences will be good for a student, but only if they allow themselves to: receive guidance and direction; open up and be truthful about their experience in the class, and how they have grown; and apply the information and ideas they have gathered from the discussion. Students should receive guidance and direction from this conference in order to better themselves. If a student stiffens themselves against the thoughts and guidance of the teacher, they are doing themselves no good in the short and long term. Students should at least receive the information and reflect on the value of the direction. Students should open up and be truthful about their experience in the class, because as mentioned in this post, the world is a dishonest and deceptive place- and we as students should begin trying to combat the cultural disease by being honest. Also, students should apply the information they have gained in the conference, in order to improve their experience in the class, and better their academic course this year- and even possibly in the future.
I also agree with Charlie and the rest of my peers. Traditional grading is more comfortable and routine, whereas having a discussion with your teacher can be found intimidating. Unfortunately, I was placed in regular english 10 last year, and don’t have the experience of having a conference with your teacher to defend your grade. Although it’s just to go over visual facts of what the student has completed, the only way one should be nervous is if they haven’t used to makerspace to to their full potential and done what they’ve supposed to.
I personally like conferences because they help with the self reflection process. Of course a major portion of this class is the metacognition aspect however there are still some things about ourselves that are harder for us to notice about ourselves than it is for other people to pick them out. I’ve heard many of my peers questioning the score they ultimately received on one of the GAP periods and while you can always start up a conversation about that with your teacher, some kids are more hesitant but conferences force you to start that constructive conversation.
It’s all about what data you have and what those data tell us. This “Rubicon” element seems to be working, for instance, because it’s prominently available on Infinite Campus. Since in-class focus is critical to success, you can see how often you’ve been significantly off-task. I agree that it’s hard — very hard — to look objectively at ourselves. If we treat it like a fact-finding mission, however, and not some sort of final judgment, it gets easier.
I also agree with Charlie and the rest of the people that have commented on here. Traditional grading is what we grew up with and what we were used to. Having a discussion with your teacher about your grades can be nerve wracking because you don’t know what they will say. Last year I was in regular english 10 so I was still used to traditional grading. At the end of the year when I decided to take this course I realized that I would now be doing grade abatement, I thought at the time, and I was nervous because all the other students were used to this and I wasn’t. Now doing GAP, I actually really like it. The only reason to be nervous about a face to face conference is if you don’t use your time wisely.
The trick to being less nervous, even if you haven’t used your time wisely, is to realize that I’m here to help. It should also be clear going in how you’ve scored, or at least which tier you fall into. Think of it less as a chance to argue your grade — that isn’t ever what we do in here — and more as a chance to gain clarity on any number of elements of your own learning.
I believe that the way to be the most successful in a conference is to be honest. We can discuss our successes all we want in conferences, and we should, but to an extent. Personally, if I feel like I didn’t really focus on an assignment or was just doing it to get it done, I’ll say that during my conference. We’re all still students, we’re not supposed to be perfect. Trying to convince your teacher that you’re a perfect student is pointless, because they’ll see right through it. When you talk about your lows with another person, you can work on making them highs.
I think these conferences are beneficial because they allow for constructive criticism to the student and to enhance are work and to be a better student.
Why are metaphors so prevalent in this class? The rhinoceros, guillotines, mirror, skinner’s box, fish in water just to name a few. They’re cool, but I’m just wondering if there is any particular underlying educational purpose for using them so often.
It’s in the first section of this post: Metaphors help you make sense of the world. It’s how your brain is wired. I’ll link to another exploration of the subject that’s worth a listen, if you have 55 minutes to spare.
The educational purpose is to help you make sense of what you’re learning by pitching common or universal lessons (e.g., you need to develop self-control) through unexpected metaphors (e.g., fatal flying guillotines). The use of metaphors also gives you a stylistic choice to emulate in your own work. You want to search for different ways to present ideas, even if it’s just to experiment with language. Finally, all this figurative and allusive language is designed to expose you to new ideas. Maybe you’ll be intrigued by Albrecht Dürer, so you’ll look into that sort of art. Or you’ll be intrigued by the Lewis Carroll allusion at the start of this post, which might get you to read Alice in Wonderland. Being curious is incredibly useful in life.