Author: Mr. Eure

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2020: In-Person/Remote Schedules

  By 2020-2021, Distance Learning, Space Explainers

Read these posts first:

2020 In-Person/Remote Class Schedules

The single-sheet schedules posted separately to Google Classroom are available by period in this folder:

Note that these schedules are designed to give us structure and predictability; we will follow them closely, but they will not be rigidly enforced. There is built-in flexibility.

See below for nonspecific versions of the in-person and remote schedules. See the folder above for your specific period’s times.

In-Person Learners

Use the first three minutes to set up your workspace and to complete the Daily Record: Self-Report form.

The next 15 minutes are dedicated to direction instruction. Take notes, ask questions, and otherwise interact with in-person instruction, which will include lectures, assignment adjustments, and general feedback. This will be delivered synchronously to remote learners.

After direct instruction, you will have 15 minutes, sometimes more, to ask questions, to receive individualized help, or to begin the day’s task. This also applies to remote learners, who will interact with the teacher via chat.

You will then take a five-minute break. This happens exactly 33 minutes into the period. During this break, remote learners will log off, so the teacher will answer their last-minute questions over chat. You can take off your mask, have a snack or drink, etc, as long as you remember not to talk to each other while unmasked.

Note: As long as it is not during direct instruction, you can schedule your own breaks throughout the period by using e-hallpass. You may leave to get a drink of water, to go to the bathroom, or to take a quick walk.

The next 25 minutes of the period are dedicated to in-person work. This includes individual conferences, small-group instruction, and class discussions. Students will help set the agenda.

With three minutes left in the period, you should pack up your workspace. Leave the space as clean as you found it. Ask any last-minute questions.

Remote Learners

Use the first three minutes to set up your at-home workspace and to complete the Daily Record: Self-Report form. Most importantly, log into Google Meet.

Note: You must write in the chat window of Google Meet that you are present. Chats are archived.

The next 15 minutes are dedicated to direction instruction. This is delivered synchronously to in-person learners, so you should follow those guidelines: Take notes, ask questions, and otherwise interact with in-person instruction, which will include lectures, assignment adjustments, and general feedback.

Note: The camera will initially show the teacher speaking at the front of the room; after that, materials will be presented directly to your device.

After direct instruction, you will have 15 minutes, sometimes more, to ask questions, to receive individualized help, or to begin the day’s task. Use the chat function for this. You must also monitor the chat for any additional comments from the teacher.

Note: You may choose to keep your camera on or off during remote learning. Keep the mic off. You must write in the chat at the beginning and end of your session. The classroom mic will remain on for direct instruction and radial feedback.

When you reach the 33-minute mark of the period, you may choose to log off. You may also stay for the entire 66-minute period, or for any portion of it.

Note: You must write in the chat that you have no further questions before logging off. Chats are archived.

The next 25 minutes of the period are dedicated to in-person work. You may stay logged into Google Meet for the rest of the period. When you log off, you must still write in that chat that you are doing so.

With three minutes left in the period, you must log out of Google Meet to allow the teacher to archive the chat.

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Terms and Conditions

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

Dima Yarovinsky, “I Agree” (2018)

Meeting the Course on Its Own Terms

Every instructional post, however long or short, has a thesis1. The thesis of the post you are now reading:

You must meet this course on its own terms.

But it’s not just that you must meet the course on its own terms; you must also stop yourself from substituting your own terms and using your own assumptions.

This is true for every stakeholder, not just students. Innovation requires a good-faith investment from parents, administrators, interested teachers, and anyone else who cares about student learning. There is too much bad faith out there already.

You can start with this quotation:

The challenge is to set up systems that allow students to follow their interests. People tend to dichotomize approaches in education: The teacher is either telling students what to do, or standing back and letting them figure it out. I think that’s a false choice: The issue is not structure versus no structure, but rather creating a different structure. Students need to be exposed to new ideas and learn how to persist. They also need support.
~Tony Wagner, Creating Innovators

This course uses just such a unique structure.

For the first part of the year, students learn how to learn. They are exposed to new ideas and helped to master important skills and traits. They explore the expected reading and writing of ELA as they learn universal tools and processes.

During the first part of the year, individual feedback is given alongside a framework of instructional, interstitial writing. Students are assessed through a unique, profile-based system based on universal skills and traits.

For the second part of the year, students put their skills and traits to work on a series of projects in the Humanities: reading and responding to literature; writing research-driven essays; public speaking and letter-writing; and the student-driven “genius hour” projects that can be tied into the final exam.

I would usually fill paragraphs like those last three with hyperlinks to demonstrate that each element of this structure supports the rest in improving student learning. That is what you’ll see everywhere else in this post, as well as everywhere else on this site.

In this case, however, the lack of links is there to emphasize the thesis we’re working with: You must meet this course on its own terms, and you cannot replace those terms and conditions with your own.

In Good Faith

You can always look to the testimonials and history of the course to dispel any misinformation or disinformation. If you act in good faith, honestly looking to understand what we do, you can avoid low-information sepsis.

Even when you are informed, you must still face down your assumptions. If you’re a student, some of those assumptions are that you will be spoon-fed information; that you will be asked to regurgitate facts and insight on tests; and that the teacher should perform in front of you, Keating-style, to hold your attention.

In this course, the teacher interacts with students constantly and responsively through writing. This is part and parcel of the course. We meet in person regularly; there is constant, feedback on student work; and every period is designed as a workshop in which students collaborate with the teacher and peers. The use of the written word, however, is paramount: Writing is the most essential act in the Humanities.

This is also about teaching in a new way instead of capitulating to outdated assumptions about learning. I’m thinking specifically about “Teaching as an Amusing Activity,” the tenth chapter in Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death, which gives us the following quotation:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

That is embedded on the homepage, in the course syllabus, and throughout the course. It is the essential philosophy of effective education: a focus on the process, not just the product.

Postman goes on in that chapter to explain that performative, entertainment-based education is like watching television — a passive act that mostly teaches you how to watch, not learn. If you’re a student, your learning cannot passive, because it is most importantly about you. You must be an active agent in the process of creating those “enduring attitudes.”

This course rejects the “rapid emergence of a new education based on the speed-of-light electronic image,” as Postman predicted decades ago, and embraces instead “the slow-moving printed word.” The computer screen is just the medium for the written word.

Look at our guide to writing, especially at the quotations that are used to illustrate each universal component:

The first quotation is in Latin and elevated to the top of the guide. It is the philosophy of a Humanities makerspace: Verba volant, scripta manent. Spoken words fly away, while written words remain.

And that brings us back to one of the most ineluctable terms and conditions of the course:

You must read what is written.

This isn’t unique to a makerspace, of course. Textbooks must be read, lectures must be heard, videos must be watched, etc. Whatever a teacher uses for instruction must be honored in good faith.

The difference here is what this kind of interstitial instruction requires — and what it does to help students.

The first advantage of this kind of carefully constructed instruction is that it teaches students how to write and how to read. This is Dewey’s idea of enduring habits and self-efficacy: It is more important to build skills and traits than to internalize knowledge.

So the instruction is not just informational. It adds more to student learning than other forms of flipped instruction.

The post you are reading right now is an example: It is designed to model effective writing and to strengthen close reading. It repeatedly invites students to learn more about philosophy. It defines new vocabulary. It varies style and rhetoric to invite emulation.

The second advantage is that the work stacks. The more students read this kind of writing, the faster their writing and reading improves. Paul Graham puts it this way: “[T]he more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto — which means you accumulate knowledge at what’s colloquially called an exponential rate.”

These posts are meant to build habits, not simply impart facts and directions. This is the key.

Contrasting Space

A contrast is found on the whiteboards used regularly in the physical classroom. (You can take a tour of that space online.) Whiteboard writing is temporary by design, unlike everything else written to students.

Here is an example of the whiteboards in Room 210, taken from the week of September 21, 2020 (and presented with all the glares and discoloration you’d expect):

The first whiteboard allows us to talk in person, early in the year, about how feedback works. It is a visual reference for me to use during discussions and individual conferences, too.

The phrase “feedback chain” is a reference to a post: The Feedback Chain. That post is essential reading.

The metaphor on the whiteboard is “[c]loning the teacher and instruction,” with a note that this is done “via flipped and interstitial writing, video, and audio.” This is a summary of how this site and most other feedback works: It effectively clones the teacher, freeing up class time for more individual and small-group discussion.

The second whiteboard is an overview of current course work, circa 9/23/20. Since this is also from early in the year, it contains significant emphasis on the backbone of the course — which is, again, the way a student interacts with letters, posts, guides, and other teacher-written materials.

That metaphor — a fairly clichéd “backbone” metaphor — is also found in the letter given to students at the start of school in 2020:

Letters like that work on multiple levels. One is, again, to teach writing and reading through exposure; another is to emphasize the terms of the course in order to invite more reading, thinking, and writing. Here are the first three paragraphs of that letter, reprinted because they evoke Neil Postman’s prescient analysis of education:

This letter will be read to you in class. It is available online, too, to illustrate its central argument, which is that reading letters like this is the most critical skill in our course and the most important element of your growth in the skills and traits that matter most.

The backbone of this course is its instructional method, which is based in reading and taking notes on what you read. The difference between students who benefit tremendously from this space and students who struggle is their investment in this instructional method.

You also have access to face-to-face meetings, of course, plus scheduled visits to office hours, virtual meetings in class, and just about any form of written back-and-forth you can think of. The online instructional method does not exist in a vacuum, and there are dozens of ways to make it work for you or to supplement it with additional instruction.

The bolded clause is another condition of the course: If you invest in reading the posts, letters, guides, and so on, you will improve the skills and traits that matter most. For students, this is the backbone of learning. You’ll gain the information you need, but you’ll more importantly deepen your ability to learn.

In other words, it’s not just about becoming a better reader and write, but improving in all the skills and traits that matter.

2020 also featured the first attempt at an FAQ driven by student questions early in the year:

Each response models effective writing, and the interlocking links and references promote close reading. The length of the FAQ requires students to organize their time, and the new ideas and insights require critical thinking.

The FAQ is, therefore, designed not just to answer questions but to teach students more about how they learn.

Contrast this with more forms of flipped instruction, especially most video-based instruction, which transmits information and insight that is independent of the medium used. The medium isn’t the message; the goal of a video lecture, for instance, is not to help students create their own video lectures.

Here, the medium is the message: Every written post, guide, FAQ response, etc, is constructed to model effective writing for students. Each one is written specifically to invite emulation. Each is also written with meta-commentary to identify what students should be learning.

That’s why a post might link to the definition of terms a student might not know2. It’s why the use of rhetorical strategies is made transparent, with definitions or examples provided through meta-commentary. It’s a different kind of writing.

The Conclusion

The conclusion is a proven one:

The more students read the instructional writing of this course, the more they will improve as students.

For non-student stakeholders, the conclusion would be that delving into the course writings will erase every concern and illuminate every success. A good-faith effort to learn about what we do will reward that faith with ironclad data and evidence; a bad-faith dismissal of what we do reinforces ignorance and resistance.

If you are a student, each and every letter, post, guide, and comment is designed to expose you to effective writing so you can learn from it. It’s not just about embracing the slow pace of the written word or deepening your thinking; it’s about the oldest form of learning, which is to copy what you see.

This is the age of the essay, as people like Paul Graham noted 15 years ago. It is the age of online discourse. In here, you read that kind of writing as part of each assignment, which builds the skills and traits you need. You read what you are later asked to write.

The reading must be pervasive, too. It needs to be part of every day. That is why the term for this is interstitial. You can access the course at any time, from any device that can get onto the Web.

Look up the literal definition of the term interstitial and apply it to your learning. You can read a post, FAQ, or letter whenever you have a chunk of time. You can read the text in sections, jump from one section to another, or linger over one section until it is clear. You can ask questions privately or publicly. You can read answers on your own time, too.

That means that you do not need to be physically present in a classroom to benefit from the instruction. You do not always need to consume the instructional materials in one sitting, either. You can be anywhere, and as long as you have a device with an Internet connection, you can practice close reading, absorb strategies for effective writing, and deepen your knowledge in the Humanities.

Along with that interstitial instructional model, we have grade abatement and makerspace-based projects to weather almost any storm. These are our building blocks. They work in concert. It all rests on the writing, however.

I think the best way to understand this is to read what students gain from this approach. This, too, emphasizes writing as central. Another of Neil Postman’s insights is that writing, because of its permanence, gets us closer to the truth; for students, their own writing is the vehicle for truth.

That said, it is also important to highlight what students stand to lose, especially now:

A Glass Case Full of Lost Treasures and Fossils

  1. The two linked examples also demonstrate the way instruction is explicitly differentiated. Students can access the course at a level that is appropriate for them. If there is a lengthier, more detailed version of an instructional post, it is for stronger or more invested students. The depth is responsive to student needs and interest. ↩

  2. In this “Terms and Conditions” post, for instance, you’ve gotten prescient and ineluctable. Vocabulary is about encountering words in context, as one of the FAQ responses details; an instructional text, however, might link directly to the definition. ↩

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On Reflection & Metacognition

  By Grade Abatement, Skill-Building, Space Explainers

Note: This is adapted from two posts written way back in 2011-2012. The focus on grades is the most obvious difference.

Making a Distinction

While we often use them this way, the words metacognition and reflection are not exactly interchangeable. In brief:

  1. Metacognition is thinking about thinking.
  2. Self-reflection is a more general (and somewhat existential) kind of introspection.

The most important habits of mind are reflection and metacognition, and you should engage in both after every task. The reason is simple: To become a better reader, writer, and thinker requires an understanding of how one reads, writes, and thinks; and to inculcate that reflex takes significant time in and out of class.

An immediate example of metacognition would be to assess your reaction to the hyperlink in that last paragraph. Clicking on inculcate defines the term for you. Did you notice the word? Did you click on it? Reflecting on the action you took invites metacognition about your approach to reading. You should also recognize, as you think about that link, that this kind of interactive self-awareness is now part of the way you must learn to read:

Well, Why Read?

Again, pay attention to how you respond to an embedded post like that. Do you open it? Do you set it aside for later? Have you seen it before, and if so, to what extent do you pause to remember what it says? Now consider what you do with this:

This video, which is one level of a lesson on self-control taught in this space, may be more accessible to you. Why? If you watch the video, how do you process its message? Toward the end, for instance, you’ll hear a reference to “capable psychonauts” and see this:

These are universal skills, and your habits around them will determine a lot of your future success. More immediately, of course, reflection and metacognition are useful in all English work, from literature to project-based learning. You may have a weekly requirement, for instance, and that may even be a graded requirement (since abatement isn’t total, and no one can change a system entirely).

Start with our universal writing process. It requires metacognitive self-awareness to function, because the feedback loop built into does not rely on grades. See the last few sections for details:

(The instructional post on the writing process delves even more into the art of writing.)

Here is an excerpt from the end of that writing guide:

In the Humanities makerspace, we use unique systems to generate radial, proxy, and direct feedback, as seen here: tinyurl.com/210feedback.

We focus on process and growth. We avoid scores and rubrics outside of test prep.

Feedback comes from reflection and metacognition throughout and at the end of the process. Consider, as an example: sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=1059.

Feedback also comes from an audience found beyond the walls of the classroom. There are many options for writers now. Medium is one. It takes moments to register and to set up a reading list of essays on subjects you choose by writers not much different from you.

Then you can write and publish, embracing a hypertextual and interstitial environment, as seen here: tinyurl.com/210interstitial.

It’s another idea from Paul Graham: “Who are you to write about x? You are what you write.” There is no barrier to publishing for a wide and diverse audience.

Your search for an authentic audience helps us to discuss metacognition and reflection. Again, we can focus on essays while recognizing that all Humanities work benefits from the same level of self-analysis.

Effective reflection and metacognition is both a key and a blueprint for you and your collaborators. You can unlock better feedback, and you can design the best final product.

You want to avoid this:

After reading it over, I noticed that it was a little rough around the edges and could easily be improved quite a bit.  Another factor of my essay that should be touched upon as well would be my overall incorporation of the documents into my essential question.  My analysis of the documents themselves was weak, and I found that I didn’t use them to my full advantage to help prove my argument. (Total length of reflection: ≈200 words)

And this:

I thought my essay was great, and I handed it in disappointed in my score as has been the routine in this class. When I went back into my essay for revision, I didn’t really change anything major, but I edited a number of errors I found in the grammatical bowels of the language, and changed some words and phrases here and there that I thought were lost in meaning. (Total length of reflection: ≈300 words)

Instead, you want to reflect and be metacognitive like this:

The first error to correct was the reference to “bumps in the road”.  From this reference I immediately jumped into a scenario with a zombie apocalypse, making the connection weak and illogical to the reader.  So, I reworded the third sentence and then added in another sentence to build the degree of trouble from a small obstacle to total destruction.  Also, I added in another sentence after introducing the idea of a zombie apocalypse to better preface the Braunbeck quote.  Finally, I fixed the penultimate sentence in the first paragraph in order to clarify my ideas. (Total length of reflection: ≈1500 words)

Or this:

I decided to revisit the topic of appearance-changing technology that I touched upon in the introduction, and have the new paragraph focus on how appearance is important in society, sometimes more so than the mind is. This may seem silly, but I wanted to hear other’s ideas so I asked my essential question at dinner to see what my family thought. My mom instantly brought up appearance and my dad said that recent presidents have been consistently taller than their competitive candidates during their elections. I gathered that I was on the right track as my ideas matched up with others, and also decided to research the pattern my dad had discussed. Then the question came up as to if I should cite statistical information that I find on the internet. Should I? (Total length of reflection: ≈900 words)

The weaker examples could be about any paper and any prompt. They require collaborators to dig up the original draft, to read it again, and then to compare each sentence to the equivalent sentence in the revision.

More importantly, weak reflection and metacognition does not help you, the writer, to improve. It is perfunctory. In our makerspace, there is no benefit to perfunctory self-analysis, as you can see in the step-by-step guide to grade abatement: tinyurl.com/step-by-step-gap.

What you want, instead, is actionable insight into how you learn. You want to learn something about how you learn that improves you, or that deepens a strength, or that cuts out a weakness.

You should note that this focus on metacognition is as old as education itself, and that one of the quotations on the front page of this site emphasizes this:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

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Opening-Day Questionnaire

  By Opening Salvo, Space Explainers

“Exactly so! I am a humbug.”

Illustration by W.W. Denslow, as archived here. Full illustrated e-text of L. Frank Baum’s novel here.

Pay Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain

The following questionnaire (or one very much like it) is given to students at the start of their time in the Humanities makerspace:

This is the start of a feedback chain — a connection between the students and the various innovations of the course. The answers to these questions will help to build a better form of feedback.

Most of the time, I would stick to exactly that sort of self-effacing setup: a focus on the course, not the teacher; the use of the passive voice to the point where it’s a bit stilted; and substantial hyperlinks, like the ones in that last paragraph, that emphasize the course philosophy.

This self-effacing approach has led to testimonials that talk more often about the course and the students themselves than the teacher. Any adult can jump on a desk and poorly interpret Robert Frost; it always seemed more important to push against the myth that it’s all about the teacher. Students benefit more from approaches that instill autonomy and agency.

The pendulum swings, though, and it’s important to confront mistakes and misconceptions. I started out against technology, for instance. Things change.

Over the years, I’ve tried less self-effacement. First, it was subtle, like structuring instructional posts to include references to my family; by 2019, there was an actual “About Me” page, which is now part of the introductory texts for the makerspace.

The questionnaire is there to generate the right kind of focus and feedback, but it’s also a chance to connect. Below are my answers to the same questions asked of students.

What does your writing life look like?

My writing life consists, during the school year, almost entirely of writing for students. There’s a reason for that:

Well, Why Read?

That is both an example of the kind of interstitial instruction I use and an explanation of it. It also tackles the subject of reading in a contemporary, non-academic sense.

I believe that students need the training outlined in that post, which is training in online discourse. It is a skill needed in almost every job and walk of life.

Most of what I write, however, isn’t in these posts; most of it is feedback in the form of direct comments on student work. This commentary is an overhaul of the traditional kind of feedback, which is why, as far back as 2017, I’ve had to gently rebuke rumors and ignorance about how it works. (The section on “The Hydra” addresses feedback in a makerspace.)

I also write and rewrite the foundational pieces of the course. That’s why the syllabus on the testimonial/showcase website is slightly different from this universal one, which is itself an update to the 2019 version. Grade abatement is updated whenever there is a need. There is an ongoing internal discussion of what works.

It’s an iterative process, but the basic innovations and shifts seem to be universal and adaptable. The updates to the course explained in 2016 still make sense years later.

One process note: To save time, I dictate most of this writing and feedback while commuting to and from work. It’s not as fun as listening to podcasts or music, but it became necessary when I had children of my own. Dictation is one way for you to deal with reluctance or difficulty in writing, too.

What else do you like to create?

I play and write music whenever I have time to do so. I’m teaching my own kids the basics of playing the piano and music theory.

I studied poetry and creative writing throughout college and grad school, too.

What does your reading life look like?

I read constantly. During the school year, I read student writing more than anything else; there are daily check-ins, feedback forms, full essays, smaller writing assignments, and more.

I read the news every morning and night, including as many longer non-fiction articles and essays as I can. To take breaks from all that, I read novels and other literature. In the last few years, I’ve expanded what I read to include atypical fiction, too — manga, comic books, light novels, that sort of thing.

I read along with my kids, even as they get older. We usually start and end the day by reading together.

What other media do you enjoy?

Like most parents of young kids, I know more than I ever expected to know about Paw Patrol. When I am able to put non-children’s programming on the TV, it tends to be background for school work or other responsibilities. I like horror movies quite a bit.

I value having a wide-ranging interest in almost all music and art. Here are a few I’d share with you randomly:

What is the story, so far, of your educational experience?

I was at the top of my class in high school and went to UVA on a scholarship. I got another scholarship to study education at Wake Forest, and then I got certified to teach in New York. Fewer than five years into teaching, I was interviewed in Harper’s and then won the first Milken Award in New York .

It all sounds impressive, but it’s not really important. The important story, for me, is that I was a perfectionist who struggled mightily with the impact of that perfectionism (and a host of other issues) for a long, long time.

So the story I choose to tell is this: I overhauled my own teaching because the awards and accolades didn’t matter. Grade abatement, for instance, comes from my own relationship with grades, filtered through the experience of getting older and starting my own family.

The story, for me, is that education has to change, even if the change is disruptive to the status quo. We have to change for the individual student.

Where do you plan, hope, or expect to be next year?

I’d like to see a discussion that is critical and constructive about, as Ken Robinson puts it, the habitats and habits of educational institutions. During the COVID-19 crisis, we got a series of post-mortem analyses of America:

We’re now trying to go back to normal. Innovation is giving way to the status quo. But if we value education, we all need to find our critical voices. There is such a thing as toxic positivity.

What else, if anything, would you like to write here?

I’ll embed an essay that is a useful way of conceptualizing this makerspace and its underlying shifts:

View at Medium.com

 

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Final Project/Q4 Updates

  By 2019-2020, Final Projects, Second Semester Projects

This post contains information on the end of the school year for senior students in English 12.

Q4: Pass/Incomplete

Q4 will close for seniors on June 15. On that day, each senior will receive a Pass or an Incomplete for the work done during distance learning.

Q4 does not factor into a student’s final GPA. GPA is determined by the grades for Q1–Q3.

Receiving an Incomplete will not affect graduation. Credit for English 12 is based on the grades for Q1–Q3.

See the letters sent home by administration for more information on grades, GPA, and graduation.

In English 12, passing Q4 originally required a final project, a final reflection, and consistent contact initiated by the student through email and the required daily check-in form. The deadline for project submissions was June 5.

To help students through this unprecedented time, these requirements have been eased. For students who have not yet completed a project:

  • Google Classroom submissions will be accepted late through June 12.
  • URL submissions will be accepted late through June 12.
  • The Turnitin.com deadline has been extended one week to June 12.

In addition, any student who is unable to complete a project, or who needs an alternative path to passing Q4, can earn a Pass by completing the final reflection assignment outlined in this week’s post:

Final Project: Week Seven

For most students, the focus should be on those reflection tasks. More information is available below.

Final Reflections

All forms are also posted to Google Classroom. There are three tasks.

1) Reflection: Final Project

The first Google Form is available here: https://forms.gle/HGjuBQxoTEJ9s19p6. Two of the three questions are optional.

For students who have handed in a Final Project, this is a chance to reflect on the project and to help with the student showcase explained in the next section of this post.

For students who do not have a Final Project, it is a chance to reflect on Q4.

2) Reflection: Senior Year

The second Google Form is available here: https://forms.gle/TBLjHfqaiPxL1Z5h7. All questions are optional but strongly encouraged, since they help with the third task.

For all students, this form invites insight into the last ten months, especially the strange three months we’ve just experienced, in terms of learning and growth.

Each prompt explores one of the paired universal skills and traits of learning seen here: https://tinyurl.com/universal-skills-traits. For each, students can write reflectively about experience and growth in those areas.

This form is built as a brainstorming and outlining exercise. It should lead directly into the final essay.

3) Final Reflection Essay

Use the second form to brainstorm ideas for the essay you will submit through Google Classroom. The prompt: Write about your growth as a student and person this year.

This essay should reflect the universal guide to writing: http://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes. In the spirit of that “river-like” method, you should experiment with the length, structure, and approach of the response. It does not need to be a traditional essay.

In other words, this is an “essay” in Paul Graham’s sense of the word. It’s also the last thing you’ll write in high school, and it is meant to help you find some insight into who you are and how this year might have changed you.

The key, as always, is to find the interesting and surprising approach to the subject; to write for an audience (which can be as small or large as you choose); and to publish, if possible, for that authentic audience.

Sharing this final writing response will be part of the student showcase, which is explained next.

Student Showcase

All sharing is optional and entirely up to each student. See the makerspace’s BHS site for examples from previous years.

The showcase will begin this week, as projects are submitted and we collaborate on final edits and revisions. It will continue through graduation next week.

After the graduation ceremony, authentic work still matters; we will continue, therefore, to share and showcase the final projects, essays, and other thoughts through the end of June.

Ask questions about any of these final elements below. You can also send an email or communicate directly through shared documents.

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Credit Recovery

  By 2019-2020, Distance Learning, Final Projects, Second Semester Projects

Credit Recovery

TL;DR — If you have no evidence of work by the end of this quarter, you may be given an incomplete and required to take a summer course of Edgenuity. You do not want this, so you should do the assigned work.

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Your final projects are due over the next two weeks.

To prepare for this, you’ve been asked to check in each day, to set goals based on that week’s part of the final project, and to use a feedback chain to revise and refine each step. If you fell behind over the last month, you were given two posts to help you catch up:

You also have a post about finding your motivation during this pandemic:

Finding Your Motivation

The question we must ask is this: What happens if you don’t complete any work by the end of the quarter?

Start by recognizing how hard it is to fail. In this makerspace, you are helped tremendously by the aggregate nature of grade abatement:

Clarifying Grade Abatement

A profile score of 3 becomes a 65, and that profile’s language is largely about resistance to feedback and a lack of any positive movement. That is still a “passing” score. If you do even less, even when contacted repeatedly across an entire quarter, you might fit the profile of a 2, which is a 60.

This is not a floating standard. It is a recognition of the cumulative nature of true learning and the vector-like toxicity of grades, as that “Clarifying Grade Abatement” post explains.

In other words, if you are able to do enough work to meet the criteria overall of a GAP score of 3 or 4, you have authentically and legitimately passed the course. You would be obviously weak in basic skills and traits, but that would not mean numerical failure is appropriate.

The school is also making exceptions for you during Q4 if there are extenuating circumstances. Those exceptions fit our set of universal skills and traits, too: To establish those extenuating circumstances, you have to communicate with us, show self-awareness and a sense of self-efficacy, accept feedback about your situation, and much more.

So the real question is this: What happens if you don’t complete any work by the end of the quarter and haven’t communicated about an exemption? What if you really have done nothing, even after being contacted?

Well, here is one possibility:

If you have no evidence of work by the end of this quarter, you may be required to take a summer course of Edgenuity.

As the TL;DR at the top of this post says, you do not want this, so you should do the assigned work.

About Edgenuity

Before we look at how Edgenuity works, be sure that you have read the BCSD letter sent to the community on April 16:

You will also want to have looked at the post on motivation, since it dives more deeply into what motivates you, how that shifts during distance learning, what happens if you fall behind, and much more. Some of what is written below is lifted directly from that post.

The district’s letter explains, among other things, how and why traditional grades have been eliminated for Q4. Instead of a score on your report card, you’ll be given a Pass/Incomplete (or Pass/Fail) for each course.

Recognize that you’ve lost grades as a motivator after being institutionalized for a decade or more. Removing the Skinner box would be difficult without a pandemic. You may need another extrinsic motivation.

That’s what Edgenuity can be: an extrinsic motivation for some of you. More precisely, avoiding it can be an extrinsic motivation for some of you.

If you aren’t aware of the program, here is Edgenuity’s explanation of credit recovery:

Edgenuity’s credit recovery courses are designed to help students learn at their own pace and on their own time. The flexibility and design of these courses empower students to focus on exactly the content they need to in order to catch up to their peers, recover lost credits, and graduate on time.

You can click the link for more at the official site. It is a program designed as another chance, and while that is a good thing, it is also a last resort. Your assigned English work will always offer you more choice and enjoyment.

The following examples will show you how Edgenuity works. After reading, you should understand that meeting the criteria for your assigned Q4 work will be easier and more student-centered than having to come in (virtually or not) to do Edgenuity over the summer.

Start by enlarging this screenshot of an Edgenuity unit that ends with a quiz:

This is part of the Common Core ELA curriculum for NY. You can see the units that are prescribed by the state and Edgenuity on the left side of the image. The units that are checked have been assigned; the rest have been eliminated.

If you are required to do Edgenuity, a teacher or other educator will go into the Common Core ELA curriculum, remove enough units to line up with the required hours, and then assign it to you.

Now note the time required for each lesson, unit, quiz, etc. The highlighted lesson, on sound and structure in poetry, requires an hour. That lesson is part of unit requiring more than seven hours.

The time you spend is all tracked, and you have to do all of it. You can’t skip ahead. You can’t rush. You are required to follow the program.

Zoom in on the poetry lesson:

This is an example of how you lose flexibility when you move from your assigned ELA work to Edgenuity: You must warm up, go through the instruction, do the assignment, go through the next set of instructions, review, and take a quiz, and you have to do it in exactly the prescribed order.

Edgenuity excels at this sort of structure by eliminating almost all flexibility. To generate enough data, the program can’t tailor the learning and assessment to your needs. There’s very little differentiation, especially in the moment.

That’s why doing the assigned work for Q4 is preferable: Even through the hurdles of distance learning, you have teachers and other educators racing to meet you where you are. In Edgenuity, the driving force is a computer program. You necessarily lose the feedback and attention you need.

There are humans involved in Edgenuity, of course. The quizzes and tests are controlled and assessed by the educator overseeing the curriculum. But if you are required to complete Edgenuity over the summer, that educator likely won’t be your current teacher. You’d replace someone who’s spent a year getting to know you as an individual student with someone who may never see your face.

Here is an Edgenuity lesson that includes a writing assignment:

Writing-based lessons in Edgenuity are prescribed for you, just like everything else. This one requires almost three hours. The process is rigid: You must submit your writing, get some feedback, revise the writing, etc, and if that’s all normal, the rigid time constraints are not.

Your writing units will also include quizzes, even when that kind of assessment doesn’t quite fit. Again, this is a computer program: Quizzes and time-on-task are the easiest ways to generate data. It’s not necessarily about you. It’s about getting data to analyze.

Writing in Edgenuity is assessed according to rubrics and according to universal ideas of effectiveness, just like in any ELA course. Here is one Edgenuity rubric:

The standard for effectiveness is similar to what you’d see in any English class, because writing is a universal process with modular elements. The specific vocabulary and labels change, not the core components. There is much less margin for error in Edgenuity, however, because you are working against the clock, without easy access to face-to-face feedback.

Revision, for instance, is assigned as a 30-minute process. There is less time to go back and earn more points or a higher score, and you are graded in Edgenuity, regardless of the policy in place elsewhere. You will receive scores out of 100, pandemic or not.

The work, therefore, is more regimented and less student-centered. It is less engaging. It does not easily adapt to your circumstances, and you will always receive numerical grades.

Your Motivation, Again

The goal of distance learning is to provide you meaningful opportunities to learn, flexibility in how you reach goals, and authentic projects that showcase your skills and knowledge. Your teachers and administrators — all faculty and staff — are doing what we can to get you through this unprecedented time in our lives.

That’s why you’re being assessed this quarter through a Pass/Incomplete or Pass/Fail system. You are being given the flexibility you need to handle everything else going on.

Remember, too, that you have teachers streamlining requirements and adapting instruction almost daily. As long as you make a good-faith effort to do the work, you will be given the benefit of the doubt.

In here, we actually talked at length about that good-faith contract and the effort required to be successful during distance learning:

April 1, 2020

What Edgenuity adds to the discussion is an extrinsic motivation for students who require it. You should do the work assigned this quarter, advocating for yourself along the way, in order to avoid Edgenuity.

It’s also important to note that extra chances and modifications are built into the post-COVID learning you’re doing. It’s ultimately easier for all students to do what is assigned, when it is assigned, to the best of their abilities.

There is even an understanding that making a bad choice is not always a malicious act. It rarely is, in fact. All of us succumb to procrastination and other bad habits, which is why we spent part of the fall in this makerspace talking about akrasia:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

Remember the phrase we had hanging in our room: Video meliora, proboque deteriora sequor. “I see and approve of the better, but I follow the worse.” It’s a human failing.

All of which is to say this:

You can do the English work assigned this quarter. You have time. It doesn’t matter what today’s date is. You also have a lot of folks to help you. We can tailor the work to your needs.

Feel free to ask questions below. Again, if anything about this situation changes, you’ll be informed immediately.

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Find the River: Project Options

  By Distance Learning, Final Projects, Second Semester Projects

JMW Turner, The Thames above Waterloo Bridge, c.1830-5. 

We are a few days into Week Three of this Final Project. Many of you have your topic from Week Two and are well on your way to the statement of purpose that is due Monday, May 18. This post is for any student still struggling with the first few steps of this project.

Here are this week’s resources:

The models in the second link offer many options. If you are feeling overwhelmed, however, or simply don’t know how to move forward, read on. This post will give you three more options.

Finding the River

Each of these options fulfills the requirements of the final project. The benefit now is that you could develop a statement of purpose by Monday, even if you start today1.

These options all rest on the universal writing process available for download here:

You’ll have to do some research and further reading, draft your response, generate feedback, and so on, but your project will start with the “river” writing approach we’ve used all year.

The idea here is to give you another level of help: You would choose one of the following three options, write a statement of purpose by Monday, and then be back on track for the rest of the calendar.

Ask questions in the comment section below.

Final Option #1: Three-Minute Graduation Speech

Use the universal writing guide to develop a three-minute graduation speech. You can submit this to administration for a chance to give the speech during graduation this year. Ms. Horler sent a note to you on May 6 with more information:

It’s that time of year already. We are looking for one amazing, unique and heartfelt speech for graduation. We will be hearing speeches on June 1st from 10-12. The speech needs to be under 3 minutes. If you are interested, work on a speech and email your intent. I will send you a time slot to give your speech to our panel.
Stay Well!
Ms.Horler

This speech requires a statement of purpose, some research, a draft, etc, just like any other project. Don’t let the three-minute requirement deceive you — this has a high degree of difficulty!

Resources:

  1. Writing Process: Universal Guide | tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes
  2. Commencement Address | sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=3791
Final Option #2: Open Letter or Longer Speech

Use the universal writing guide to develop an open letter or longer speech. This could be an address to the graduating class, like the three-minute speech in Option #1, but it would not be limited in scope.

You could also select a different audience for an open letter. To do this, you would use that universal writing guide. There is definite overlap here with Option #3; the difference is the concept of an open letter or speech in this one.

Note also that the goal of this letter or speech is to share it. That is not required, but it is a goal. Consider the instructional post on the end of the writing process: A specific audience beyond your teacher(s) makes the work more authentic.

Resources:

  1. Writing Process: Universal Guide | tinyurl.com/sisyphus-writes
  2. The End of the Writing Process | sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2114
Final Option #3: River Essay — Quarantine Edition

Use the universal writing guide to develop an essay. For this option, you are using the definition of essay we identified by studying Paul Graham in the fall.

Start with your observations, feelings, etc, during this quarantine. Read what others have written in the last two months. Cast a wide net, and pay attention, as Graham says, to what you’re not supposed to.

You can use Jerry Jesness’ “Floating Standard” essay as a model, if that helps your own design. Note that specific kind of research-driven essay, as  the original project explains, is about identifying and trying to solve a problem; for this final option, you do not need to do that.

Resources:

  1. This will be posted on May 13, five days before the deadline. Remember, though, that these deadlines are flexible: You can take the time you need to do this the way you’d like. ↩

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Project-Based Learning: ETA Models

  By Second Semester Projects

Before you continue into the body of this post, read “Splitting the Atom,” a teaching essay about analysis and emulation:

View at Medium.com

It should take ten minutes to read and probably another 30 minutes to click through the necessary links.

Note that you can ask questions about any of this in the comment section that follows the examples below.

Continue reading

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Finding Your Motivation

  By 22–23 Resources, Final Projects, Triage

Drive and Motivation

Grade abatement eliminates the worst of the impact of traditional grades, but there is still a score in the gradebook every three weeks or so. There just isn’t any illusion about how grades act as a vector for the most toxic parts of education.

We also have no illusions about how hard it is to make the right decision. How do you motivate yourself outside of that number?  How do you improve without a grade? And what do you do when even clicking on the links that answer these questions feels too difficult?

Continue reading

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Final Project: Week Seven

  By 2019-2020, Distance Learning, Final Projects, Second Semester Projects

Week Seven | 6/8–6/12

Final Project: Step #7 | SELF-Assessment & Reflection

Edited for June 8, 2020.

Back in February, you were given a post on final assessments for the year. The final exam, at that point, was an essay reflecting on the Senior Talk. That project shifted in April, as did everything, but reflecting on the experience is more important than ever. We’re now at the end of the strangest semester.

First note: You can continue to hand in final projects through Friday, June 12. The deadlines have been extended. For the next ten days, your work will be showcased and shared as part of a general celebration of your graduation.

Second note: If you aren’t able to complete and submit a project, you can earn a Pass for the quarter by completing this week’s reflective tasks in full. Those tasks have been tweaked to make this easier.

Just like in the original version of this post (from April 28), there are three tasks for the five days of Week Seven. We’ll shift focus to your entire senior year, however, for the second and third tasks:

  1. Reflection: Final Project (Google Form)
  2. Reflection: Senior Year (Google Form)
  3. Short Essay: Senior Year (Google Doc)

The first Google Form will allow you to talk about your Final Project and fourth quarter, and you’ll be able to answer some of the prompts whether or not you finished a project.

The second Google Form invites you to reflect on your entire senior year. It’s an outline for the third task.

The third task is to write a short essay about your senior year. This written response should follow the philosophy of our universal writing work — that is, it should seek out interesting and surprising insights into your learning.

This last essay is truly about what you take away from your senior year. You are entering a world that seems to change every day, where the only certainty is uncertainty, and where just about any cliche seems likely to come ytrue.

That’s why it’s important for you to think about what you learned about how you learn. It is, once again, about the fundamental goal of authentic learning:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

Use the steps of the writing guide:

Whether you have an intended audience of one or everyone, use to the metaphor of the river and the purpose of writing:

The Writing Process