Author: Mr. Eure

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Literary Analysis Guide

  By Reading Resources

The Point of a Story

In a Humanities makerspace, you often write what you read and read what you write. We call the process emulation through analysis, or ETA writing. It means that analytical writing has a practical purpose, not just a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”

That quotation comes from John Holt and his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which is part of our introduction to literature and the reading process. That is essential reading. There is also a three-part guide on how to read:

Continue reading

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Objects in Space

  By Space Explainers

Updated in September of 2019.

The Physical Makerspace

Here is a partial view of the makerspace in Room 210 on November 27, 2018:

The physical space changes often. It is finally a reflection of our pedagogy, which was described as far back as 2015 like this:

Grade abatement isn’t a grand and unifying theory that solves the problem of grades and grade obsession; it is, instead, the kind of art where the shaping of instruction is the instruction. It evolves because it is in use.

That linked post is itself a showcase for iterative pedagogy. Some of the raw stuff in that post has been refined; some elements have been jettisoned; some has been kept intact. We shape this space by using it.

The physical setup reflects the same sensibility. It can be rearranged every morning to fit my plans — let’s circle students up for discussion; let’s separate students for timed writing — but it should, most of the time, shift to fit students’ plans. Here is a tour of the space cobbled together as part of the testimonial site:

The photos in that tour are a little older than the photo at the top of this post. If you look closely at the latter, you’ll see copies of our skills and traits laminated and fixed to each table. There is also a copy of a check-in checklist, which starts with a consideration of the physical space and continues with a form for goal-setting and mindfulness.

When the physical space is modular, that daily calibration is essential.

Daily Calibration

That daily check-in form might be the key to focus for all students. Here is a pre-filled version of the check-in form that anyone can view:

That takes only a few moments at the start of each class period, but those few moments build powerful habits and generate useful data. Consider this screenshot of student feedback:

The first two columns’ data come from the following parts of the form, which are drawn from the excellent educator resources at Stop, Breathe & Think:

While these sections are optional, they can center students physically and mentally, giving them a greater chance of shifting cognitively from whatever came before — an exhausting gym class, a frenetic lunch period, etc. — into the work of a makerspace.

The next columns of data are goals and miscellaneous feedback or updates from students. This is incredibly powerful information to have at the start of the class period, and not just for teachers. For students, this is a way to orient themselves in the middle of a day that pulls them in a dozen different directions.

Completing this form is, therefore, incredibly important. To address students directly: This is a habit that you need in life. Goal-setting and mindfulness will help you navigate academics, relationships, and the equally Sisyphean grind of many jobs. You can and often should pause momentarily to take stock of your physical and mental wellbeing. You can and often should set an immediate, achievable goal.

Off the Floor

If you look again at the picture of Room 210 at the top of this post, you’ll also see a set of assigned seats for each table. This runs somewhat contrary to the idea of student-driven collaboration, but it’s often required when we’re faced with those flying guillotines. For years, I’ve tried different iterations of assigned seats. For a while, these iterations improved accountability and focus; overall, they undercut the purpose of the space.

We have to consider the needs of the space. When students arrive, that seat is where they shift cognitively. They set a specific goal for the period, either formally or informally, often by completing the above “calibration” form. They note briefly how they are feeling mentally and physically.

To again address students directly: When you sit with friends at the start of a period, your mindset tends to be less focused. If I need to announce something or review directions, you tend to miss that information. Regardless of the paradigm shifts in play here, this is still a public high school; you need to make a conscious effort to set aside the million distractions around you.

What we want is a way for each student to slough off distractions, set an immediate goal, and get to work — eventually without needing a teacher to call for attention. Think of it as putting on a lab coat and safety equipment in a more traditional makerspace. You wouldn’t walk in and casually fire up a blowtorch. You would check in first.

Remember the true purpose of this space: to use its resources to solve authentic problems, most often through reading and writing in the Humanities. The seats are just furniture to hold us off the floor while we do that. The people around us are resources and supports while we do that. All it takes is deliberate action and a sort of sedulous self-awareness — not an easy habit, but a necessary one.

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ETA: Prose’s “Caged Bird”

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Overview of the Concept

In 1946, George Orwell noted that

an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Later in the same essay, he summarizes this idea: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” This is true. We must focus on that, but we can also focus on a feedback loop that builds strength in thinking through strength in writing. We can listen to Orwell but invoke Neil Postman:

Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

We also pay attention to Paul Graham and his theory that essay-writing in school focuses on literary analysis through “a series of historical accidents,” with the end result that most school essays are “now three steps removed from real work.” Even non-literary assignments lose authenticity in the pursuit of academic emulation.

The path forward has you read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate those strategies in your work, not just to produce the sort of analysis that a cursory search of Google would reveal. It’s the difference between applied and theoretical science, and the difference between blowing up the kitchen and learning how to tell a good joke:

View at Medium.com

So we arrive at emulation-through-analysis (ETA) work, which is designed to teach you how to answer analytical questions while you answer them. You should define new terms, look up new concepts, and enlist the feedback mechanisms of the space to help you. Getting the right answer is a goal; understanding how to use the strategy or technique is the goal. And the substructure is, as always, made of the universal skills of grade abatement, especially these:

Keep those universal skills and traits handy. You must know how to create in order to create. A makerspace requires granular expertise before experimentation and iteration will yield results. Otherwise, it’s just a sandbox.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” by Francine Prose

Start with the essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” by Francine Prose, which is available to BHS students here:

It will also be photocopied and posted to Google Classroom as part of any formalized in-class and interstitial work. The following questions, all drawn from that textbook chapter, allow us to do the kind of analysis necessary to implement the most effective writing strategies.

Before you answer these questions, know two things:

First, In addition to the usual feedback, I will give you a set of instructional responses to these questions. They are teaching responses, written as much to explain the concept, question, etc., as to give you the “correct” answer. This key will let you test your collegiality and critical thinking, but it will most directly test these skills and traits:

Second, you must answer these prompts by combing a sense of creativity (e.g., discussing your love/hate for literature, imagining what schools might do to encourage reading) with a granular understanding of Prose’s expert effectiveness (e.g., learning how to appeal to ethos as she does). We’ll always move from questions on rhetoric and style into emulative responses, personal essays, even rhetorical analysis essays — all writing that requires both to be effective and enjoyable.

Ask questions, make observations, and engage the assignment in the comment section below.

Questions on Rhetoric and Style

  1. Discuss three appeals to ethos in this essay. What different roles, or personae, does Prose use to establish her ethos?
  2. Prose’s opening paragraph includes such words as appalled, dismal, and dreariness – all with negative connotations. Why does she start out with such strong language? Does she risk putting off readers who do not share her views? Why or why not? What other examples of strongly emotional language do you find in the essay?
  3. Prose makes several key assumptions about the role and impact of reading literary works in high school. What are they?
  4. What appeals does she make to logos?
  5. Prose cites many different novels and plays. Does she assume her audience is familiar with some of them? All of them? Explain why it matters whether the audience knows the works.
  6. According to Prose, “To hold up [I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings] as a paradigm of memoir, of thought – of literature – is akin to inviting doctors convicted of malpractice to instruct our medical students” (para. 13). Do you agree with this analogy? Explain your answer. What other examples of figurative language can you find in this essay?
  7. Toward the end of the essay (paras. 35, 39, and 43), Prose uses a series of rhetorical questions. What is her purpose in piling one rhetorical question on top of the other?
  8. Would Prose have strengthened her argument by including interviews with a few high school students or teachers? Why or why not?
  9. According to Prose, why are American high school students learning to loathe literature? Try to find at least four or five reasons.
  10. Does she propose a solution or recommendations to change this situation? If she does not offer a solution, is her argument weakened? Explain your answer.
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An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Click for the AV Club’s review of The Twilight Zone episode, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

The Point of a Story

In our course, you write what you read and read what you write. We call the process emulation through analysis, or ETA writing. It means that you pick apart a text because you want to emulate it, not because of a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”

That quotation comes from John Holt and his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which you studied as part of our introduction to literature and the reading process. Following that, you also received a three-part guide on how we read:

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

Our goal, again, is to emulate the works we study. To get there, we must analyze them, being careful not to let that analysis break the magic.

This time, we are studying narrative writing: 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 the criteria outlined above, 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 distractions. When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:

To this:

Analyzing Narratives

After you’ve read the background above, you can move on to analyzing and emulating. Because you take the English Regents Exam in June, however, we’ll start not with short stories that can be emulated easily, but with a longer story that has been adapted into an Oscar-winning film.

After reading the story and watching the film, run each through the protocol for works of literary merit. Use the template provided below. Load it, make two copies of it in your Drive, and then complete both.

The headings are repeated below for reference.

1⁰ Focus: How You Read

Focus on what this work reveals about how you learn and how you read. Does the length of the text help? How? Did you print a copy of the texts, or did you read online? Why? What was the effect? When you watched the film adaptation, how did you do it? Were you alone or with others? Did you watch it all at once or in sections? What did your choices reveal?

2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For

Use the post and the ideas we gleaned from its central video to ask yourself what each text teaches you. Is it giving you wisdom and insight? Into what aspects of yourself or your world? When in doubt, remember the video’s final quotation:

We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Often, this kind of analysis is pitched in terms of essential questions about human nature or society. For this particular study, you should have already considered the following:

⍰ To what extent can any of us trust our senses?
⍰ To what extent can any of us trust our memories?
⍰ How do ignorance, knowledge, and happiness interact for us? In other words, would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable?
⍰ To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
⍰ In what ways are any of us ever truly alone?
⍰ To what extent are people naturally self-destructive? What does it mean if we are?
⍰ At what point and for what reasons should a group stop an individual from doing whatever he or she wants?

3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis

The post on how to read covers diction, syntax, and other universal elements of writing. You can emulate those aspects in any writing response.

For this particular mode of discourse, and for each model text, you should also focus on literary devices. Characterization, conflict, foreshadowing, irony — all those and more can be analyzed and emulated. In fact, the best way to approach this sort of analysis is by adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts:

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.

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Short Story)

Author: Ambrose Bierce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [Google Docs]

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [Free eBook at Project Gutenberg]

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [PDF]

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F11%2FAn-Occurrence-at-Owl-Creek-Bridge.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Short Film)

Director: Robert Enrico

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [on Vimeo]

Emulation: Narrative Writing

If you are so inspired, you can and should attempt to emulate Bierce’s short story with one of your own. That is the best use of this kind of analysis and discussion. You will, however, be asked soon enough to read, analyze, and emulate flash fiction — narratives that are short enough to be emulated by anyone, regardless, just through our work during each class period.

If you do elect to write your own story, take your time. 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. ↩

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English 10: Narrative Writing + Literary Analysis

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

The Point of a Story

In our course, you write what you read and read what you write. We call the process emulation through analysis, or ETA writing. It means that you pick apart a text because you want to emulate it, not because of a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”

That quotation comes from John Holt and his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which you studied as part of our introduction to literature and the reading process. Following that, you also received a three-part guide on how we read:

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

Our goal, again, is to emulate the works we study. To get there, we must analyze them, being careful not to let that analysis break the magic.

This time, we are studying narrative writing: 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 the criteria outlined above, 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 distractions. When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:

To this:

Analyzing Narratives

After you’ve read the background above, you can move on to analyzing and emulating.

Below are short stories of increasing 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

Focus on what this work reveals about how you learn and how you read. Does the length of the text help? How? Did you print a copy of the texts, or did you read online? Why? What was the effect?

2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For

Use the post and the ideas we gleaned from its central video to ask yourself what each text teaches you. Is it giving you wisdom and insight? Into what aspects of yourself or your world? When in doubt, remember the video’s final quotation:

We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Often, this kind of analysis is pitched in terms of essential questions about human nature or society. For longer works of literary merit or nonfiction, those questions are usually provided in class.

3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis

The post on how to read covers diction, syntax, and other universal elements of writing. You can emulate those aspects in any writing response.

For this particular mode of discourse, and for each model text, you should also focus on literary devices. Characterization, conflict, foreshadowing, irony — all those and more can be analyzed and emulated. In fact, the best way to approach this sort of analysis is by adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts:

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.

ETA Narrative #1: The Shortest Story

Author: Ernest Hemingway

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

ETA Narrative #2: 50-Word Short Story

Author: Michael Lawrie

First Impressions

Beth: Socialist, vegan, Amnesty volunteer, and generally lovely girl. Her band wore the Swastika, SS badge, and the Totenkopf — so she did, too.

Walking home after a gig, she felt the blade slide in, cold then warm.

The police dismissed her as just another dead Nazi. Her killer was happy to have done his bit.

first_impressions (1)

This is the original, unedited version.

ETA Narrative #3: Short Fiction

Author: Stuart Dybek

Sunday at the Zoo

We decided to stop drinking and spend Sunday at the zoo. It was going nicely until she worked herself up over the observation that it was a horrible thing to cage the animals.

“That’s not very profound,” I said, “everybody who goes to the zoo feels that sometime.”

“Oh, you cruel ********2,” she screamed, “I’m not everybody!”

She bellied over the guardrail and flung herself against the bars of the wolves’ cage.
Three wolves had been circling and as soon as she touched the bars they froze, fur
bristling along their spines.

She had her arms stuck in between the bars up to her shoulders and as much of her face as she could wedge in yelling, “Eat me! Eat me!” to the wolves.

Just that week the newspapers had carried an account of how a small girl had an arm gnawed off – she’d reach in to pet them and one wolf held it while the other ate. It was, in fact, what had led us, along with the crowd, relentlessly to the wolves’ cage.

But the wolves held their ground, snarling, stiff-legged.

An attendant came running down the aisle between the fence and cages and grabbed her by the hair and throat, wrestling her back. She locked her arms around the bars and he kept
slapping her face with a thick, purplish slab of meat he must have been feeding to one of the animals. 

“I’ll give you, ‘Eat me, Eat me,’” he grinned, kicking her down.

At that instant all three wolves rushed against the bars so that they shook, and you could hear their teeth breaking on the metal. Their bloodied snouts jabbed through, snapping at air.

“Stop abusing that woman,” I shouted from the crowd.

Here is a PDF of the original story, with a second bit of flash-fiction attached: “Billy’s Girl,” by Gordon Jackson.

Emulation: Narrative Writing

The last step is to emulate one of the three 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. This bit of profanity has been edited out, with sincerest apologies to Mr. Dybek’s original text. We have to tread lightly in a high school. There’s no . ↩

One Comment

Exemplary Feedback

  By Skill-Building, Space Explainers, Triage

The following three emails were sent on November 21 at 7:51 AM, 8:09 AM, and 8:16 AM, respectively. The assignment in question is this one:

SWOT Analysis

My response is essential reading for any student using the makerspace. It covers, among other things, the value and universality of the skills and traits of grade abatement. It highlights the kind of feedback used in this space, too.

Student’s Email: 7:51 AM

Mr Eure,

I want to be completely honest and open. I am absolutely BAFFLED by this SWOT Analysis. I have no idea what my strengths are, I don’t know how to organize this information, I don’t know what questions to answer because the article that was given is mostly work related and it confuses me.

Even if I could come up with my strengths, I don’t know how to word them properly. I don’t exactly understand how I can explain my own strengths and weaknesses, I think sometimes my weaknesses are that I do not use my strengths to the full extent that I can. Why I do that? I don’t have the answer to that. What strengths am I limiting myself in using? I also don’t have the answer to that.

Every website I look up only further confuses me, and they are all ad-ridden and barely load. I am truly baffled, that is the only word I can use to describe my current state. I really don’t understand this at all. I think one of my weaknesses is SWOT analyzing.

Thank you for reading in advance,

[Anonymous]

My Reply: 8:09 AM

One of your strengths is amenability, which includes asking for help like you have here. You’re also self-aware enough to admit when you’re confused or lost — a real strength, especially when so many folks feel pressure to be perfect all the time.

To adapt a SWOT analysis to academics — to student life — you need to think about school as a company. Its products are the students themselves. More specifically, it’s about work to produce that student. Your job is to make yourself.

Think of strengths and weaknesses in terms of GAP skills and traits. Those are universal. They apply to everything — so much so that we were able to draw analogies yesterday, using those universal skills and traits, between our work and everything from soccer to waitressing to playing in a band. Use that language. Look at your amenability, assiduousness, self-efficacy, etc., and recognize that you absolutely have strengths from that list.

Then recognize that strengths and weaknesses are elements you control. That’s the distinction that works best for me: a strength can be honed, and a weakness can be mitigated. We control those, at least to a certain extent. Opportunities, on the other hand, are of our control. So are threats. All we can do is prepare for them, taking advantage of opportunities and navigating threats.

In our class, you have the opportunity to write me like you have here, and you’ll get immediate feedback. That’s outside of your control; if I don’t check my email, or if I never invite you to work interstitially in the first place, you can’t force it to happen. But you can take advantage of the opportunity that is there. Similarly, you can’t do anything about this holiday break. For five days (since today, Wednesday, isn’t a full day of school), you don’t have face-to-face time with your peers and me in this makerspace. That’s a threat to continuity, momentum, and the best kind of feedback, which is always given in person. You can’t change the calendar. But you can reach out, as you have, for interstitial help.

Which brings me to your most obvious strength: critical thinking and metacognition. Look at the set of universal skills and traits, which pair those and frame them in terms of “problem-solving in an authentic context.” It also says that “you strive to make that thinking as transparent as possible.” That’s what you’ve done by sending an email: You’ve made your thinking transparent, asked the kinds of questions that lead to helpful feedback, and opened yourself up to further critical thinking and metacognition. That’s a real strength! It is, in fact, the most important strength to have, when you feel lost or confused. It’s easy to dodge responsibility — out of embarrassment or frustration or fear — and blame others. It’s much harder to do what you’ve done, which is to communicate effectively in writing in order to get help.

And just look at that last sentence: You’ve demonstrated strength in effective communication, writing (especially the idea of “mak[ing] thinking clear”), amenability, and self-awareness. All through a single email.

If it’s okay with you, I’m going to take your name off of your email and use it, alongside my response, as an example for all students. That, too, gets at a strength: collegiality and empathy. You have strength in both, and this would be another way for you to demonstrate, as anonymously as you choose, the “[e]mpathy [that] animates and facilitates the collaborative environments that drive innovation.” That, too, is from the list of universal skills and traits.

Thank you for reaching out,

Mr. Eure

Student’s Reply: 8:16 AM

Thank you very much for your timely response!

This helps a lot, especially with comparing a school to a company. That makes the questions on the link you provided in the instructional post make much more sense. I would be okay with you using the email as an example, I always find that others student’s emails and your responses help me understand things more clearly and I would want to be able to provide the same for my peers.

2 Comments

SWOT Analysis

  By Grade Abatement, Organization: Getting Things Done, Triage, Units

Network of Possible Wanderings

To create the best version of you, you must become an expert in your own learning. You’ve done a considerable amount of metacognitive work already, but there is always more to do. This time, we’re looking to expand your “network of possible wanderings,” a term used by Teresa Amabile to define expertise:

Continue reading

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Pause: The Big Sky

  By Space Explainers, Triage

If you’re reading this as a student, it’s likely because you are being asked to complete an activity like a SWOT analysis or a blueprint for a passion project. There is sometimes a question about when, in our makerspace, we will get to the so-called “real work” of English. This is a response to that question, and it is written to help even those who already know the answer.

The TL:DR is that the makerspace is dedicated to building habits and developing substructural skills and traits. English is about reading, thinking, and writing; you’ve been immersed in the Humanities since you entered the room. We must occasionally focus on a skill or trait in order to better read a novel or write an essay. We must dedicate the time to putting those skills and habits of mind into practice.

Continue reading

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For Honors Students: Sufficient vs. Insufficient Work

  By Space Explainers

This posts grapples with sufficient and insufficient writing in Honors classes, which means it is built adjacent to another post:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

Start there, and keep all of that feedback in mind. This post was originally written for an AP English Language and Composition course, but it should work for any course with Honors- or college-level expectations.

General Feedback: “The Age of the Essay”

This is a common text in our course, both for practical and philosophical applications. The prompt for a response usually looks like this:

Read and respond to “The Age of the Essay.” The instructional post is here, with links to the essay in a few different formats; you can also find the materials you need under the “Education” unit in Google Classroom. Your response should probably not be an essay itself. It is more likely that you will have notes, annotations, short responses, etc., to copy and attach here. Ask questions about this in class and online.

Meanwhile, you should look to publish some of your writing. You can collaborate with me and your peers to apply Graham’s practical advice. Hopefully, you will be able to find the river in some of your observations and insights, and that will give you an essay that deserves to be shared. Copy any links to these Medium posts (or to any other social media publishing platform) in a comment here or on the instructional website.

The examples of student writing below were written around Halloween in 2018, and the focal point of our discussions that week was the last sentence of the first paragraph. Those notes, annotations, short responses, etc., should always shift us toward an essay response. The “probably not” in the third instructional sentence changed.

The notes, etc., are still critical, of course. Here’s what it looks like on my end when students submit digital annotations:

Know that any comments left no an essay in Google Docs also appear on my end when sorting evidence. I can see any attachments to an assignment, too, and click easily between them.

This example will earn credit, sure, but there’s not much feedback to give. During class, I can help you annotate. Before the deadline, I can give you feedback on annotations. Otherwise, again, it earns credit, in the sense that it fulfills a requirement, but it doesn’t propel us toward authentic writing.

As AP students, you need to push more. Ask questions, seek clarification, and write as much as you can. You can all produce essays like this in the amount of time you’re given:

You aren’t seeing the whole thing, of course, but the point is to share the feedback with everyone. I’m able to give that kind of feedback because the work pretty much demands it. It’s thorough and insightful enough to help in a number of ways, as my comment indicates.

Here’s another response that works:

Why is it that we have been taught to do what we’ve been told since we were small toddlers and now out of nowhere, this guy named Paul Graham tells us to not write the way we were told in school? Graham tells us to question things that seem wrong, but to me, Graham’s philosophy on how to write an essay seems wrong. He is telling us how to write a “real” essay, but at what point do school essays turn into real essays? If I wrote a “real” essay instead of a “school” essay and turned it in as a high school assignment, would I get a good grade still? If Graham is correct in his philosophy about essays, why have I never heard of it before? Is it because not enough people question everyday things? At what point do you stop questioning? If Graham tells us to question things that seem wrong, how do you know what seems wrong?

So much of this is great! It’s not an essay, but it accompanies a lot of notes and annotations. The most interesting thing to me is that grades are underpinning the central question about what a student is allowed to do in school. That’s important. But I’d rather talk about this: “If Graham is correct in his philosophy about essays, why have I never heard of it before? Is it because not enough people question everyday things?”

Yes, that’s exactly it. The point of innovation is to break a paradigm in a way that leads to success. Success in school is becoming who you’re meant to be — hokey, still absolutely true — and in being skilled enough to live a good life. Remind yourself of our purpose in here by reading this again, start to finish:

AP English Language & Composition Syllabus: 2018-2019

Graham’s not the only person to suggest that school might not have evolved to reflect what truly helps students. The history of anti-establishment rhetoric in education is long and storied1. And the only way to change an establishment is to question it.

Here is another screenshot of feedback, this time for a student who wondered in their first sentence if the essay was “rambling”:

This is why it is often so critical to write more, even if it feels unfocused in the moment. You can stumble across a a line like that one: “That’s math with words.” An essay could shape itself almost entirely around that line.

Here’s another screenshot of feedback, attached to a student’s work:

I’m going to embed a lot more screenshots, because you need to learn from each other, not just me. You can do that interstitially. If you start to ask questions and engage each other this way, you’ll see results almost immediately.

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General Feedback: Short Essays

It’s important, obviously, for you to start using the space differently, and not just to work harder from bell to bell. You must be more efficient and effective with each other. For instance, you were asked to read this instructional post, which was assigned as part of the original Paul Graham post. Here’s how it looked in your browser:

Not enough of you clicked through to read that. At least one person did, however, and wrote about it:

Splitting the atom refers to breaking apart a community. This meaning in learning and collaborating with other people. Ken Robinson is advising against splitting up. Collaborating and working with others is so important, and reading about it this year I have realized that. In the video we watched earlier in class, he explained why. Maybe you don’t have the right idea or you need help. Sometimes, you need another person’s opinion. The table I sit at has recently gotten bigger, and I have learned more about these people. [One] helps me a lot with my writing because we are very similar and use a lot of the same techniques. Collaboration is very important in learning about yourself, helping others, and improving your writing. Having a plan and putting in effort into the class makes it easier to collaborate with people and help them realize the purpose of these assignments or even the purpose of smaller things like reading. By putting in effort in my own work I can them help others.

Analysis can be confusing, because you don’t want to over-analyze something and read too much into it. You can improve by studying others, and reading their writing and even the analysis of that. “You need to walk a sometimes fine line between refining what you do and overthinking it, between having knowledge of the discrete elements of, e.g., writing or collegiality, and obsessing over minutiae.” Overthinking is something that I suffer from a lot. I tend to overthink things and then I over-analyze my writing. I get nervous that it isn’t as good as I think it is or that I won’t make sense. I need to be careful about reading too much into my own writing and overthinking what I know sounds good or is right.

That’s one of the strongest students in the space this year, and someone who, at their current pace, will earn a profile score of 9 all year. That’s an average of 100 in a college-level course. Why? Because they are writing about collaboration and doubt and overthinking in response to an instructional post that is making them better at tackling all of those things. They are actively looking for the branching pathways. They are writing constantly.

As another example, again in concert with that post on maximizing your time, here is what one of you wrote around 10/24/18:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F11%2F48-Hour-Essay-AP-Example.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

That’s a 48-hour essay, more or less. If you read when you’re asked to read and write when you’re asked to write, you will be able to produce thoughtful and meaningful responses at this pace. It will feel like you are exploring authentic ideas that affect you personally because that’s exactly what you are doing.

That same student also wrote this, which highlights what I mean:

Psychonaut: Greek, meaning “a sailor of the soul.” Quite obviously a lofty description, but it is Greek, so it’s neither surprising or entirely inaccurate. To avoid the Greek’s love of a good drama, psychonautics can better be described as, “the means to study and explore consciousness (including the unconscious) and altered states of consciousness; it rests on the realization that to study consciousness is to transform it.” The most important part of the quote is the last part, stating that to transform or alter your consciousness you must first understand it, and this is what capable psychonauts do so well. Before the video and the research on psychonauts, I was under the impression that I would be a capable psychonaut, because I spend so much time in my own head and in made up worlds. However, after watching the video and doing more research, I have realized that I am a psychonaut, but simply a poor one. I think a good metaphor for this ties back to the etymology: “A sailor of the soul.” A capable psychonaut would be a captain of a ship floating in the mind, that would never get lost or lose its way, and always be where the captain needed it. In the sense of procrastination, the captain would position the ship in a place that would benefit the work environment, and thus the work would be done in a timely fashion. I, however, would classify myself as incapable psychonaut. I am captain of a ship that usually has no intention or placement. My boat is an exploration vessel on the infinite waves of my imagination, and it never has direction. While this is great for daydreaming and for having a good imagination, it is a poor system for procrastination, as the boat has no predetermined position. So as the deadline is approaching and the brain needs to be in the right position, the boat is not and thus it is harder to do the work. I think the key for me and for others to break the habit of procrastination it so simply give our captains a map. If we can break the habits or hack the system we have, then we can at least beat procrastination, because it cannot be erased or destroyed. Like the definition states, to understand the consciousness is to transform it. So, I and whoever else has the issue of procrastination, really needs to just think about our ships and our captains: and what they’re doing wrong.

The metaphor work here is effective because it becomes actionable. It’s an insight that leads somewhere. It’s also clever and curious, investigating etymologies and grappling with the true meaning of “capable psychonaut.”

Right now, you can check your own investment in this process. Are you skimming these excerpts? Or are you reading them carefully, looking for why these students are featured? Are you learning from them or passing them by? In that second excerpt is a lot of what you should be capable of already: to work in metaphors; to explore your own insight; to grapple with what you’ve read, specifically and repeatedly; to make the connections between what you read and write; and to learn more about yourself, purposefully and honestly, again and again.

Here’s another essay, this one from 10/25/18, from a student who regularly receives feedback because of how hard they work:

I’m responding to them here, not through Google, because this student will read this post. They’ll see their work being celebrated, and they’ll feel validated. Then I can say this:

They are successful because they see the connections between all three short essays, the overall goal of the work you’re doing, and the need to distinguish between each step. There’s even a link to a previous essay. But the real strength is the insight, which comes from open-mindedness and assiduousness. The idea of being a “selective psychonaut” is clever and original. It’s a perfect qualifier for metacognitive habits.

They even move toward a plan in the final paragraph, noting that this is the real purpose of writing three times on what is ostensibly the same subject. That, too, speaks to a careful consideration of what we’re studying and why.

The Takeaway: Teach Each Other

One reason to compile all these examples of sufficient writing, on top of a previous all-purpose post on the same subject, is to give some of you the models you need. You can emulate what you read here from your peers. In that way, those peers are teaching you. They’re providing an emulative guide.

What you must all endeavor to do now, however, is to teach each other more actively, and to ask for help more regularly. Seek out students who seem to be successful. Look at their feedback. What have they been told to do? What comments have been left on their writing? Use them as proxies for your own work.

Remember that feedback in here works differently. At its peak, it will be as effective and efficient as anything else, but your investment determines that peak.

  1. Try this one by John Taylor Gatto, if you have a few minutes. It’s good. ↩

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Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

  By Grade Abatement, Triage

When any teacher using the makerspace remarks that a student’s work is insufficient, that really means that the work is not substantial enough to garner feedback. Often this remark is made in person; occasionally, it is flipped online as part of general feedback.

The trick, if there is one, is that students don’t need to be told when work is insufficient. They need only self-awareness, integrity, and a post or two like the one you’re reading now.

Time Enough

The point of a makerspace is to create something meaningful. Look at this section of our skills and traits:

This is the reading/thinking/writing of all learning. Many assignments in English, of course, focus on writing, and with good reason:

Writing gets us at the truth, and sometimes the capital-T Truth, while making our understanding clearer and our learning more permanent. The writing must be substantial, as a result, which is why students are always given enough time, in and out of class, to do their work.

This goes hand-in-gnarled-hand with the lecture-as-instruction-post on working harder, because all work in our space needs to reflect the time allotted to it. This isn’t subjective. In a grade-abated course, it’s more like a sorites paradox: when a heap becomes a heap. It’s obvious when the work is substantial.

What follows are examples based on common English assignments.

Example: Essential Questions

Essential questions are a staple of English classrooms. They invite us to consider timeless issues, personal beliefs, and societal norms. The most common assignment, at least at first, is to respond freely to the questions — to write, for a class period or more, without worrying about anything but getting ideas down.

Here is a set of essential questions used in several units in our space:

  1. To what extent can any of us trust our senses?
  2. To what extent can any of us trust our memories?
  3. How do ignorance, knowledge, and happiness interact for us? In other words, would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable?
  4. To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
  5. In what ways are any of us ever truly alone?
  6. To what extent are people naturally self-destructive? What does it mean if we are?
  7. At what point and for what reasons should a group stop an individual from doing whatever he or she wants?

These seven questions were assigned to a junior-level English class on October 31, 2018. Students had three days in class to write, with encouragement to expand on their ideas at home.

Here is an example of insufficient work:

Here is another example of insufficient work:

It is not obvious to every student, without context, that these responses are insufficient. The questions are answered, and the assignment is checked off. But a single response to those questions ought to be this long:

Notice that writing more led this student to something interesting. That’s the power of an essential question: Writing more almost always leads to something more interesting. Writing more almost always justifies the effort.

Example: Short Essays

What if the prompt asks for an essay? In October of 2018, students in various classes were given a series of prompts based on this instructional post.

Here’s what is possible with one day of writing and a day to finish at home:

The point of an essay, sometimes, is to practice the act of writing. It’s to prepare for a discussion. It’s to freeze understanding. 850+ words is possible, and the more often a student pushes toward saying more, the more possible it becomes.

This is also acceptable:

That’s the comment I left, too, to highlight this point: A short essay can be 800 words or much shorter, but it has to look like an essay. It has to have a purpose and a shape. It needs to have a reason to exist beyond the assignment.

This is not an essay:

There is one original sentence in that. The rest is quoted material. That quoted material could be turned into something, though, and that’s the real loss: More substantial writing would almost certainly produce an opportunity for feedback. That the subject of these essays is akrasia and procrastination just highlights the problem.

Here’s another example:

I’m using this to highlight my response to the student. They’ve taken issue with the number, as you can see, but that number has context only through the copious instructions and explanations here. This is also a common refrain: that substance ought to trump length, and that writing just to pad the length is a bad practice. It is. But for most of us, there’s a simple truth: Substance almost always comes from length.

Writing succinctly is a goal. Brevity with precise insight is a goal. It takes a long time and a lot of practice to reach that goal. A half-page essay that mostly summarizes an article has not reached that goal. Writing more, when the assignment asks for it, is a way to garner more feedback and better direction for the writing. The point is to get feedback, improve, and work toward being succinct and precise. It’s the rarest student who excels at that from the start.