This is what the homepage looked like at the end of the 2019-2020 school year.
Distance Learning & English 12 Final Projects
Office Hours: 10:00AM – 11:00AM
Email: meure@brewsterschools.org
Important communications will be sent as emails and posted as Google Classroom announcements. Posts on this site provide context, instruction, and general feedback. Please contact me directly with any questions.
As of April 27, seniors will be working on their final projects of the year. The updates to distance learning before April 27 are archived on this page.
English 12 Final Projects
Final Project: Documents & Posts | Note: This is the post that links to the rest.
English 12 Calendar: April 27 – June 15
Final Project: Week Five & Week Six
Distance Learning Archives
Distance Learning: Week 1
• March 27 Update
Distance Learning: Week 2
• April 1 Update
• April 2 Update
Distance Learning: Week 3
• April 9 Update
• April 10 Update
The first post (Distance Learning: Week 1) covers how to contact me, what resources we will be using, and what students will do each day. One of the resources is a letter that explains project-based learning and its incorporation into distance learning:
English 12: Distance Learning Update (March 25, 2020)
• URL: tinyurl.com/makerspace-update-0325
If you have any trouble loading the Google Docs version of that letter, try the PDF version. Be sure to read the letter and its embedded resources carefully.
The material that follows is left as-is from before March 12. You’ll find answers to most questions about the makerspace below.
Makerspace Artifacts: 2019-2020
For All Stakeholders: A Quick Guide to Stakeholder Involvement
Google Site: Proof of Process: Testimonials, Tours, and Student Work
Units of Study
Updates and Overviews: 2019-2020 Specific Posts
① The Age of the Essay | Study of how and why we write. Includes close reading of a central text, guided analysis, and a universal writing process.
② What Is Literature For? | Study of how and why we read. Includes close reading of different texts (video, nonfiction), guided analysis, and discussion. Includes summer reading work.
③ The Practice of Empathy | Study of empathy as a skill. Includes close reading of nonfiction and the start of a novel, The Things They Carried.
④ Organization: Getting Things Done | Mini-unit for the start of Q2. Includes an in-class close reading of these excerpts from this article on distraction.
⑤ When the Truth Isn’t Sufficient | Study of truth, memory, and narrative. Lessons cover essential questions, reader-response writing, and poetry. Includes the English 12 assured experience, The Things They Carried.
⑥ Second-Semester Senior Projects | Student-directed projects designed to use the full potential of a makerspace and prepare students explicitly for the next stage of their lives. Covers the entire second semester. Includes the required final Senior Talk and the final exam.
Quick Links: Senior Projects
- Overview
- ✰ Self-Prescribed Book Project
- ✰ Research-Driven Essay
- ✰ Commencement Address
- ✰ Pareto Projects and Senior Talks
- Final Obligations
- Final Assessments
- Statements of Purpose
Essentials Pack: Assessment (2019-2020)
- Clarifying Grade Abatement
- Grade Abatement Profiles
- Universal Skills and Traits
- Step-By-Step Guide to Assessment
- GAP Worksheet: Template
- Feedback and Focus
- GAP Triage: Overview
- WIP GAP Scores Explained
- 2019-2020 Calendar of Assessment
- 2019-2020 Student GAP Reports
Essentials Pack: Writing
The Writing Process (Post)
The Writing Process (Doc)
The End of the Writing Process
The Writing Process: Reader’s Response
The Writing Process: College Essay
The Age of the Essay
Textual Analysis Guide
Simplified Analysis Worksheet
Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work
Turnitin.com Instructions
Artifact Feedback Worksheet
The challenge is to set up systems that allow students to follow their interests. People tend to dichotomize approaches in education: The teacher is either telling students what to do, or standing back and letting them figure it out. I think that’s a false choice: The issue is not structure versus no structure, but rather creating a different structure. Students need to be exposed to new ideas and learn how to persist. They also need support.
~Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
Click to see the full image, courtesy of Cognitive Media, RSA Animate, and Ken Robinson.
An aesthetic experience is one in which your senses are operating at their peak, when you are present in the current moment, when you are resonating with the excitement of this thing that you’re experiencing, when you are fully alive. An anesthetic is when you shut your senses off and deaden yourself to what’s happening…
We are getting our children through education by anesthetizing them. And I think we should be doing the exact opposite. We shouldn’t be putting them to sleep. We should be waking them up to what they have inside of themselves.
~Ken Robinson, “Changing Education Paradigms”