Advanced Placement Ownership

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What You Own

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Your first timed essay prompt, and our first foray into the eldritch geometry of the College Board, deals with the concept of ownership. This is not an accident. You must own your learning in this course, and you have now a post of street-corner preaching that tells you that. We’ve shifted the paradigm. It’s not going to look like anything else, especially in terms of student ownership. When it does look familiar, in fact, I’ve failed you — given into half-measures, which Mike Ehrmantraut would tell us is a bad idea.

But a full-measure approach doesn’t mean a lack of transparency or agency. Far from it. To make sense of your performance on this timed essay, you must simply¹ embrace the interstitial and grade-abated structure of the course itself. Your feedback is built into the process, with additional mentoring and proxy feedback available starting on Thursday of this week. (We’ll need Wednesday for a frank discussion of that last post.)

Only… you haven’t met your end of that bargain. For the last week, I’ve been asking questions of individuals and small groups designed to test your close reading and internalization. A few students stood out; many more students failed that test. You aren’t doing the work.

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Front-Loaded and Responsive

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On January 20, four days before you wrote the timed essay itself, you were given instructions through Google Classroom. Here are those instructions in full:

On Tuesday, you will write your first timed essay. We delay this in our course (most AP courses start the test prep early) in order to focus on the substructural skills that matter beyond a high-stakes test, but we don’t ignore timed work; if anything, we emphasize the gamesmanship and performative skill involved. This assignment gets right at that emphasis.

Attached below is an AP exam guide I developed, plus a more specific guide for the third-free response question. You will be writing one of these free-response essays (abbreviated as FR3) on Tuesday. You will, in fact, be answering FR3 from the 2013 AP English Language and Composition Exam. That prompt is attached below, too, as part of a collection of all free-response questions from 2007-2014. (It has yet to be updated for 2015 and 2016. Blame the small humans crawling and sprinting around my house; I have a lot less time than I used to have.)

Finally, you will find a link to a Sisyphean High Medium post that explores the idea of gamesmanship on high-stakes exam. Reading this instructional essay will give you a much stronger sense of how to approach Tuesday’s writing — and all of the other timed writing and timed multiple-choice we’ll do over the next four months.

Your assignment here is to account for your choices this weekend. When Tuesday arrives, will you have read the guides and prepared for the FR3 essay? Will you have looked at the prompt ahead of time? Will you have studied the Medium essay like you would a lecture or textbook chapter? You can and could do any of these things. Because we are grade-abated, the focus is, as always, on:

1. How you grow over time in these skills, traits, and performances
2. How you collaborate with others to improve, learn, etc
3. How you monitor and analyze your individual choices and development

Growth, collaboration, and metacognition. Approach all of our test-driven work with that in mind — and a copy of your grade abatement profiles next to you — and you’re going to maximize your potential when it comes time to take the actual test.

One quick note: I have spent time over the last few months (when I’m not chasing down those small humans in my household) developing a more streamlined and helpful version of bishop composition, the writing process that includes the DAMAGES rubric many of you have used before. I should finish the work soon. In the meantime, you have access to old version of the rubric and writing process, including versions that link up with the College Board’s essay rubric, through the central Sisyphean High site. You’ll also find embedded copies of DAMAGES and related processes within the test guides attached here.

Now to your assignment:

Write a short, insightful essay about your preparations and approach to this first free-response prompt. Account for and analyze your choices. Consider the extent to which you studied the guides, whether or not you read the prompt, and the purpose behind every one of these decisions.

You can do write this metacognitive/reflective response whenever you like, but I might suggest waiting until Tuesday evening to start, since you will then be able to fold in your experience writing the FR3 response itself. Treat the essay you write for this Classroom assignment as you would any essay: Use Paul Graham’s logic and river metaphor alongside our systemic approach to learning to say something meaningful and truthful about your learning.

I’ll pull out the two central questions embedded in that assignment:

1. Will you have read the guides and prepared for the FR3 essay?
2. Will you have studied the Medium essay like you would a lecture or textbook chapter?

The answers that many of you would be forced to give are:

1. Not really
2. Not really

But as the last post argues vociferously, these front-loaded instructions and lessons are more important than the writing itself. This is where your learning happens. This is where all feedback starts. Without a deep dive into those guides and lectures, you can’t hope to sit with me and unpack your performance on the timed essay. You simply won’t have the context or language to do that. You will instead fit the quotation at the start of this instructional essay, Dunning-Kruger effect in full force:

I tend to subscribe to a different theory on [Jason] Whitlock. What people see as his self-serving imposture is in fact little more than political and historical illiteracy, mingling with a hack columnist’s instinct for provocation… [H]e’s a low-information guy, infinitely suggestible, learning on the fly, joining in on a conversation in a language he has no interest in learning… Given his lack of intellectual curiosity, the astonishing thing with Whitlock is that he’s ever right at all.

It is possible that you, at this moment, are pedagogically illiterate, because you have not invested the necessary time in this course. You might, at this moment, be a “low-information guy,” using an outdated language to try to talk to me. What you control, however, at this moment, is whether or not that changes — whether or not you conquer any “lack of intellectual curiosity.”

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The Timed Essay as Example

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In order to work closely with me (or any proxy) on this timed response, you must start with this:

View at Medium.com

Bring a consistent, careful, annotated interaction to that essay. Then read both of these guides with the same consistent, careful, annotated interaction:

• AP Exam: FR/MC Guide: Overview
• AP Exam: FR Guide: Q3

I hope that this step is review for some of you. That’s a good thing, and you want that kind of engineering redundancy in your studies — a backup of things, essentially. For many of you, however, this is obviously the first time you’ve truly engaged with that instructional material. Make it count.

When you’re ready, you can finally take a look at your timed essay… and set it aside almost immediately in favor of this:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2Fap13_scor_q3.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

That PDF is lifted directly from the College Board’s page of free-response material. That page has every resource you need to be ready to work directly with me. You can look over the 2013 exam, read what students had to say about Question 3, and then look at the scoring rubric and exemplars. It’s only after you’ve prepared with all of this that you’re able to benefit from my feedback.

Which brings us to your assignment:

Dedicate your class periods to this timed essay, and make sure that you are ready as soon as possible to work with me in small groups or individually on your timed response. You may ask questions about the guides, the exemplars, the lectures, etc, and I will help you. When you do seek feedback about your own essay, however, you must have a relative mastery of all this preparatory content. Do not seek feedback on your essay until you’re ready for it.

A few other notes:

• When you’ve internalized enough of this prep material, you and I will be able to determine out what your essay would have gotten from an AP reader. Figuring that out on your own is much more effective than having me tell you.
• That said, I will tell you what you’d have gotten. The same investment requirements apply, of course.
• You won’t have physical copies of the College Board’s student essays, because we have to try to save the forests at some point. You should already have a copy of the scoring rubric (the correct one, not the one I erroneously printed in your timed writing packet).

Ask questions below.

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1. An adverb that takes on very different connotations in this course, I know. ↩