Cover art to DJ Signify’s Sleep No More. The track featuring Sage Francis is at the bottom of this post.
Pareto Recap
Your Pareto Project should now be underway. If you haven’t already, post your 120-character idea to the central Google Form. Edit your entry, too, if it needs clarity or revision. Then check out the master list of ideas on the last page of the guide, which is embedded again below. If you get to the end of the week without incident, your project and blueprint are good to go. Otherwise, we’ll work out an interrupted schedule together to strengthen the project and clarify the blueprint.
Watch this space for an update over the winter break. I will give you instructions about what to expect on January 3, when you will complete a writing response related to your Pareto progress.
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FParetoProjectGuidev1.6.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]
Really, Though: Mind the GAP
The new year is an opportunity to regroup and refocus. You’ve been given explicit instructions about ongoing work and upcoming work — here is the post for 11R; here it is for AP — and we just spent a significant amount of time setting up Round 1 of your Pareto Projects. As we enter 2017, you might also note that you are now in the calendar year when you will apply to college. If you haven’t been serious before, now is the time.
Our interstitial classroom will take care of your access to each other, to me, and to the materials of the course. We will centralize bishop composition after the break, using it to drive everything else we do, including exam-specific writing and reading work. Grade abatement will take care of how you are assessed.
On that last note:
- Consider the assignments issued to you through Google Classroom. Take an inventory of missing work, incomplete work, lates, etc. Remember that approved lates or incompletes are fine; everything else is not.
- Consider your use of class time. Take an inventory of how often you believe you have been on- or off-task. Then take a true inventory of your focus. How often am I likely to have noted that you are off-task?
- Consider your metacognitive and reflective work. Take an inventory of how much writing you’ve done and how many conversations you’ve had with me about your learning, your growth, your writing, etc.
- Consider your atelier or workshop efforts. That refers to the extent to which you’ve studied with me to become an expert and the extent to which you’ve taught others. Take an inventory of how demonstrably invested you’ve been in the academic and grade-abated success of your peers.
For some of you, that is going to be a sobering picture. You have lost focus, missed work, and neglected your responsibilities. That’s human nature, so you don’t need to self-flagellate… but you do need to get better at this. Load the expanded profiles alongside your notes on GAP logic:
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FGradeAbatementProfilesFourTiersv2.2.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]
More than a few of you need to approach 2017 as if you were clinging desperately to the edge of a Tier 3 profile, with the abyss of Tier 2 gazing up at you. Because you are. You are hanging on by your fingernails.
A Series of Tubes
The last post introduced the fourth step of the Pareto Project, and you’ve had nearly a week to flex your autodidactic muscles. You should have made some progress in answering these prompts from Step #4:
- Set up a Twitter account and profile.
- Set up a Medium account and profile.
We’ll now use Wednesday and Thursday to discuss Twitter, Medium, and your digital persona. That’s the first lesson: You need to curate a digital presence. When folks go looking for you in the future, they’ll use Google, and this is the start of your control over what they find. Colleges will want to see a student who maintained a Medium account, who wrote regularly and insightfully about different subjects, and they’ll want to see a student who engages online in a smart, responsible way. Finding nothing might be as bad as finding evidence of bad decisions.
That doesn’t mean that you manufacture a different version of yourself. You need to be authentic, but not unfiltered. For most of you, that means creating a professional Twitter account that you use to promote Medium essays you write, Instagram projects you create, podcasts you record, etc. You can carefully choose who you follow, what you post, and what your virtual space looks like.
Think of this like a digital résumé. The world you are entering won’t care about the grade you got on a test; it will care about your digital imprint and the impression that creates of you. Keep any personal social media private, and treat these new accounts as extensions of the work you do in our course. Build a better version of yourself.
Let’s talk, though, about what these social media accounts will do for us. Head back to that last post, look at what has been given to you as examples, and start a discussion with me and your peers. What are your concerns? What are your questions?
Meanwhile, a preview of the kind of poetry we’ll look at in January:
Regarding the poetry we are going to be looking at in the future, it is quite odd. It kind of reminded me of spoken word poetry with a beat. I wonder what the purpose of the music/beat in the background is