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The Aft Agley Gang

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Read the following updates carefully. The title of the post comes from this poem.

On the Quixotic Attempt to Go Paperless

In various corners of the classroom, under the windowsills, on desks and stacked precariously on bookshelves, you will find photocopies of materials for this course. The windows, for instance, frame the most recent posts and texts — the AP reading on horror movies; the instructional post on empathy, which is next to Chad Fowler’s essay; the post on “Habits and Habitats”; the always relevant post on guillotines, self-control, and the intersection thereof; and so on.

Way back in September, in what now seems like the fever dream of another life, I told you that we would be trying to go paperless. We are still trying. I’d like to ramp up that effort, too, in light of these data:

  • The Fatal Flying Guillotine — 51
  • Habits and Habitats — 53
  • The Most Important Skill — 92 (!)

Those are three of the photocopied posts, with the total number of photocopies left as of Monday, 10/30. They’ve all been there at least a week; the guillotine post has been there since October 8.

Unless a majority of you can explain those numbers, I will no longer print copies of instructional posts. Any central texts, yes, but no posts. It’s a waste of resources.

[Onomatopoeia] Quizzes

Note for AP students who have been hardwired in a particularly unfortunate way, and who, despite spending all of Friday discussing cheating, will react to the word “quiz” in an unhealthy way: Read carefully. There’s a reason you’re getting this online before it’s distributed, and it has everything to do with how you hold yourself accountable. You might be able to cheat your own integrity and honesty here to generate evidence of internalization, but that sort of poison seeps into your bones. I don’t think you should do that.

Below is a an [Onomatopoeia] Quiz. It asks you to write down everything you learned from reading the instructional post and the central text by Fowler. Photocopies will be distributed in class on Wednesday, November 1, for AP11 students. They were distributed on Thursday, October 26, for RE11 students. Read this first:

View at Medium.com

Moving forward, that is required reading. It explains more about how and why we would use this sort of “quiz” to help us learn.

This particular “quiz” takes the form of a reformatted copy of the post and central text for our study of empathy. You’ll find some (but not all) of the original subheadings and images from those readings, plus enough blank space for you to write. Your prompt for this “quiz” (which I’ll stop putting in quotation marks now) is to fill in that space with what you know about these lessons, texts, etc.

Regardless of your course designation, this is a required diagnostic. Load a copy of the two documents here:

You have been trained all your life to look at quizzes as a risk/reward system. They are Skinner-box switches you press, hoping for a reward. If you know the material, you get a prize in the form of a high score; if you don’t know the material, you are punished with a low score.

In this course, the question is different: What does your performance tell us?

The answer to that leads to metacognition, collaboration, and all the other stuff of growth. Perhaps your performance reveals an eidetic memory. That’s a rare skill, and we need to weaponize it. On the other hand, your performance might indicate a weak memory, some performance anxiety, or the struggle to read critically and closely. As frustrating as those results can be, they also provide the best starting place for growth.

The reason is simple: As long as you’re putting in the time and effort necessary, you are exactly where you want to be. This [Onomatopoeia] Quiz is, in that case, just a diagnostic. It tells us which of our universal skills and traits need attention. It gives us a blueprint for the feedback loop you need to improve (and for a fourth-tier GAP score).

What is not acceptable is a lack of self-control. This could be posted once a week, and it would always be relevant:

The Fatal Flying Guillotine

You must learn self-control. You can recognize, as that post argues, that self-control is difficult to master, but you must put all your effort into developing it. It springs from self-awareness, assiduousness, integrity, collaboration, organization, and a few more of our skills and traits; as a result, you develop self-control by doing your job in this course.

Let this [Onomatopoeia] Quiz reveal your level of self-control, in addition to what it might reveal about your understanding of the posts, especially your ability to internalize key concepts. You can talk to me about this in the comments here.

More on Self-Control

This is a review of how to take control of your learning in our makerspace.

Start with the idea, first given to you in the syllabus1, that the problems we are solving are often unique to you. The components we are using have universal names and definitions, but they take on a unique appearance in your individual learning.

One of the makerspace problems given to you to hack is the lifelong problem of self-control:

The Fatal Flying Guillotine

Yes. that’s embedded twice in one post. It matters that much, in part because this process continues well past the end of our formal in-class discussion and writing. Every assignment, lesson, text, class period, etc., for the rest of the year provide opportunities for you to work on your self-control.

You could compare this to an attempt to build a robot arm in a robotics makerspace.You’d start with instruction in the basic skills, from electrical wiring to coding. Once you had the basics, the focus would shift to your vision and needs, your work ethic, and a lot of testing and restarting and refining. You’d expect setbacks. You’d measure progress.

A compelling example of how this works is the assignment that was due October 30 around 7AM2:

When you load this assignment, you also load the work you completed. A document was created for you, and your instructions were to divide your writing between the explicit exercises and a separate box for metacognitive analysis. At this point, Google has recorded all of your submissions, resubmissions, edits, and so on.

If you did everything by 7AM, you demonstrated self-control over the weekend. You avoided procrastination, hacked your brain’s tendency to get distracted, made a plan and followed through, and so on. That self-control lets us focus on metacognition, which is the key to your learning (and, not to put too fine a point on it, your performance in this course).

That’s the point of covering this all here, with an eye toward referencing it in the future: Metacognitive writing is what makes learning permanent. You need enough self-control to get you through the first level of the assignment — the one on Google Classroom, usually — because that’s the only way to generate something to be metacognitive about. In this case, I built metacognition into the assignment, instead of asking you to add it after the fact.

You can use any and all choices you’ve made lately, from the amount of focus you had on Friday in class to the way you spent your weekend, to fuel good metacognition. And if you are struggling with the self-control necessary to get your work done, let’s put the space to work on that as soon as possible. It’s not a habit you can afford to keep.

  1. Load the main page of this website for a copy of the syllabus, or look to the “About” section of Google Classroom. ↩

  2. This empathy work is, by itself, another example of iterative and innovative work done in this makerspace style, but we can come back to that later. ↩

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Character and Catcher in Context

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

The Aft Agley Gang Rides Again

If you search this site for the word “agley,” you get more than a few posts on the unpredictability of our schedule. Most of those posts make some allusion to Robert Burns’ poem, which gives us the phrase “gang aft agley” and a chance for a very weird pun.

This week was another microcosm of unpredictability. A snowstorm kept us out on Wednesday, which was naturally the first day of spring; we lost three hours on Thursday to a weather-related delay; many of you were, therefore, forced to spend all day on Thursday preparing for the spring musical; and some of you spent the period on Friday taking the the twice-rescheduled DCC Accuplacer exam.

Even the predictable elements of that lineup are chaotic. That’s why we use the term interstitial here: When the learning is accessible anytime and anywhere, we can ride out the chaos. All it takes is a focus on preparing in advance and watching each other’s backs. Hence the Aft Agley Gang.

Regulators, Mount Up

We will meet four times next week (barring another misplaced winter storm), have five days for a makeshift spring break, and then return for more than seven consecutive weeks of classes. It is a good time to self-assess.

We’ll start on Monday with a period of extemporaneous writing about writing and continue on Tuesday with a period of extemporaneous writing about reading. This worked well when we did it in mid-February, and it works especially well to tie together the writing and reading processes that were disrupted last this week.

The prompts for Monday and Tuesday are below. The first will be posted to Google Classroom at the start of the period on March 26. You will have the next 42 minutes to answer the prompt and submit your response. On Tuesday, March 27, you will answer the provided prompt by hand, with your phones and computers stored until the bell rings at the end of the period.

If you’re doing your job, you should be reading this well in advance of the work itself. That’s why we’re using the term extemporaneous, which has a number of possible meanings in context. You can prepare as much or as little as you like, because the focus will be on the skill of extemporaneous metacognition.

Monday’s Prompt: Character Essay

Here is how we planned out the writing process for your essay on character, starting with a bit of direct instruction on Monday, March 19:

You had the rest of the week, starting on Tuesday, to work with me and each other. The focus, whether you were applying to NHS or not, was on finding an unexpected or surprising approach.

You’ll be asked to submit copies of any and all digital evidence related to your character essay work. This includes final drafts, outlines, and collaborative notes. This evidence will be checked in separately from what you do during class on Monday.

For that in-class writing, you will spend about 40 minutes of a class period writing about the writing. How did you use the notes taken on the whiteboard? How did you use feedback from your peers and teacher? What did you discover in brainstorming, and how did that fit your various intrinsic and extrinsic goals? Most importantly, what did you learn about how you write from this week’s process?

This response must be submitted before you leave and folded into the GAP scoring process that culminates on Thursday, March 29.

Tuesday’s Prompt: The Catcher in the Rye

You started this novel on February 25 with an atypical look at online annotations. Since then, you could have signed out a hard copy of the novel. You’ve also been invited repeatedly to return to the story when you have time, sometimes as an in-class alternative to your formal assignments. It’s now been a month.

On Tuesday, you will spend about 40 minutes of our class period writing about your reading. You should start with what’s going on in the book. How far have you gotten? What’s happening? What do you know? Then you should write your reactions to the novel, including your perspective on the narrator. Finally, you should write about the most important aspect of this process: What have you learned about how you read over the last month?

This response will be written by hand — no computers, phones, etc. — and collected before you leave class on Tuesday. If you are absent, you will have the usual 24 hours to make up the work. It will then be folded into the GAP scoring process that culminates on Thursday, March 29.

Video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor.

For some of you, these two days of silent, introspective writing are opportunities to focus on what you’ve learned about your learning over the last month. This will put you in the right frame of mind to self-assess as the GAP panel ends, too.

For others, it is your last, best chance to drag your body of evidence out of the lowest tier of profiles and earn a passing score for the quarter. This is it. Look at the threshold for failure:

That untiered set of profiles hangs on our wall. The key language in that 2: “a deliberate and systemic disengagement from the learning process.” It’s repeated a sentence later: “There is no investment in the learning environment.”

If you invest for this entire week of focused self-assessment, writing as much as you can as honestly as you can each day, then you will genuinely fit a higher profile. It’s an incredibly forgiving system.

But if you continue to be weak in virtually all facets of the course? If you continue not to meet even the most basic requirements? You will fail, just as you would in any classroom.

As always, this is about self-control and choice. (And flying guillotines.)

GAP Scoring and Miscellanea

These instructional posts are used to set up our in-class work, so I want to explain a change to the GAP protocol for next week. On Thursday, March 29, you’ll be asked to complete the usual Google Form to self-assess your performance since March 12. In addition, you’ll be asked to submit a link to a Google Drive folder that contains organized evidence.

Here’s what that will look like in Google Classroom:

When clicked, that will open up a folder of evidence that is clearly labeled, like this:

This may require you to make copies of evidence, depending on your existing organizational strategy. It may require you to move a few things around. It should be easy enough, however, to organize your work under one hyperlink. We’ll talk more about the process on Wednesday.

A few more notes:

  • AP students will need to complete both the multiple-choice assignment and the required analysis outside of class, since Monday will be dedicated to something else.
  • Updates to the course calendars will be online as soon as possible, but probably not until spring break.
  • Previous GAP scores will be posted tonight or tomorrow morning. Because of the extensive feedback and data released last week, there will be no further discussion or revisiting these scores.

If you have questions about anything in this post, ask below.

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Calendar Updates: RE/AP

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

The Return of the Aft Agley Gang

You might remember our syllabus and its quixotic desire to go paperless:

We need to be able to edit documents in real time and to collaborate in a more 21st-century way. You need access to the hyperlinks and connections that make up the bulk of contemporary writing and reading.

Which isn’t to say that you can’t have printed copies of this stuff. Think of it as responsive printing: If you need a copy of something, then you’ll get it. It’s up to you to determine that need, though, and usually to take care of it. We have our own printer, but it is connected only to the desktops in Room 210; if you want to print, you’ll have to be deliberate about it.

We will also print some essays as we workshop them, depending on need. Not everything can be done on a computer, but we are going to attempt to minimize our paper use.

As I write this, I’m staring at stacks of paper on every bookshelf and tabletop, so “minimize” didn’t happen. It’s hard to let go of the desire for printed copies of everything we do, and there is still a need, in many cases, to maintain that kinesthetic connection.

There was one reason above all others to go paperless: to be flexible. Photocopies, especially laminated ones, are a commitment to a particular state of things. Edits require us to reprint 100+ copies of a handout or text, and that’s not always possible.

Case in point: The calendar needs to be revamped.

If the Google Docs versions don’t load correctly, use the PDF. Obviously, only the Google version will be updated.

I’ll also replace the links on the main site and Google Classroom over the next few days. Make sure you’re using the updated version of the calendar. I’ll make copies next week. I’m also going to leave the earlier calendars laminated on our bulletin board as a testament to the folly of man.

Most of the changes are small. The only major change is to the GAP scoring process for the next month:

  • There will be no Q3A score.
  • Your Q3B score will reflect the entire time frame between January 22 and March 9.
  • Your Q3 average will come from that score and your Q3C score.

Infinite Campus already reflects this change. It works out in your favor, since it will give you more time to show growth, develop your skills, and conference with me, if you haven’t already done so. Use the new calendar to plan for that.

One reason for this change is our ongoing (and possibly quixotic) attempt to develop more self-control and self-awareness. In the last post, I explained the latest version of the Rubicon protocol. To reiterate:

  • You can accumulate a “point” more than once per period.
  • If you stay focused and productive, you won’t accumulate any.
  • If you don’t stay focused and productive, you’ll keep accumulating points.

The number you see in Infinite Campus won’t always be up-to-date, and you aren’t going to get a memo telling you what you did. This is basic stuff. Stay focused, follow directions, and do your job.

Rubicon scores factor into your grade abatement profiles, but there’s a caveat there. You aren’t going to fail because you see that Rubicon number tick up. It’s one data point among many. A low number there probably doesn’t exclude you from the fourth tier of profiles. A high number doesn’t necessarily drop you to the second tier. We’ll look at everything when fitting you into a profile.

The most important thing for you to keep in mind is that this is a learning tool. It’s designed to focus you. If it doesn’t do that, we can have a conversation about what’s happening. So far, you all seem to understand the purpose of it, and you’re buying into its efficacy:

Optical Delusions

That should link you straight to the comment section of the last post. Enter that discussion, if you have some insight into how best to motivate you and your peers from period to period.

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Antediluvian Discussion

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

The word of the day is antediluvian.

Interstitial Discussion: Another Update

Let’s talk, once again, about how we talk to and work with each other. First, comments.

Comments are grouped, archived, and emailed to me by this website. They appear by post and comment thread. Below is a screenshot of the inbox dedicated to this process. It was taken Monday, November 27, around 6AM. I cleared the previous batch before going to sleep at 9PM on November 261.

Comments are also recorded on the website. The dedicated page for this, which was created on October 1, sorts them by time. Below is a screenshot of some of the comments left on November 26 (or in the midnight hours of November 27). If the inbox I maintain helps sort GAP evidence, this website page helps you sort opportunities to collaborate and to discuss.

The most recent post on how and why this interstitial approach works is here: In the Spaces in Between. It was published on November 20. Previously, you had posts that directly instructed you on using these resources, including The Ironic Use of TL;DR and The Aft Agley Gang, which were both published on October 30; Habits and Habitats, from October 20; Scripta Manent, from September 28; a post answering the question, “What Do I Do Next?” on September 22; and these two posts that opened the year. There are many more.

You’ve been told to use these interstitial resources. You’ve been shown why it matters. The work was never optional2. We absolutely need to figure out why it’s not being done.

Riders in the Storm

Comments are just one part of the interstitial classroom. They extend in-class discussion and allow you to think in writing, which gives you another angle on the instruction, feedback, and formal assignments that comprise the rest of the interstitial work we do.

The calendar offers an example of why this matters. Between the Thanksgiving holiday, last Wednesday’s assembly, several lockout and fire drills, teacher meetings, and the occasional illness, we haven’t had much time together in class. That inconsistency will continue in December with snow, which will give us the weird and muted joy of cancellations, delays, and early dismissals. Individually, you will miss time for sickness.

Without this website and a shared focus on interstitial instruction and learning, that fractured a schedule makes learning unsustainable. You lose the momentum necessary for productive reading and writing. Your academic muscles atrophy. You forget what you were up to, back when you had class, and often shrug your way past that feeling.

Or you try to use the survival skills you’ve learned elsewhere to make up that lost ground. You rush through work at the last second. You skip steps, copy answers, make excuses. That’s why there has been a flood of activity today. We are all creatures of habit, and here, again, that creature is a rat trapped in a Skinner box.

What happens is this3: You load Google Classroom, see an assignment, and spam the switch that looks like it will give a reward. If the assignment asks you to copy your notes and submit them, you might have to create those notes. If it asks you to copy ongoing work and submit it, you might have to churn out whatever you can during the class period. Reminded that you must contribute online, you might add several comments to different posts without reading much of what your peers have written.

There is limited efficacy in that. The sudden influx of comments really is too great for any kind of close, careful reading; instead of the ebb and flow of a digital conversation, there is a deluge. Your peers can’t monitor a thread when there are dozens of them appearing at once. I can’t provide ongoing feedback, because your contributions aren’t ongoing.

Similarly, when you try to take a week’s worth of notes in a single period, that deluge drowns any real learning. The work manages to be perfunctory and overwhelming at the same time4. You are rushing to fulfill a checklist, and that’s not how this kind of learning happens.

This sort of perfunctory and sometimes panicky approach also prevents you from recognizing comments that open up discussion, like this one:

That was one of the few comments left before the flood today. It is also a post driven by in-class feedback from me; the question is an attempt to galvanize others to apply Graham’s logic to an unrelated (but interesting) discussion. It would have helped you practice how to write succinctly and how to sign up for follow-up comments. Instead, it sat there for a week, unnoticed and unremarked.

The Chain

Of course, students who rush through assignments are still doing the assignments. That’s something. There are folks reading this who need to admit to greater need, and there are folks not reading this at all — or not reading it until it has been pushed on you by a teacher, either digitally or through printed copies5.

To take notes on this instructional post, all of you should answer one or both of the following questions about what most motivates you.

Do you want a good grade?

Start looking at your desire for a good grade more closely, then. You aren’t entitled to anything, and in here, your performance is all that matters. What you do is all that matters. And that includes when you do it.

If you want to do well, you mean that you’d like a 90 or higher. That requires you to keep up with instructional posts just as much as formal assignments and central texts. That fourth tier of profiles requires you to be metacognitive and reflective, to do those things consistently and insightfully, and to contribute meaningfully to the class as a result of your introspective work. You have to do that over time.

You might be able to justify a GAP score of 6 or 7 without a regular habit of reading, taking notes, and responding to materials. You might be able to meet the criteria by rushing at the last second, since that last-second work still teaches you more than you’d learn by doing nothing (and there are students doing nothing, as always). It’s unlikely, however, that your last-second work is brilliant enough to make up for your lack of assiduousness, organization, self-awareness, amenability, and self-efficacy.

If you want a good grade, you have to work interstitially.

Do you want to future-proof your skills?

In this question, “future-proof” means to give yourself the skills and knowledge to get into college and/or a career, to make the most of your relationships, and to thrive in whatever future you find. I can’t imagine anyone saying they don’t want that sort of strength, but it might be that you don’t see how reading this long post or leaving a comment gets you there.

Which is when I remind you that we’ve gone over the skills and traits of this course, including their connection to the skills and traits employers and colleges want. We’ve done it so often that it’s almost redundant to link to individual posts, as every post covers this. Here’s the one on empathy, for example. You’ve seen me emphasize self-control repeatedly (and through strangely violent metaphors). If you take the time to read Paul Graham’s essay, you’ll see how important writing is to any career, to say nothing of its importance to understanding yourself and your life. We started the year with the importance of reading, especially as it relates to empathy.

The only way to build these skills and traits is to chain them together, one link at a time, with an eye toward overall progress. You can’t fake your way into a good writing process. You can’t take shortcuts to empathy. You can’t sustain an insincere focus on collegiality for very long, and you won’t be productive while you try.

These posts get at the need for regular practice. They link to readings that emphasize other skills and traits. When you contribute interstitially to discussions, you get to practice organization, collegiality, and amenability. You can use the ramiform resources here to practice autodidactic and individualized instruction. You are always encouraged to lean into the kind of feedback that makes the most sense.

Desultory or perfunctory work barely creates the appearance of progress. It will feel like busywork, because you aren’t building anything; you’re rushing to get credit for what you haven’t been doing all along.

If you want to future-proof your skills, then, you have to work interstitially.

  1. This is not really the place to discuss the work you do late at night, but it’s at least worth a footnote. You know, because it is your lived experience, that work done late at night is work done less effectively. Even if you are a nocturnal kind of person, you don’t get to be that kind of person while you attend school. You get to wake up and attend classes at 7:45 in the morning. We need to figure out how to budget your time and work with foresight for a number of reasons; that your work suffers late at night is one of them. ↩

  2. In the sense that the option not to do it carries penalties. You can always choose to ignore instruction, avoid feedback, neglect assignments, etc., if you’re willing to accept the repercussions. ↩

  3. It should always be repeated that this is not true for everyone. It’s rarely true for the kind of student who reads footnotes. It’s true for enough students, however, that those of you reading this footnote should ask yourself a question: Which peers can you direct to this feedback, because you know they need it? You are stronger together, as the logic goes, and ought to think of how to help each other. ↩

  4. That word, perfunctory, is a helpful word to internalize. It means to go through the motions — to do something without much effort and reflection. Another helpful word is desultory, which indicates a lack of planning or logical connection. The etymology of desultory provides an interesting image, too, that might help you realize how important consistent habits of mind are. You can’t keep jumping from horse to horse. You’ll break something. ↩

  5. But we will avoid printed copies as much as possible. It’s a surrender to your lack of planning, when it happens by default. If you want a printed copy, you should print one; that’s why we have a printer in our classroom, which is a unique resource. Central texts that require direct annotation will be printed. This kind of post? That should be a decision you make as part of your own learning process. ↩

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RE/AP Updates (11/14)

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Ono. Quizzes

I gave you all these quizzes (that aren’t quizzes) recently:

Two interesting things happened as a result of this. First, you all were eerily focused for a few days on just filling in those boxes. The second, unrelated thing is that I realized these quizzes were a bad idea.

My original intention was to provide traditional feedback to some of you in the form of handwritten commentary and scores out of 100 points, thereby empowering you to teach others about the content of the quiz. The scores wouldn’t count, of course, but I thought they might let us weaponize that lizard part of your brain again. Hence this:

Except, well… that last hyperlink (“that lizard part of your brain“) is to a post called “How Feedback Should Work,” and everything we’ve done since then is expressly about pushing the boulder away from the Pavlovian, Skinner-boxed logic of the system. Attaching a point value to your work is toxic, even as a symbolic exercise. You don’t need unilateral commentary to teach each other, either. Feedback can’t be forced; that defeats (or at least undercuts) the purpose, which is to give you a universal language for learning and writing while encouraging you to experiment and grow as students.

Instead of focusing on these quizzes (again, not quizzes), I want you to focus on the links in this post, if you need to look at them again, the full scope of the instructional post given before reading Graham, and the Q&A that will be posted later tonight.

Walking Deadlines

Except for the assignment due on November 6 — the one that asked you to respond to The Aft Agley Gang and The Ironic Use of TL;DR — you won’t have any formal deadlines in Google Classroom for the rest of the month. Instead, you must use the space and each other to organize your work, keep goals in front of you, and track your learning.

This is an extension of our look at self-control. If you want to see why that is, read the sixth section of this essay:

View at Medium.com

That conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons touches on the psychological danger of preparing, since it makes your performance entirely about your ability, not some outside factor. For a while, at least, you won’t be able to self-medicate through deadlines in here, so let’s see what we can do to avoid other forms of self-handicapping. (The opening of that essay also shows you what kind of abomination my traditional gradebooks were, along with other interesting perspectives on the course.)

Remember, too, that there is a date on which we pause to determine a GAP score. This time, it’s December 1. See the calendar again for more information:

Ask questions about these updates below.