From the Montserrat College of Art.
RE/AP Plans, Feb. 12-14
On Tuesday, and then again on Wednesday, you will spend the 42-minute class period writing. The subject of Tuesday’s prompt is your reading process, particularly with regard to 1984; Wednesday’s subject is your writing process, particularly with regard to the classification and division essay inspired by Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie.”
You will write by hand to start. That helps you practice the physical act of writing, which matters in a year when all of you take at least one timed, high-stakes English assessment. Writing by hand is also a way to engage the kinesthetic part of learning more directly. It’s as we discussed earlier in the year: Sometimes we need to focus on the physical and tangible. We spend enough time in front of screens in our lives.
When you arrive on Tuesday and Wednesday, plan to store all of your devices and electronics. As necessary, you can put them in that anti-distraction corner that was built for this purpose. The act of storing your phone and computer for two days will help you into a different mindset, and that’s what we want: the kind of interesting, authentic writing that needs silence and space to develop.
You will be strongly encouraged to take these responses with you over the long weekend for more reflection, metacognition, and revision. At that point, you should return to instructional posts that set the context for the work. For instance, this is how you were introduced to reading novels:
Look over that instructional post again, and begin thinking about how you approached 1984. Do the same thing for the instructional posts that contextualized the writing process for your classification and division work.
Use the comment section here to ask questions, share ideas with me, etc., and keep an eye on your assiduousness this weekend. Six days off is just enough time for your brain to atrophy.
Two more admin notes:
- You will need to sign in your copy of 1984 during the week of February 211.
- It will be ten days until we are able to resume the required conferences that started on January 22. Let’s use those ten days to conference interstitially — over email — where possible2.
If you’ve lost it, that’s actually an interesting approach to your writing: What’s the story behind the novel going missing? ↩
Remember that these conferences have always been available to you as part of a better form of feedback. They are required now to make sure you’ve talked to me individually about your progress. You’re not limited to one conference, and you’re not required to do it in person. It’s about the feedback loop. ↩
As this year has progressed, I think we all have gained some very valuable skills. The analysis that we have been doing is super helpful. I would never think about writing about how I wrote. This analysis allows us to really understand how we are doing. We can’t hide from our work and think that we’ll do it better next time. Having time to break down what we’ve learned is truly valuable and something that is very important. Continuing to do this work will only help us so we can do our best on the AP. Many times, I would find myself writing and never looking at it again. I wouldn’t know how I did, I wouldn’t know what to work on, what to fix.
Now I do. Although the extra writing may be tough, it will help in the long run.