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 10. Each class period is separated on Google Classroom, which we’ll cover momentarily, and your instructional posts will obviously be separate; this digital space is shared, however, in the same way our physical space is shared.
This is by design. All English Language Arts courses address the same universal skills and traits, whether you study memoirs, poetry, or contemporary nonfiction. 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 to learn more about what that means for you. Find your course on this website, or follow the links posted on Google Classroom. You’ll find that the syllabus hits some of the notes you’d expect to hear, but the tune is different. Pay attention to those differences.
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.
You have already been invited to your course. If you did not receive the invitation sent on September 1, use the appropriate code below:
English 10
- P2 English 10: bdd493u
- P7 English 10: sf21ta4
English 11
- P3 English 11: btrb0t3
AP English Language & Comp.
- P5 AP English Lang: kojome
- P9 AP English Lang: mc747z7
Assignments and updates will appear in the stream. When you’re ready, that’s where you’ll also find the first writing assignment of the year, which will deal with summer reading.
Feedback works differently in a makerspace. Read about this here:
That post is essential reading, if you want to be successful in here. Again, this sort of flipped instruction also helps you develop as a reader. It scrapes off some of your summer atrophy, too.
Part 4: Clarity from Effort
As you complete your first assignments, you will experience firsthand what the typical day in here looks like. You will see what each part of the classroom does and learn more about how assessment works.
In other words, you learn by doing in here. You also learn by reading lots and lots of teacher-written posts. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, for instance, you could read this essay:
This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background and notes are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with the 40 minutes or so we have together2. 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. 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 continue to reference Wu-Tang and Grindhouse kung-fu movies.)
If nothing else, I want you to be able to answer these two questions each and every day:
- What are you working on?
- What help do you need?
If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do, and most of that work will be easier with help. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know. I’ll redirect you. During the first few weeks of school, for instance, you might need time to go over the syllabus. You might need help setting up your Google account. You might want help with your first writing assignment.
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 weeks, 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 post3 with an essay on what it means to take risks like this:
Welcome to Room 210, and to Sisyphean High. Good luck.
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. ↩
The essays haven’t been updated to reflect any changes to our bell schedule, mostly in an effort not to lose the Wu-Tang allusions. ↩
Which is longer than most future posts will be. This one needs to be as dense as possible, because this is the overview of the year. 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. ↩