Part 2 of a two-part series that probably isn’t going to be renewed for another season. Too much stunt casting, the critics say.
AP Post-Exam Work
Now that you’ve had a weekend to decompress from the hadal pressure of AP exams, you might want to head over to Google Classroom and complete the reflective/metacognitive document prepared for you. When you open the assignment, you’ll get a file with your name automatically added. You’ll see boxes that will expand as you write in them, and you’ll intuit from the first part of this sentence that you should write enough to cause them to expand.
Your prompt: Write about each of those elements of the exam. In your writing, say something insightful and meaningful and worth the effort of pulling it out of your mind and making it permanent.
Now, in the first paragraph there, I’ve said that you might want to head over there to reflect/metacogitate1 on the exam, because this assignment isn’t “required.” And that word is in quotation marks to draw your attention back to the language of the upper-tier profiles. This post-exam work is the “more than just what is required” in the GAP 8. Failing to write something meaningful here doesn’t necessarily keep you from that GAP 8 or 9, and there may be a reason that you can’t fit this kind of writing into your week. See what you can do, though.
Regents and Final Exam Work
As discussed in the last post, the final exam will be given only to students in danger of failing the course. If you are one of those students, you will know by the end of this week, and you will be given the final exam prompt on Monday, May 22.
As for the Regents Exam: The exhaustive context and directions remain where they have been, and you should know exactly what goes in your manilla folder. We will return to these folders in June, when we’ll need to review and arrange your mental architecture for the exam itself. While it might not be the entrance exam at Oxford, the Regents needs to be taken seriously, especially by AP students.
Even before your folders are submitted for review, I’ll talk to you about serious areas of weakness. I’ll also probably ask you to do the poetry prep that the RE11 students are doing. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on this, which is the subheading for this part of the Regents Exam:
HOW TO STRIP POETRY OF ALL ITS BEAUTY
Well, not all its beauty. We’re not quite at what David Foster Wallace called “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty,” although that may be simply because the Regents isn’t precise enough a tool.
Regardless, the data always suggest that you struggle with multiple-choice questions on poetry. Perhaps that’s because you shouldn’t analyze poetry unless you plan to emulate it — to become a poet yourself, that is. I’ve tried to parse the logic that gets us anywhere else:
But we will practice, in all likelihood. There will be a packet of poetry and multiple-choice questions at some point, and you’ll have time to answer those questions and talk about the poetry, and then I’ll post a Google Form to give you the right answers and generate group data, just like we’ve done before.
Other Work
We’ll continue our Pareto Project work on Fridays in the iLC. I’ll use the data from this form, which has been formally posted to Google Classroom and embedded in an earlier post, to determine what happens next, and that will dictate some of our time together before the end of the year.
Otherwise, what we’ll do is true makerspace work: work that is generated in the moment through questioning and observation and curiosity. I’ll push you to write certain essays and read certain texts. It will be very much about exploration, creation, and the learning that goes with it. So the work won’t have a post here online, nor a Google Classroom assignment. It will be work that is folded into the grade abatement process and made authentic by the understandings we’ve developed over the year.
In other words, when we aren’t grappling with tests and their interior logic, we’ll be seeing what sort of happiness we can carve out of the rock in front of us. You are expected not just to understand all that metaphorical talk, but to know how to put it into practice. That is the real test at the end of the year: Do you know what we’re really trying to do in this course? Can you do it?
A verb that will never not seem ridiculous. ↩