Aged Paper

The last day of classes is Monday, June 12. You have five days left.

Your productivity and focus for the next week will factor significantly in your Q4C profile score, which should be finalized on or before Friday, June 16. As you’ll read below, there is an optional assignment due on June 15 that may take longer to process, depending on how many of you complete it.

Look over each of these sections as soon as possible — at the start of class on Tuesday, June 6, at the absolute latest. Then recognize that this is the worst time to give in to apathy and atrophy.

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ELA Regents Exam

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Continue to do Regents Exam prep as necessary. All formal deadlines for the work have passed; at this point, you should prepare based on your individual needs. Refer back to this instructional post:

The Harrow: ELA Regents Prep

That has all the resources you need. You can also lean on me to get further practice, feedback, and advice.

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RE/AP11 Final Exam

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The reader-response prompt shared with you on May 25 is another option for you over these final five days. Obviously, if you were assigned this as a final exam requirement, you have no choice; you must finish your response by the deadline. It is a good prompt for everyone to consider, however, and certainly a fallback for anyone uncertain of how to spend their time.

If you are interested in dedicating some of your time to this work, talk to me in the comments here or in class. The prompt leans heavily on autodidacticism, but not to the exclusion of direct feedback. Here it is in full:

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Pareto Project

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The other default work for the final five days is your Pareto Project. Any and all work done on this project factors into your final GAP score, and you will have an optional assignment next week that allows you to get credit for anything you produce. This will be posted later.

The point of these projects, however, was always

1. to give you time and space to do something meaningful; and
2. to honor that time and space by emphasizing process over product.

The work can’t just be submitted to me as part of a GAP report. It also shouldn’t stop when the course does — unless you want it to stop, of course. If you want to present or publish something you’ve done, on the other hand, or if you want to share a part of your project with your classmates through a lesson or activity, this is the time to do it. To give you an example:

That’s an example of blackout poetry, the focus of one of your Pareto Projects. Use Google to look at other examples (this is one from the Google image results for “blackout poetry” that keeps the text intact, which is atypical). The student and I talked months ago about the possibility of an in-class lesson on creating this sort of poetry, which could be a lot of fun. You could bring in newspapers, magazines, books, etc, and see what can be gleaned from them — here is a Scholastic lesson, but I might go with this step-by-step guide instead. Then it’s all in how you isolate and emphasize the words on the page. I could set that up for Thursday or Friday using the student’s suggestions, give everyone a day to bring in materials, and then run the lesson beside her. That’s a great use of one of our last days of class.

Let me know as soon as possible what you’d like to do, if it requires my help. If in doubt, ask yourself a question: What would you do with this project if there wasn’t a single grade, GAP score, or classroom connected to it?

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Summer Reading

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You also have the option over the next five days to begin your summer reading work. Copies of the school-wide assignment are in Room 210. You’ll find them next to the hall passes and exam folders by our door. If you are taking AP Literature & Composition or DCC, you have an additional assignment. Those are labeled. All of this material will be digitized and shared by the school at some point, too.

I encourage you to use Amazon, Wikipedia, and Goodreads to learn more about these books. The teachers you will have next year aren’t going to care if you memorize the plot or pass a reading quiz; they’re going to ask you to have invested in the text. You’ll be writing about and discussing what you read. The best thing you can do, therefore, is pick a book you might actually want to spend time with.

You also know by now that if you put this off until the last second, you’re probably going to dislike whatever you read. That’s if you read it at all, which is unlikely. So you won’t have much of an experience, at least not compared to what might happen if you take your time now to look into each choice. Do this the right way, and you will almost certainly find something you want to read.

In the meantime, I’m curious about what you’ll do with the following excerpts about reading. They are distinct in tone and perspective. The first is from one of Franz Kafka’s letters:

Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? … We’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.

The second is from The Autobiography of Malcolm X:

I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man…

I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read, and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity — because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about. I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college.

You could do a lot worse than reading Kafka and Malcolm X this summer, by the way, and that would be quite the interesting pair to bring to the beach. As a point of comparison, revisit this video about why we read literature:

Ask about the BHS or course-specific books in the comments below, and I’ll offer whatever feedback I can. If you want to talk to each other about the possibilities, use the classroom space — or maybe clear the cobwebs from your Google+ Community for these final five days.

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Makerspace Shenanigans

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That’s a lot to choose from for five days, so you really don’t need another choice… but this option takes us back to the first thing you ostensibly read, when the syllabus was given to you back on September 6. You should be using the space at this point to ask questions and solve problems. That was the point of most of the recent posts, especially the ones on the end of the year. Of course, most of you able to choose this option already have, which makes the following text — edited lightly from that first-day syllabus — just a bit of validation.

We are a makerspace. It’s a term rarely used in an English classroom, and you’ll understand why when you revisit this clip:

That scene from Apollo 13 presents the traditional makerspace experience: A group of like-minded and similarly trained folks are given tools and components, confronted with a problem, and then asked to collaborate to solve that problem.

These engineers pour out a box of components onto the table, and then they experiment in order to do something important and innovative. In most makerspaces, the components that are poured out (metaphorically speaking) are physical — even if they are as tiny as DNA:

Trying to hack DNA to create cow-less milk requires the same general kind of makerspace thinking that it takes to save a bunch of stranded astronauts. Both examples involve science, and that’s the usual focus of a makerspace: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. When Art is included, they call this STEAM education.

To adapt this for English, we ask two questions:

1. What important and meaningful problems are we solving in an English classroom?
2. What components do we pour out onto a table to help us solve those problems?

Well, the problems we face are the universal ones: What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to live in a society? What are our beliefs? How do we want to live our lives? We face the problem of metabolizing anxiety and processing grief, of love and hate, of carving meaning out of the rock in front of us.

Like any makerspace, we must experiment to try to solve those problems. We have to think outside the box. Sometimes we have to destroy the box and build a better one. In an ELA makerspace, however, the tools of experimentation aren’t robotics, circuits, or 3D printers, but a set of universal skills and traits, which we fold into a course in the Humanities.

If that makes sense to you, good. You know what to do, and you know how to fill these five days. As always, I’m here to help.