Author: Mr. Eure

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10/11 Post-Writing: RE10

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

*The header image again comes from the original ten Rorschach inkblots.

Descriptive Post-Writing

Using last week’s descriptive paragraphs, you are going to learn how to evaluate and, as necessary, revise your writing. Start by clicking this chessboard image:

Google Drive

Opens in Google Drive

All writing can be processed through the tools in this folder, which we collect under the name bishop composition. Today, and likely for the rest of the week, you will be learning these components by running a post-writing protocol on the paragraphs you wrote.

Before we do anything else, I want you to note that this “post writing” analysis can be applied at any point after you’ve produced enough writing. Without grades, you aren’t beholden to a score for this step of the process, and the process is more important than the product.

Start by reading this document in full:

googledocs

Post-Writing: Guide

Then load the modified template given to you in Google Classroom. It will ask you to complete Step #1 and Step #3. Follow the directions below, and make sure you replace the filler text in the template. This is a test of your ability to follow directions as much as a breakdown of your descriptive writing.

Step #1: Process Reflection

Print a copy of your paragraphs. Set that aside, and turn off any devices you have. For the moment, you are assessing exactly what you have — no more and no less.

The first step of any post-writing work is to assess how you spent the time allotted for the assignment. In this first step, you are also determining the extent to which you meet the criteria for a fourth-tier GAP score. This is not a completion check, however. Some of you will have negotiated a slightly different assignment by speaking to your teachers; that negotiation meets the threshold for a “student-generated feedback loop,” which is a significant part of these higher profiles.

Many of you will not have completed your assignment, and you will not have spoken enough with your teachers to excuse that lapse. You will have wasted time in class and failed to complete the work at home. This is evidence that we must process in order to help you improve.

Right now, any of you who do not have a finished assignment are locked into the third tier of GAP scores. You can unlock passage into the fourth tier through renewed assiduousness and a kind of academic makeover — change that creates a new version of you that does your work and advocates for your learning.

If, however, your habits do not change, that is a failure to take this feedback and apply it. At that point, you are likely locked into the second tier of profiles. You can see the logic for this by reading the first tier again and noting its focus on amenability and improvement.

Step #3: Metacognition

After you’ve taken stock of your work ethic and time management, you can move into a concerted analysis of your writing itself. This was a descriptive assignment, which means that we are primarily focused on the first three most important elements of writing: the meaning you derived from these images, the details you used to describe what you saw, and how you arrange those details into a paragraph. Answer the questions and follow the prompts in this post-writing protocol. Annotate your printed paragraph. Look for patterns, and try to balance your analysis between strengths and weaknesses.

While you are annotating, work with a peer or teacher on one more element from the rubric: grammar and mechanics. You will catch basic mistakes yourself. Letting a peer or teacher look over your writing will help you identify more errors. The goal isn’t perfection, but the development of control.

When you have enough insight generated, write the metacognitive section of the post-writing assignment.

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Special Weapons and Tactics

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

*Stock image by way of the website of Blaz Kos, who has a phenomenal name. Would it have been a contender for Name of the Year? I don’t know. I just want an excuse to link to Deadspin’s NOTY. That will be time well spent.

Progress Reports

Junior S.W.O.T. Analysis

Our course intends to be a makerspace, which means that we intend to be flexible and responsive in what you are assigned, what you are taught, and what you create. Over the last two weeks, the divergent paths in Regents English 11 and its AP counterpart have repeatedly returned to the same concern:

Back to Basics

That’s a post written for the AP classes, but it contains some of the texts assigned to Regents students last week. We need to revisit how juniors are sorted and tracked at a later date; for now, it’s enough to note that you all need to grapple with procrastination, focus, stress, and time management.

On a not-unrelated note, Friday is the day marked by the high school for progress reports. Since our course is grade-abated, there will be no numbers to obsess over in Infinite Campus; instead, you will receive feedback of a different kind. You’ll need the profiles and tiered explications of grade abatement, and then you’ll need to read these:

Those two links instruct you in how to create a personal SWOT analysis. The acronym stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, which are sorted according to whether they are internally or externally derived. Note that they tend to be less about specific actions and decisions, and more about the traits and habits that lead to those decisions.

An Aside: Big Brother Is (Sort of) Watching

We are focusing on assiduousness and akrasia now in all junior classes for a number of reasons:

  1. Your choices are central to grade abatement.
  2. These choices are correlated with academic success — as well as stress and anxiety.
  3. The essays and videos you’ve been given recently help you practice close reading.

Another reason? A few of you are off-task. Habitually. Not in the sense that you are briefly distracted, either. In the sense that you wile away the period discussing the way a drunk friend vandalized your property over the weekend, or in the sense that you spend more than a half-hour doing your AP US History homework instead of, you know, what I’ve asked you to do.

Last week, one of you packed up with five minutes remaining, took the small hair trimmer from your purse, and began trying to sculpt a friend’s eyebrows. That’s the sort of thing that I will stop you from doing, and not just because it is obviously inappropriate. Like throwing an inflatable shark across the room (also from last week; Spirit Week makes you all vaguely insane), it’s disruptive to others. If you don’t cross that line, however, I am likely to let you go. It’s your grave to dig.

Still, I see you. Your peers see you. We see your disrespect and disregard for the freedom of the class — a freedom that is best expressed in this way:

  1. If you need to talk or even to write about a friend’s drunken vandalism, this is the class that can probably make that fit your learning process. That’s rich subject matter for an essay, especially during a study of akrasia and empathy.
  2. If you desperately need to finish US History homework, I’ll probably let you use the class period, because we can turn that into a closer look at your organization, assiduousness, stress, integrity, etc. It’s worth delving into why you’re in that position. It might be reflective of the system, of your personal life, of a misunderstanding of grade abatement — all things that lend themselves to a feedback loop.

That’s freedom. If, however, you decide without discussion and sanction that you aren’t going to do our work, you might just fail this course. Look at the language of a GAP 2, which”may indicate a deliberate and systemic disengagement from the learning process.” The first time you choose to disrespect the classroom to that extent, you’ve deliberately disengaged. You’re halfway to a 2.

I don’t have time to redirect you every time you make a bad choice, especially in classes with 30+ students. If sharks or nose hair start flying, yes, I’ll intervene; in most cases, however, you need to be very, very afraid of what will happen if I have to take time to deal with you.

TL;DR: Don’t disrespect the class period. If you do, you’ll fail, and not just in the traditional sense. Train yourself to think differently about the environment.

End Aside

Junior S.W.O.T. Analysis (Continued)

Your next step is to determine how to adapt this tool to meet your needs. You could use the worksheet MindTools designed, or you could head over to Google to search for other templates, models, and approaches to SWOT analysis. There are dozens. I will offer you this one, which will be shared individually with each of you through Google Classroom:

Find a format that makes sense to you, and then adapt it to meet your individual needs. Complete that SWOT analysis with as much insight and detail as possible. Keep in mind what you’ve learned over the first month of school, too; the subjects of our lessons and your learning (empathy, assiduousness, stress, procrastination, etc) should directly inform this sort of thing.

The deadline is Tuesday for this work, but you’ll want to have it done well before then. This is your progress report, and it will be far more edifying than a range of numbers and a canned comment — if you do it well.

You’ll need to submit your SWOT analysis through Google Classroom (where the directions and links are cross-posted), so if you’re doing the work by hand, start thinking about how to get a copy of it online.

Here's one from the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame.

This is a SWOT template from the Mendoza College of Business at Notre Dame.

Ask questions about the assignment, including the particulars of a SWOT analysis, below.

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Back to Basics

  By AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

*Header image from the YouTube video embedded in this post.

A Quick Aside: Procrastination and the Akrasia Effect

Part 1: Feedback Looping

Before we move into a unit on your reading life, we should test the capabilities of our interstitial classroom. Friday’s work gives us an opportunity to loop feedback through a period of transparent discussion, i.e., you can see what you wrote and respond to that, too. You produced 12856 words — with a response from every single person, unless I miss my mark. You should have access to these responses as part of the results page here:

calvin-ls-1

Click here for the responses.

If that doesn’t work, load this PDF. Note that the PDF conversion cuts off part of the responses. When possible, we’ll want to use Google itself to flip feedback like this, but I need to insure that you can read what was written.

That writing should be anonymous and randomized. Let me know immediately if that isn’t the case. Anonymity and discretion are parts of our feedback loop; the more you see the way your class talks to me about itself, however, the more finely we can tune that discussion.

What do you notice? Leave those observations here, as part of the comment section of this post. Ask questions to which you need a more direct or immediate answer through the Q&A section of our Google Community. (You can always take your own notes, write your own responses, etc; in this case, I’d like you to engage me directly with what you observe.)

Part 2: Procrastination

Many of the more recent posts on Google+ and here deal to some extent with procrastination. Since Friday’s writing and today’s feedback loop also address assiduousness, I want to give you a way to deepen this discussion:

There is also a book trailer for McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart that focuses on procrastination:

We may spend the next few days on this. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that your English 11 contemporaries will spend considerably longer unpacking those two texts (along with this one, on the concept of akrasia); the assumption is that you, having chosen a college-level course, can master procrastination and focus without a protracted look at how it works.

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Rorschach Inkblots

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

*Header image is one Rorschach’s original inkblots.

Descriptive Writing Work

In this lesson, you will write in your first mode of discourse. The lecture that precedes this work — read it here — uses artwork and optical illusions to demonstrate how your brain processes information and creates meaning. This process is at the root of everything you learn, from the way you compile grade abatement evidence to the way you relate to a literary character to the way you make a three-dimensional cube flatten into a diamond-like shape.

Multistable/Necker Cube

Now we will look at descriptive writing, for which we will use another kind of visual: Rorschach inkblots, which will be the subject of your first writing assignment.

Click here to load the Flickr set of all ten original ink blot plates. As you look at these, you should consider more than what you initially see; consider also how best to describe the image to a stranger looking at the same ink blot. Description is the first mode of discourse you will practice this year, and while it is the simplest, it is also a chance to practice word choice and basic sentence construction.

Our in-class discussions will center around the variety of interpretations that are possible for each of these—and, perhaps most importantly, the way you can shift your peers’ understanding with effective description. This kind of thinking, also called divergent thinking, asks you to solve a problem in as many different ways as possible.

Your assignment: For each inkblot, write a paragraph describing what you see. You should write at least 5-6 sentences, but you can obviously write more. Start this writing by hand, so that we can continue to balance digital instruction with pen-and-paper work.

When you have a paragraph written for all ten images, you can type them in a Google Doc, share them through Google+, be metacognitive about your word choices, and so on. Don’t worry if you haven’t done that before. You will go slowly through the process with us before moving into the actual writing. Look to Google Classroom for the formal assignment.

For now, focus on writing the most descriptive paragraphs you can. We will do the rest together over the next few days.

The ink blots can also be loaded below. Use this if the earlier link does not work.

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Writing Background: Gestalt

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

*Header image is a 100-year-old optical illusion (that might tell a lot about you).

Before We Write: Some Background

Each of you enters this English classroom with a different history and different goal. Some of you love to read and write, and you look forward to improving your skills and experiencing new texts. Some of you, on the other hand, have hated English classes since you became aware of them, and you want only to escape — by climbing out the back window, maybe, if that’s what it takes.

This class is designed with all of you in mind. In fact, it is the mind itself we are studying, because the purpose of this course is not just to have you read and write; it is, more than anything else, to have you think, and to think about how you think. This idea, thinking about thinking, is metacognition, one of the focusing terms for our entire course.

To begin to analyze how you process information and create understanding, we have spent a few weeks looking at grade abatement, which collects the other focusing terms. Now we move into our first writing assignment.

Before that, though, let’s talk about the Gestalt effect. This is a term you only need to be familiar with — it won’t appear on any tests — but the idea of it is easy enough to remember. It’s related to two more terms: inference and implication, which are important skills in reading and writing.

In order to read beyond the superficial details of our texts, and in order to write fluently and effectively, it helps to understand a bit about how the brain creates meaning. The simplest way to approach this is to use that not-so simple term: Gestalt. This is a German word that can be translated into English as “shape,” and it refers to the part of your brain that makes meaning from sensory data.

When we study ourselves, the Gestalt effect is about our perception of the reality in front of us. You process the information given to you in subtly different ways from the people around you, and in here, those differences are important. We will work together to understand what each individual reads and writes. It will be a collective effort.

This initial exercise won’t seem at first to have anything to do with reading or writing, but you are going to work on applying these concepts to the rest of the year’s work. These are analogies, another term you should recognize. An analogy is, to take the definition verbatim from its Wikipedia entry, “a cognitive process of transferring information or meaning from a particular subject (the analogue or source) to another particular subject (the target).”

Below are several kinds of Gestalt systems taken from various sources, with commentary folded in.

1. The Whole Picture

The above image usually has no meaning for us until we are shown it upside-down. Click the image to flip it, and then read the footnote at the end of this sentence for the title1.

The image perceived as a whole, all at once, after you are given some direction. This is the guiding principal for how we read and write: You piece together meaning component by component, and sometimes it is only in the end that the full picture snaps into place.

2. Filling in the Blanks

In this next example, a triangle will be perceived in picture A, although no triangle has actually been drawn. In pictures B and D the eye will recognize disparate shapes as “belonging” to a single shape, and in C a complete three-dimensional shape is seen, where in actuality no such thing is drawn. This is reification—the way we fill in the blanks to flesh out a complete idea.

The triangle may be easiest to see. The rest are helped by the language we used to name the objects. This is an example of the power of naming: By naming, we grant shape and form to the nameless things around us. Here, B is a black worm wrapped around a white pole; C shows a sphere covered in spikes, much like a mace; D is a snake or sea monster swimming through water, buried beneath the surface at two points.

Recognize that your mind can’t not see these images that way now — not without a supreme effort to break your own Gestalt grouping mechanism and unsee them. In the same way, it’s only through awareness that you can you break your mind’s habits and forge new ones.

3. Flexibility

Next is flexibility (which is technically called multistability). It is best illustrated by optical illusions like these two. Unlike the reification of an image or text, multistability requires flexibility. One must be able to see both the vase and the two faces; one must be able to see both the old lady and the young woman in the optical illusion located here; one must be able to see that Griffin in The Invisible Man is a victim and the villain, or that Romeo and Juliet are victims of fate and, at the same time, responsible for their own deaths; one must see both sides of an argument in order to defend one or the other. Nuance should be the word we keep in mind when we apply this concept to our study of writing, thinking, and reading.

As we move forward, keep the way we discussed these visual examples in your mind. We will move next into descriptive writing, where we will focus on metacognition and word choice.

  1. Title: The Dog. ↩

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Time to Understand

  By All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

*Header image from the video for “The Horror,” a song by RJD2. 

Interstitial Discussion, Take Two

A week ago, I gave you this post:

Time Enough at Last

Over the week, the comment counter never moved from zero, which led me to rethink my approach. You need a space to ask questions about grade abatement, and it makes sense to make that space open to everyone — i.e., to give tenth graders the ability to hear the questions asked by AP students (and vice versa).

You should still use the comment section of the original post to ask questions about its contents. This post, however, is devoted solely to the GAP tiers you were given in class:

 

GAP Tiers

GAP Tiers

This document is the same for all levels and all students. Its application changes — obviously, AP students face higher standards than tenth graders — but the logic never does. Your job is to understand that logic.

How to Use This Post

We will talk in class this week about grade abatement, even as we move on to new units and assignments. In tenth grade, we’ll turn to descriptive writing; in eleventh grade, you’ll focus to varying extents on reading, empathy, and politics. You’ll have time to talk to me in class about GAP scoring and evidence during those studies. I’ll draw your attention to these tiers repeatedly. But you really need to start asking questions in an interstitial forum, where the questions are frozen next to my responses.

So your assignment is this: Ask questions about the tiers of grade abatement below. You should be able to sign in with Google+, which means you can link your questions to your school account. Regardless, make sure I know who you are. You will want this evidence for the end of the quarter.

This will force us to make this website work for us, which may take some tinkering on my end. Report any bugs as soon as you find them.

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Gathering Evidence: Advanced Placement

  By AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

Header image is one panel of Francis Bacon’s triptych, Three Studies For A Portrait Of Lucien Freud.

Preliminary Evidence

We’ll spend the first part of this week — Monday, mostly — talking about evidence. Grade abatement is an evidentiary process, which means it is also objective and aggregate in nature. In other words, you begin with nothing, and over time you collect the evidence of a particular profile.

You can use the previous post to read more about GAP scoring. You can also spend as much time as you like tracking the history of these systems, including how the evidence-based process developed over the last few years, by visiting Sisyphean High proper. You should already have a baseline understanding gleaned from that site; if you don’t, that means you neglected (or missed) the summer work, which means you are working at a deficit.

For now, you should focus on what you did last week as you read this instructional post and the embedded article by Chad Fowler. Use the comments below to ask me questions about evidence. Let’s see how functional this site can be for Q&A, whether it’s the more substructural questioning demanded by the previous post on grade abatement or specific questions about an assignment, like this one.

We’ll talk about deadlines when they lurch their way into view. Remember, these are fluid requirements of the system; they matter, but the process matters more.

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Gathering Evidence: Regents 11

  By English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Header image is one panel of Francis Bacon’s triptych, Three Studies For A Portrait Of Lucien Freud.

Preliminary Evidence

We’ll spend the first part of this week — Monday, mostly — talking about evidence. Grade abatement is an evidentiary process, which means it is also objective and aggregate in nature. In other words, you begin with nothing, and over time you collect the evidence of a particular profile.

You can use the previous post to read more about GAP scoring. Ask questions about the overall process there. In this post, you should focus on what you did last week (i.e., this instructional post and the embedded article by Chad Fowler). Use the comments below to ask me questions about the evidence you’ve gathered before you submit it through Google Classroom.

As you work on this, don’t worry about tonight’s deadline. Remember that these are fluid requirements of the system; they matter, but the process matters more.

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Gathering Evidence: English 10

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

Header image is one panel of Francis Bacon’s triptych, Three Studies For A Portrait Of Lucien Freud.

Preliminary Evidence

We’ll spend the first part of this week talking about evidence. Grade abatement is an evidentiary process, which means it is also objective and aggregate in nature. In other words, you begin with nothing, and over time you collect the evidence of a particular profile.

You can use the previous post to read more about GAP scoring, but I would suggest that you focus your attention on our in-class discussions, which we will continue online through this post. You are collecting evidence of your learning process from last week, when you read about empathy through this post and the article by Chad Fowler. Use the comments below to ask me questions about the evidence you’ve gathered before you submit it through Google Classroom.

We will set a deadline for this evidence based on what you manage to submit to Google Classroom on Monday. Focus on asking questions about the process; deadlines are important, but the process matters more.

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Time Enough at Last

  By All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

*Header image from “Time Enough at Last,” an episode of The Twilight Zone. 

Daily Checklist

Here is the list of skills and traits assessed through grade abatement:

Triptych To-Do List

Triptych To-Do List

This is in the form of a daily checklist1. That image is the QR code embedded at the end of the checklist; if you activate it (here’s how), it takes you to an explanatory document:

Triptych Annotated

Triptych Annotated

That is an explanation of each of the elements of the checklist. Read it carefully. It is just one of the many guides available to you that explain these profiles:

GAP Tiers

GAP Tiers

That one, for instance, is crucial: It explains the four tiers of grade abatement, with notes on how to move from one to the other. You already have a single-sheet version of the profiles themselves; this is the set of directions you must follow to meet the requirements for each one.

How to Read This Post

You are being given all this, no matter which class you are taking, because

  1. reading complicated writing helps improve both skills;
  2. reading my explanations for these systems helps you enter a conversation about them;
  3. these are the guidelines for your quarterly score, no matter your age and ability level.

Take your time, read through these documents, and ask questions below. Think of this as a lecture, after which you are given time to ask questions; to say nothing means you understand all this perfectly, with no need for clarification. There are 140 of you this year. At least one of you needs clarification.

As questions are asked below, I’ll answer. Read those answers, too. AP students should take the lead here. Tenth graders might do more lurking. Everyone has an equal stake, however, and I expect some back-and-forth to emerge quickly this week.

  1. If you missed the hard copy last week, see me in class. Remember that we are aiming for a responsively paperless classroom; these documents are certainly important enough to be printed. ↩