Author: Mr. Eure

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Feedback: Improve the Learning Environment

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Space Explainers

From one perspective, this is a gamified environment. There are levels, and you can progress through those levels in many different ways. You earn experience (in the gamification sense and in the academic sense) by accomplishing set tasks. To succeed, you must dodge environmental hazards and avoid other elements that damage you.

That’s why the Pareto Projects work as well as they do: Students aren’t graded on them, but the best projects are evidence of the skills, traits, and knowledge that are found in the strongest profiles. Investment in the project is an investment in the process of the project, which is really an investment in gaining meaningful experience.

Pareto Projects are also among the best opportunities to level up collegiality and empathy, which remain the most important facet of your learning. Peer-to-peer feedback is an essential part of what we do in a Humanities makerspace:

View at Medium.com

Here, then, is a post about a few of the most direct ways to generate evidence of peer-to-peer feedback. And it is fine if you look at this as a way to game the system to earn credit. Even if your motivation is less than pure, the net result is positive. That’s the design, at least: You can’t cheat the system, and “faking” your investment still helps others. That idea is explained in the tenth section of an essay on an earlier (but still relevant) iteration of the makerspace:

When you are in doubt, fake it. Force yourself to be collegial. Force yourself to do metacognition. Force yourself to spend the entire period pretending to be the right kind of student.

Do this for long enough, and the skills and traits you are pretending to hone will be honed. You will become a better student. This is the Wiseman effect transposed onto education. It is a kind of psychosomatic inverse: tricking your brain into developing habits by forcing your body to take particular actions.

In here, it’s fine if you try to game the system by generating whatever evidence it takes to justify that GAP 8 or GAP 9. Why? Because there is no gamesmanship — no way to cheat the system, fabricate evidence, or twist the language of the profiles. There isn’t even a way to cheat yourself.

If you force yourself through the motions in here, those motions will inculcate the skills and traits we want. A misanthrope who forces himself to take collegial and galvanizing actions will incrementally learn empathy. A narcissist who forces herself to reflect and metacogitate every week will incrementally find new self-awareness and insight. An apathetic student who grinds through assignments just to get them done will incrementally gain a real appreciation for the value of the work.

This is a subtle conversion. It evades the entitlement at the heart of both helplessness and arrogance. The helpless among you feel entitled to be shepherded from task to task; the arrogant among you overvalue your intelligence and devalue the good work of this course. Both groups anticipate being gifted a high grade through some kind of alchemical magic.

The logic of this course is immutable, however. There is no game to play and no gamesmanship to lean on. This course does not care how naturally gifted you are. It does not care if you play sports and play them well. It does not care what your parents think of you. It does not care what you look like, how charming you are, or how much latitude you have been given throughout your life to do what you want.

It cares only about what you do.

I think I’d add now, a few years later, that I care about all of the things listed in the penultimate paragraph. As a teacher and human being, I care. But the course has a logic to it that focuses purely on what you do. You can force yourself to give effective feedback, and it doesn’t matter, provisionally, if you are intrinsically motivated. As long as it’s effective feedback — that is, not perfunctory, superficial, vague — the eventual effect is the same.

Galvanic Work: GAP 8

The first and second page of this PDF cover the top tier of profiles:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FGrade-Abatement-Tier-Guide.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

That’s a new iteration of the guide to the profiles. Here is a screenshot of the anchor profile, which is the profile for a GAP 8:

And here, again, one of the many explanations for how this tier works:

Probably the most important requirement of the highest profiles is a feedback loop — an individualized academic connection with the teacher, the materials of the course, and your peers. There are four main ways to do this:

  1. You can learn directly from the teacher in small groups or as an individual.
  2. You can learn directly from folks who’ve done #1.
  3. You can interact thoughtfully with the interstitial instruction of the course.
  4. You can learn directly from folks who’ve done #3.

Learning from an expert peer is nearly as effective as conferencing with the teacher, and it more closely emulates what you’ll need to do throughout your life, which is to read and annotate and think about the writing of others without a teacher standing over your shoulder. Mentorship should be something you seek out, especially as you get older, but it’s not always a given. Collaboration is.

The burden is evenly distributed, too. Once you have learned something meaningful or mastered a skill, you need to teach it to others. That is known as the protégé effect, and it is almost universally accepted as the best way to hone skills and retain knowledge. In this course, we also call it proxy feedback.

That is another key criterion for the highest profiles: evidence that you have contributed to the learning environment. After that, it’s about the other most effective way to learn, which is to think about your thinking — to get to know yourself and your choices through regular reflection and metacognition.

This should all be done through a mix of discussion and writing, and it needs to be insightful and consistent. Throughout the learning process, you should be using the right language — the universal language of grade abatement.

Peer-to-Peer Feedback

Which brings us to what you do now. You are reading this because it is helpful to have direction when you give feedback to a peer. A template is useful. Sometimes, sentence starters are useful. You can default to this worksheet, which comes from collaboration with Mrs. Greenfeld, who runs the other makerspace at the high school. Here’s a PDF of it:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FFeedback_-Glow-Grow.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

As you can see in the file name, this is adapted from the “glow and grow” model of reflection and assessment. The key is the use of sentence starters. It also helps to have the blurb at the top of each feedback section. Because we are grade-abated, we can use Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” The feedback, again, is the key, not a score.

You have a number of options for giving peer-to-peer feedback. Written feedback has lasting power, so focus there — not because face-to-face feedback is unimportant, because it is so important that it happens naturally. If you are talking in class after a project presentation, for instance, feedback will happen. You could use this template to help you be more specific in your feedback, but it’s in the written feedback that it really shines.

Some options:

  1. Leave feedback on the artifact, if possible. Add comments through Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc., if you’ve been given permission to do so.
  2. Make a copy of the artifact, if it’s available but not open to comments, and leave comments on that copy. Then send the annotated copy back to the original owner.
  3. Write a response offering positive and constructive feedback, and then email it to your peer.
  4. Send brief but specific feedback through social media.
  5. Leave comments on any teacher-created version of the artifact, like the Pareto Project pages posted online.

Building Evidence

Here is the most important part of the process, at least in terms of quasi-traditional assessment: You want evidence of your feedback. Look again at the anchoring language of the Tier 4 profiles:

To “demonstrably improve the learning environment,” in this context, means to demonstrate that you gave effective feedback. Again, the gamesmanship of this is built into the system, and there is no harm at all in being somewhat extrinsically motivated. You need evidence of your hard work for the GAP process:

The GAP Process

What does that mean? It means that you are putting feedback in writing not just to make it more permanent, and not just to allow for more thoughtfulness in its construction; you are also preserving copies of that feedback for your records. You can take pictures of handwritten feedback and screenshots of typed feedback. You can make copies of emails and other direct addresses.

Most critically, you can write about the feedback. Be metacognitive about what you said and how you said it. Reflect on your use of sentence starters, since those really do help, and on how the conversation developed. It should be a conversation, after all; delivering feedback with no follow-up is much less effective than a discussion about the work.

Ask questions about this below.

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Moratorium

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Triage

Starting Wednesday, December 12, there will be a moratorium in our classroom on the use of any all devices (e.g., phones, tablets) except district-issued Chromebooks and personal laptops. There will also be a moratorium on choosing your own seats1.

We’ll review this together — hands-on, with liberal use of a whiteboard to define and detail certain points — but you may have questions or comments that require an interstitial forum like this one. Remember, too, that this site is for all stakeholders, not just students. Our conversation about technology is an inclusive one.

The most important note is probably this: moratorium refers to a pause or delay in action. It’s a temporary suspension. It isn’t a permanent ban. The second most important note is that you can be part of the conversation about technology use and learning. Start in the comment section here by asking questions, making observations, etc., so that I can reply to you.

Moratorium on Phones

Since smartphones are the most common distraction, “phone” is a placeholder for any device except district-issued Chromebooks or personal laptops.

If you want context for this moratorium, you’ll find it in the unit we did on self-control and self-discipline:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

Self-control is one of the most important skills you can develop, so we’ve used the flexibility of the makerspace to give you opportunities to test your focus and discipline. Many students failed those tests.

That’s okay, at least in a larger sense. The purpose of that akrasia unit is, in part, to normalize the problem as a decidedly human one. In other words, we all struggle with self-control, distraction, procrastination, etc., and we all need to improve.

In a more immediate sense, we have to get these phones out of students’ hands. There are, of course, academic reasons to have a phone, and this site is designed to be read on the smaller screens. But those academic reasons continue outside of school. You’d use your phone interstitially, as intended, when you are making the choice to learn, create, question, etc., in an academic sense.

In class, the phone is too much of a distraction. We’ve tested it for three months now, and the rate of improvement is too slow. I imagine that this moratorium will remain in place for a long time.

Assigned Seats

The context for assigned seats:

Objects in Space

All we’re doing now is keeping you in those start-of-period assigned seats until the bell. You need the separation to get work done. We’ll obviously make exceptions when it comes to group projects, but this is otherwise about isolating you from distractions.

It needs to be clarified that collaboration is the stuff of growth, which is why we start the year there; simply being in a group, however, is not proof of collaboration. Being in proximity to other students is just being in proximity to them. Collaboration refers to what you produce. When members of our group fail to stay on task in their chosen groups, it helps to assign seats.

We Have Work to Do

All of this is predicated on the obvious: You have work to do. You are in a makerspace, and that means there is always more work to do. Even that last link proves its own point, because it would take a while to read that entire lecture and process its ideas.

Right now, as the winter holidays approach, you need to be more focused than ever. In every course, the end of your first Pareto Project process requires the following:

Pareto Projects: Final Self-Assessment

Meanwhile, English 10 students are writing personal letters, English 11 students are analyzing and writing short stories, and AP students are applying the makerspace mentality to Santa Claus. This is perhaps the worst time of year to lose focus.

Below is the version of our grade abatement profiles that was affixed to each workstation earlier this week. The color-coded tiers may help you to maintain focus. You shift into the red by ignoring directions and disengaging from the work, and the more you resist, the more you build evidence of those lower tiers. In other words, refusing to focus, especially in the particular way you are being directed to focus, is enough by itself to lower your profile and grade.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FGAP-Color-Arial.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

  1. With the possible exception of the AP classes. This is based on group dynamics, which is really about a kind of herd immunity, and AP students have earned a few days to prove they have the requisite discipline to choose their own seats. The moratorium on phones applies to everyone, though, which says something about the addiction we’re dealing with. ↩

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“A Memory of My Existence”

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

A Long Way Gone: Chapter 20

Whether you chose to continue reading A Long Way Gone or switched to a different novel, it is important to consider what Ishmael Beah has to say about our place in the world. At the end of Chapter 20, for instance, his departure from New York City on November 15, 1996, leads to this insight:

My sixteenth birthday was eight days away, and throughout the flight back home I still felt as if I was dreaming, a dream that I didn’t want to wake up from. I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.

Beah is describing a very human need: to have left a mark on the world. He knew, even then, that he would persist through the memories of the people he had met. The way he has continued to impact and influence people around the world is simply a larger and more powerful version of this.

If you are reading this, you have already left a mark on this world, and you will continue to do so. Your existence has impacted others. Your day-to-day life continues that impact. Still others remember you, even if you are no longer a part of their lives, and that memory of your existence is alive somewhere in the world.

This is existentially heavy stuff. But it leads us to a straightforward opportunity for reflection, introspection, and more of that psychonaut exploration we have undertaken before.

The writing prompt: Consider the excerpt from A Long Way Gone carefully, and then write a letter to yourself about the mark you make on the world. You may write about the impact you’ve had so far in your life, the impact you intend to have in the future, the idea of “a memory of [your] existence,” and any related subjects that arise from your contemplation of Beah’s words.

This letter can be private or public to any extent you choose. You may publish it as an open letter, or you may keep it from even your teacher, making it a purely personal exercise Either way, you will be asked to write about the letter-writing process. That metacognitive analysis is what lets you control every aspect of the letter’s audience.

You also have the option of printing this letter, sealing it in an envelope, and leaving it to be opened by a future version of you — at the end of this year, the end of next year, as you graduate, or at any other point you choose. Every choice you make has an impact, which reflects the core of the assignment itself.

Ask questions below. Deadlines and other requirements will be posted to Google Classroom.

Featured image source: “Nora’s Letter,” as archived at The Victorian Web.

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The Unseen World: “Yes, Virginia”

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

The upcoming winter holidays offer us the perfect context in which to study one of the most famous editorials ever written:

http://www.newseum.org/exhibits/online/yes-virginia/

The Wikipedia page adds more context to the story, plus links to related subjects. It’s worth a read, too.

Here is the editorial again, reformatted for our course:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FChurch-Yes-Virginia-Text.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

The Work

What you should notice about that last PDF, which will also be shared with you through Google Classroom, is that it was downloaded from a much larger document. This text is part of a much larger conversation about truth, lies, and the way we frame our world. Our next unit will delve into those issues, and what you will read then will help you make sense of the great lie of Santa Claus — an acceptable lie, perhaps, and one I tell my own children, but a lie nonetheless.

Synthesis — that search for related readings and context — also helps us here. Santa Claus is the subject of many thoughtful essays, from this pseudo-scientific back-and-forth on the physics of Santa to this semi-serious discussion of an actual war on Christmas. Tongue-in-cheek humor is a nice contrast to Church’s endearing earnestness, and I think we need both tones. (Irony and sarcasm don’t help us with the “veil covering the unseen world,” as Church puts it.) You will start to make connections between disparate positions and voices as part of becoming a better writer and as part of our prep for the AP exam in May.

The real lesson is that everything connects, and everything is an opportunity to improve the skills and traits of our course. Remember the metaphor Paul Graham uses: that of the river.

To help you understand Church’s editorial, you’ll need to respond to another batch of prompts on rhetoric and style:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FChurch-Yes-Virginia-ETA.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

These are reprinted below. They serve as discussion questions, too, allowing us to talk about the ideas of the letters as much as their rhetoric. Responding will require you to define new terms, ask for the right kind of feedback, and otherwise work with a different goal than just submitting the correct answers.

The prompts for “Yes, Virginia,” reprinted for reference:

  1. You’re going to notice immediately that this letter may not exactly be targeting one little girl. Be specific here, and take a look at every relevant element of Church’s essay: Who is his audience? How do you know?
  2. Church crafts distinct, intertwined arguments of fact, value, and policy in this letter. Research a working definition of each type of argument, identify each one in the essay, and then analyze how cogent or fallacious his reasoning is.
  3. Church believes Santa is real. Or maybe he doesn’t. How we read this editorial depends on the definition of “real” employed here. What is Church’s definition? Be specific. Figure out what definition — or definitions — he implies, and use his language and logic to support your analysis.
  4. Summarize each paragraph’s main idea in fewer than ten words.
  5. Consider the essay’s use of imagery related to childhood: rattles, fairies, dancing, etc. Pull out two or three of these images and explain their rhetorical effect.

These prompts require a mix of convergent and divergent thinking. Once you have your own responses, you can use the following essay as a way of understanding how to respond:

View at Medium.com

The goal, as always, is to analyze in order to emulate. Formal assignments will be posted to Google Classroom, but the overarching goals fall outside of the Skinner-box stuff: Understanding Church’s writing is how we get at the deepest and most productive discussions about truth, childhood, faith, etc., and it’s also how you become a better writer yourself.

Use this post to discuss the assignment with me or to leave observations. Keep your comments succinct. Spark conversations with each other. This is about the way we define and redefine truth in our society, which is a timeless concern. In fact, you might be interested in another famous article that ran in The Sun — although it isn’t quite what Virginia’s father meant when he told her that “[i]f you see it in The Sun it’s so.” It’s now known as the Great Moon Hoax:

Not the best moment in journalism, maybe, but a highlight in creative writing. Speaking of The Sun, I’ll leave you with their reprinting of Church’s editorial in 2012:

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/yes-virginia/68502/

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English 11: Narrative Writing + Literary Analysis

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Start by reviewing our process for reading, analyzing, and sometimes emulating literature:

Literary Analysis Guide

On Narrative Writing

Through this post, you are studying and emulating narrative writing, which is a mode of discourse in which a sequence or series of events, real or fictional, is relayed or described. More simply, narrative writing tells a story.

For a piece of writing to be considered a complete narrative, it must fit these criteria, which it does through certain literary elements. Some of the basic elements of writing, like syntax and diction, are included in that protocol; everything else falls on a list you are given every year in your English classes. That’s why you’ll recognize everything in this article1:

Note: We are using that particular article for two reasons. First, if you read it, you’ll know everything you need to know to do this work. Second, it’s a site full of ads, which lets us use Snap and Read, one of the district’s most useful browser extensions, to eliminate distractions2. Whatever you use, make sure it covers the basics. You’ll need an internalized sense of them to analyze what you read.

Narrative ETA: Emulation Through Analysis

Below are short stories of varying length. After reading each story, run it through the protocol for works of literary merit. Write about each focus separately and completely, using the template provided below. Load it, make a copy in your Drive, and then complete it.

This template will be attached to any Google Classroom assignments, as well. The headings are repeated below for reference.

1⁰ Focus: How You Read
2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For
3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis

Note: For that tertiary focus, we are adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts, since it serves several purposes3.

Here is a downloadable and printable copy of all three stories, including the example text:

Example Text: “Widow’s First Year,” by Joyce Carol Oates

Note: You do not need to run this short story through the three responsive steps. Instead, it’s included to show you what all stories have. Even these seven words — just one more than Hemingway’s apocryphal story — create a story with a beginning, middle, and end. There are characters who experience conflict. That conflict resolves itself.

All stories obey these rules, or they break them deliberately. Keep that in mind as you read the two stories that comprise your assignment, and then use what you’ve learned here to craft your own story.

Here is Oates’ story in full:

Widow’s First Year

I kept myself alive.

Required Narrative #1: “Sticks,” by George Saunders

Click here for the story and a bit of background:

Required Narrative #2: “Give It Up!” by Franz Kafka

The second required story is quite short and strange. It will test your critical thinking and collaborative abilities to make sense of it.

“Give It Up!”

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was walking to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized that it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me unsure of the way, I did not yet know my way very well in this town; luckily, a policeman was nearby, I ran up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “From me you want to know the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I cannot find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up,” he said, and turned away with a sudden jerk, like people who want to be alone with their laughter.

Emulation: Narrative Writing

The last step is to emulate one of the short stories presented here. Your own narrative can be true or fictional or a combination of both. It can be on any subject you choose. It must only demonstrate the same kind of authorial choices.

Create this emulation however you wish — by hand, through Google, on a typewriter, etc. — and then submit a copy of it as requested for GAP purposes. Additionally, you should strongly consider the extent to which your story might be shared with others. Refer to this post:

The End of the Writing Process

  1. Which is just one of many such documents available to you. The most cursory search on Google would give you hundreds more. ↩

  2. When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:

    To this:

    This is not the only way to get a readable, reviewable source for literary devices, but it works extremely well with our technology. ↩

  3. The first is to give you another way to learn the necessary literary devices, since the full exam prompt offers a list of them. This is what it looks like:

    Closely read the text provided and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device (characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text.

    The second purpose is to practice succinct analysis. You are not required to write an essay of analysis on the ELA Regents Exam; instead, you must write only two or three paragraphs. Your focus is on identifying a main idea, identifying a literary device that develops that main idea, and analyzing examples of that literary device in the passage. ↩

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Pareto Projects: Final Self-Assessment

  By Pareto Projects, Space Explainers

The details of the final self-assessment assignment are at the end. First, a review of the background for the Pareto Project.

Background

The following screenshot was taken on December 7, 2018, but it will match the work of any Pareto Project undertaken at any point during any school year.

The complete guide is posted first. Students brainstorm, pitching their ideas according to the guide’s protocol. Then a blueprint is created, submitted, edited, resubmitted, etc., until it is given final approval.

After refining the project’s final goals and answering any frequently-asked questions, we are able to set final goals. These examples come again from 2018:

These projects, of course, are created under the auspices of the Humanities makerspace, which means they are assessed as part of the grade abatement process. No rubrics are necessary. Instead, we look to an authentic validation of student work, as seen here. And we look to the validation and feedback guided by a student’s own self-assessment, reflection, and metacognitive insight.

Final Self-Assessment

The blueprint step of this process requires students to set two goals: a learning goal and a product goal. The final self-assessment requires an accounting of those goals. Which goals were met? Which changed over time? In the end, what was created, and what was learned?

The blueprints are completed through Google Forms, which means that every student has a copy of the blueprint emailed to them. We can search through Gmail to find that copy to see what was written back before the project truly began.

For the final self-assessment, we can evaluate the extent to which those goals were met. The prompts are changed from predictive to reflective and metacognitive:

1. Pareto Project: Product and Process

What did you create, develop, explore, experience, etc., through this project? How did the process evolve over time? How did your goals shift over time? What now exists for others to see, hear, experience, etc., and to what extent have you chosen to share that work? Will the project continue? If so, what are your future goals? Be specific, and evaluate yourself honestly and empathetically.

2. Pareto Project: Skills, Traits, and Knowledge

What did you learn through this project? What skills, traits, and knowledge did you gain? Use the specific, universal language of grade abatement, referring explicitly to the details in this handout. These questions can also be used to guide this work:

  1. How did the loop between collegiality and empathy factor into your project?
  2. What sort of discussions did you have with others about your project, whether or not you formally worked in a group?
  3. What kind of reading and research was required for your project?
  4. What new knowledge and information did you internalize as a result of your process?
  5. To what extent were you able to practice divergent thinking and creative problem-solving through this project?
  6. How did working on your project test and develop your ability to communicate with others?
  7. To what extent was writing involved, excluding this final self-assessment?
  8. To what extent did you seek criticism and praise about your project as it developed? Did you become more self-aware as a result?
  9. How successful were you at honestly and objectively assessing your progress and product(s)?
  10. What limits did your project test in you? To what extent were you able to demonstrate or develop resilience?
  11. How successful were you in maintaining focus and self-control throughout the project?
  12. What did you learn about your organizational strengths and weaknesses through this project?
  13. To what extent did you need to teach yourself the necessary skills and knowledge to reach your goals?

Whether these final self-assessments are bulleted or, more helpfully, written as essays, they serve as the capstone to the process.

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Pareto Projects: 12/10/18–12/21/18

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

The Schedule

Presentation and non-presentation schedules are saved in this Google Drive folder:

You can also load the documents individually:

The Projects

Most student projects will be showcased through this Google Site:

For now, it contains projects, testimonials, etc., from previous years. As new projects come in, that site (and this one) will be redesigned to showcase what students have created.

The Background

The background and FAQ post for these projects are available below.

The Pareto Project: Complete Guide

Pareto Project: FAQ

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Pareto Project: FAQ

  By Pareto Projects

These are answers to the most frequently asked questions about the Pareto Project. Make sure you are familiar with the guide first:

The Pareto Project: Complete Guide

Frequently Asked Questions

Am I required to present my work?

No. The guide tells you that your final product is yours to design, so your project could take just about any form you imagine. What happens, I think, is that the time set aside for these projects — see this 2018-2019 calendar for an example — is dominated by talk of presentations. That’s because we have to schedule those, reserve spaces (like the school’s iTheater), and talk to presenters about time constraints. It takes more planning than, say, sharing a collection of poetry or publishing a website.

What do I do if students don’t pay attention to my presentation?

This is an important question. The short answer is: Ignore them, focus on your work, and let your teachers handle the behavior. Part of the GAP scoring language addresses this. In fact, a criterion for lower profiles is not investing in the classroom environment:

These are the profiles that correspond with failing grades. Look carefully at the idea of deliberate disengagement. Any student who, after being instructed not to, ignores your presentation is risking failure. We’ll take care of that feedback.

The longer answer is this: Be empathetic to the people who aren’t respectful of your work. Many factors go into that decision, whether it results in being on a phone while someone is talking or something more overt. Those folks aren’t excused from the bad decision, but it’s not a decision that has anything to do with you. It’s about them.

Am I required to share my project, if I don’t present?

No. You are strongly encouraged to share your work to some extent, just to give yourself the authentic experience of having others react to your project. The passion that hopefully inspired you to create your project deserves an audience. It doesn’t require one, however, and some projects are intensely personal, or works-in-progress that would be difficult to share right now, or for some other reason less in need of sharing. If you keep in mind the goals of all assessment in the makerspace, you’ll be able to determine what you need to do.

How else can I share my work?

The guide gives you a few options, including Medium, which is the most likely host for written work of all kinds. Medium is also mentioned in this overview of the end of the writing process, which is similarly about sharing your work. There are other online platforms, of course, and you could use any of them to share your project. You’ll know about Instagram for photography, but you might consider VSCO. If you’re writing stories, Wattpad is an option.

The focus on digital options is all about interstitial access — about giving students an audience beyond the classroom and the period. Think of how widely shared TED Talks are, or how often a powerful piece of writing makes its way around social media. That’s important for all of you. The in-class, in-person options are just as important, however, from hanging artwork on the walls to leading your peers through a discussion.

What should I do if I won’t have finished my project by the deadline?

If you haven’t made this clear already, make it clear to your teacher. You’ll need help determining exactly what to do. Fortunately, you aren’t required to present, share, submit, etc., an unfinished project. Rushing something into being isn’t required, either. Instead, you’ll do what we often do: You’ll focus on the process, discuss and write about your ultimate goals for this project, and submit that reflective and metacognitive work.

Is writing about my progress on the project enough for the due date?

I’m including this question separately to reiterate the point: We are almost always more interested in the process than the product, if we must choose between the two. It’s Postman’s idea, which I repeatedly post: The most important thing we learn is always something about how we learn. The products matter, but the process often matters more, especially at your ages.

You also indicated, when you designed your blueprint through the original guide, separate learning and product goals. Everyone, regardless of situation, will write about both of those as part of their Pareto Project.

Will my grade be affected if I do not share my project with others?

No. As always, your grade is determined every three or four weeks by the GAP process, which is detailed here. These Pareto Projects are part of a triptych panel, and we fold it into the assessment like we would any other formal assignment. It’s worth noting, though, that these projects — any project-based work, really, especially 20 Time projects — incorporate every single universal skill and trait. That’s why the complete set of skills and traits is embedded in the original guide: Your Pareto Project is a reflection of your holistic strengths, including every “soft” or non-academic skill and trait. A presentation grade wouldn’t reflect that.

I would like to get feedback from students about my project/presentation. How can I do that?

You have several options. The first is to share your work with your peers through Google Drive, Medium, etc., and to ask for specific feedback. This would work for written projects, slideshows, websites, and other artifacts that are accessible outside of a presentation environment. If you’re presenting, you’ll want to structure some follow-up discussion or feedback, which I’ll help you to do. It can be as immediate as a Q&A after you’ve presented or as in-depth as a formally-assigned writing prompt. As always, you need to know what you want out of that feedback.

Are there guidelines for what non-presenters should complete?

Again, your grade is still a GAP score based on much more than just these projects. Your project’s guidelines should already be clear to you, too, which means what you complete will vary from person to person. You might have guidelines for publishing a story, sharing your progress on an essay, hanging your artwork — it depends.

For everyone, however, there will be a required pair of writing responses addressing your product and learning goals, respectively. You’ll be given those to work on during the two-week block of time, but only after you’re ready. The prompts will be universal, but how you approach your responses will be almost completely individualized.

What will we do when we’re not presenting during the designated two-week block of time?

See the above answer. You’ll also be given an English unit to complete interstitially, using the resources of the classroom to read, think, and write on a particular subject. It might be a series of units, too, depending on where we are in the year and what else you need. We will almost always have enough time during those two weeks to circle up for discussion, read a short story, do some test prep, etc., because not everyone in every class is presenting formally.

Examples of these concurrent units (to give you an idea of what to expect):

  1. English 11, 2018: Reading, analyzing, and emulating a series of short stories, plus some brief Regents Exam practice
  2. English 10, 2018: Analyzing and responding to student-chosen novels, plus revisions of literary analysis paragraphs
  3. AP English, 2018: Deconstructing the article, “Yes, Virginia,” and practicing timed essays
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Bird Sings Why the Caged I Know

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Diction, Poetry, and Hip-Hop

This lesson follows our work with Francine Prose’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” which is embedded here:

ETA: Prose’s “Caged Bird”

In her essay, Prose has a few things to say about Maya Angelou. We will now look at one of Angelou’s most famous poems, pairing it with a hip-hop song it inspired:

The usual assignment for this pair of texts is a tone and diction analysis — a breakdown of word choice and how it contributes to the meaning of the overall piece. You might be asked to use this list, for instance, or to search through Google for any of the dozens of other lists available.

But we’re meant to be a makerspace. You should pay attention to word choice, but only because that’s what you do naturally when you read poetry or hear a song. Your assignment needs to be more creative, so: Use your analysis of these texts to create something meaningful. Emulate the poetry, search up other songs by Atmosphere and respond to them, have a circled discussion with a small group — just make it meaningful.

The song needs to be heard, of course, so:

On a side note (sub-tangent?), the comments on that video are, as you might expect, fascinating. Many years ago, I collected some of them for the first version of this lesson, and they ran the gamut from insightful:

It seems to me that this song is a response to Maya Angelou’s poem “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Maya Angelou is a world-renowned African American poet, and her poem is a moving portrayal of the beauty of freedom. This song expresses the animosity and frustration of people who are NOT YET free, to whom the free bird is insulting and offensive. It might not be the author’s personal view, but it captures an important viewpoint that definitely exists in our culture.

To, well, less insightful:

no joke, i think hes talking about the reptillians/winged serpents/lizards(lizzies)/draconians which are from the planet in the Alpha Draconi star system of the Orion Constellation and created by the their parent race The Carians.

That first quoted comment mistakes the title of Angelou’s poem, “Caged Bird,” for the title of her memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” I’ve made that mistake, too. It’s such a common mistake that it lets me link to a Snopes article on the Mandela Effect, which is really about confabulation and the faulty state of our memories1.

As for the second quoted comment: I appreciate the effort to clarify that the lizards can also be called “lizzies,” although I’d like to know if that is a term of endearment or just a sign of informality.

There are many other comments posted under that Atmosphere song. YouTube remains, as always, an endless documentary on the state of American consciousness. Here is a variation on that theme from 2008, which is so far in the past now that it’s a little disconcerting: Michael Agger’s attempt to classify and divide more than 58,000 comments on a clip of a baby laughing.

Use the space below to talk to me about this work.

  1. One of the problems we can tackle in a Humanities makerspace is the problem of memory. We might look at this nonfiction article, this Borges short story, Joan Didion’s essay on keeping a notebook, even another Atmosphere song — four perspectives on memory that open us up to exactly the kind of discussion and writing that asks and answers important questions. ↩

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A Better Kind of Quiz

  By Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

The origin of the term is also its purpose: A pop quiz asks what a student actually remembers, not what was crammed into short-term memory in the moments before the bell. A pop quiz reveals what is internalized.

Except when it doesn’t. In my experience, pop quizzes don’t work. They operate on fear and anxiety, which undermine knowledge and skill. Quizzes require obfuscation and subterfuge on the part of the teacher, too, resulting in a kind of arms race between student gamesmanship and real learning.

What I did with that realization is here:

View at Medium.com

The first two paragraphs are mostly the same as the start of this post; the rest of that Medium essay explores what pop quizzes do and how we might reimagine them.

Data-Driven Quizzes

In a makerspace, the goal of a quiz would be to gather data that lets us direct instruction and learning. For example, during a unit on narrative writing and literary analysis in English 11, we needed to test students’ understanding of literary devices. That led to this quiz:

The directions are repeated at the start of the Google Form, too, for the sake of a kind of engineering redundancy:

DDQ: Literary Devices (1)
Complete the following quiz without using any additional online or offline resources. Match the term to the definition. Identify what you have internalized. Then use the resources of the makerspace to make sense of your performance. Submit evidence of that metacognitive insight as indicated elsewhere.
Terms and definitions: https://blog.prepscholar.com/list-of-literary-devices-techniques
Header image: https://dribbble.com/shots/5330302-Creativity-Book-Club

The focus is on how students learn, not a quiz score. The scores help students self-assess their needs and advocate for their roles in a different and often better form of feedback.

In this example, the questions were simple enough: given the literary device, match it to the definition. For each term, all 19 definitions (we cut it down from the 24 suggested in the instructional post) were randomized, which forced a basic kind of repetition. Here is the start of the choices for verbal irony:

In a quiz like this, each question is instructional, and determining the correct answer is about learning, not performance. On my end, I am able to look at real-time data like these:

That screenshot is illustrative of the process. One tab is open to an instructional post; another, to this quiz and its data. For each question, I am able to see what students seem to know. Irony, for instance, is a difficult concept; perhaps these students need a lesson in irony, then, or a model text that demonstrates verbal irony. I’ll know the answer when I read their metacognitive analysis of the quiz.

Moving Forward

That’s an explanation of the pedagogy. For students, it’s now a question of efficacy: Does this help you to internalize information? Does it make your learning habits more transparent? How does your performance improve as a result of this kind of reimagined quiz? Use the comment space here to ask questions and offer insights — including any onomatopoeia that might replace “pop” with a better metaphor.