Author: Mr. Eure

No comments

An Exercise in Empathy, Part 1

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

Your Most Important Skill

Today’s text is about the definition of empathy and why it matters as a skill. It’s also about how that skill can be practiced and inculcated1. This is primarily a source that gives you information — facts and logic and ideas that inform your own thinking.

Empathy, you’ll see, is at the center of the highest profiles. It’s the first and most important skill listed. The title of today’s essay is, therefore, probably not a surprise: “Why Empathy Is Your Most Important Skill.”

The version of the essay you’ll read today is also an example of ramiform reading. Ramiform mean “branch-like,” and it can be applied to most articles online. Here’s the first paragraph of our article:

I’ve never considered myself a real programmer. I know at this point it’s probably silly to say, but I started my scholastic and professional life as a musician, and I’ve never quite recovered from the impostor syndrome that comes with making such a shift. One of the faux-self-deprecations I use to describe myself is: “I’m a people person who just happens to express this tendency through programming and technology projects.”

The link defines “imposter syndrome” for you. You don’t need to Google that term or guess at its meaning; the link does that work for you. It branches you off to another website to learn a bit more about the subject. The rest of the paragraph invites you to define unknown terms, too (“faux-self-deprecations” probably needs a definition), but the link is what makes the reading ramiform.

Most folks don’t click on the links in an online article. Most don’t even finish the article. You need to be different. When you encounter a link, click on it. Follow that branch for a bit, see what information it offers, and then return to the original text. Let your reading be ramiform, and you’ll strengthen your brain’s white matter.

More specifically, you’ll hone the skill of close reading. You’ll sharpen your assiduousness2. You’ll need to work together, which will bring collegiality into focus. In fact, most of the skills and traits in these profiles — and the profiles themselves — will be exercised over the next few days.

I will point out what is being developed as we go, which will bring clarity to the process. Most of that feedback will happen in person, but I want you to start asking questions in the comment section of this site — the space below this post, where you must use a social media account of some kind to talk to me. Fortunately, you have a Google+ account through our high school.

Make sure you keep these handouts nearby:

Remember that we use these profiles, skills, and traits all year – you aren’t expected to have internalized them yet. My hope is that you’ve read over them3; it will take time for you to see their universal application.

To load the article, click the image below:

Image via Vladgrin (Shutterstock).

Image via Vladgrin (Shutterstock).

If, for any reason, that doesn’t work, use this direct link:

Updates to this assignment will be posted here or on Google Classroom. Talk to me below, if you can’t find me in the sea of students in our classroom.

  1. The key part of the definition of this word is its emphasis on repetition. You only develop this sort of skill through rigorous work. There are no shortcuts. ↩

  2. Because it takes that specific kind of work ethic to push through ramiform reading. Again, there are no shortcuts. ↩

  3. And not just because that was the assignment. It’s about repetition — about inculcating understanding over repeated use. Keep reading over these ideas, talking to me about them, and reflecting on what you learn. ↩

No comments

The Brain Unfolding

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

The Assignment1

Your success in this course depends on the work you do. That’s obvious — and true of any class — but you already have a sense that we learn differently. In here, your success depends on evidence.

In the opening-day materials you are (still) reading, you should have come across these documents:

The profiles will be the subject of many lessons as we move forward. That last document will be revised and adapted for you, and it will dictate how you structure your learning. Note that it has sections for “internal artifacts” and “external artifacts” — i.e., the stuff you make. Some of that making happens inside you. Some of it happens externally, through essays, conversations, etc.

We’re going to focus for a day or two on the easiest way to meld the internal and external stuff of growth. To put it another way: This is how to succeed in here. Load the following:

That Google Form gives you questions and prompts that are metacognitive or reflective in nature. You shouldn’t need more than one or two 40-minute chambers, as we’re defining your learning time, to evaluate last week’s learning, from the schoolwide activities on Friday to the contents of the course syllabus.

You will notice that there is a minimum character count for each answer. If you don’t meet that minimum requirement, you can’t hand in the assignment. This is not a class where your work is checked in mindlessly; you need to gain something from every assignment, and only by writing enough can you start to dig into some useful metacognition.

Be mindful, too. This is your first real interaction with the materials of the course, and you are delivering those thoughts and insights directly to me through an interstitial mechanism. That’s a complicated way of saying that this is your first written impression.

Ask questions below, if they arise, and make sure you mark the assignment done through Google Classroom when you’ve finished.

  1. What exactly is the look that Tesla is giving the camera in that picture? Why does it feel like he’s staring into my soul? ↩

No comments

Orientation: September 7, 2016

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

After all this time1, you know what to expect from this first day of school. You know what mixture of exhaustion and nervousness and excitement you’ll have. You know you’ll see a half-dozen course syllabuses and classroom expectations. You might do an icebreaker or two. Usually it all blurs together, because (barring variations in clip art), it’s just another variation on the rules, regulations, and grading policies that you’ve seen since middle school.

Our course will hit many of the same notes, but the tune is going to be quite different before we’re done. Or, to switch to a culinary metaphor:

Molecular Learning

That links to a Medium essay I wrote last year to explain the course you are now taking. It is the first of three essays in this opening post. None of these essays is required — more on how assignments work in a second — but they all will help you with the most important step you can take over the next few days: getting to know your teacher.

The written word is the primary means of instruction here, and these opening-day materials are your first lessons. You must read carefully, because I have written carefully, and in the writing are the answers to questions and concerns you haven’t even had yet. The writing will also model strategies and techniques for you. It will tell you a lot about my style and personality, too, which is just as important at this early stage.

Course Syllabus

You’ll notice that this post addresses all of you, whether you are enrolled in AP Language as a junior or taking English 10. This collective address will be rare as we move forward — note the menu that lets you select your class posts above — but you need to recognize that you share this digital space. That’s no different from sharing our physical space, and you’ll see soon enough how important it is to pay attention to the needs and impact of those folks.

This is all by design. All English instruction address the same universal skills and traits, and you develop those traits in the same sequence. There is much to gain from observing what your peers do, even if you are not given the same assignments. And when there is opportunity for alignment or collaboration, you’ll gain much from talking to each other.

Whenever you load this website, you should use the menu at the top of the page to look for class-specific lessons and feedback. If a post isn’t tagged for your course, you can still read it, but it’s not required. This is the digital equivalent of homework or notes written on a chalkboard.

Load your specific course syllabus below:

Read your syllabus over the next few days. Let me know immediately if one of the links is broken, won’t open, or leads to the wrong syllabus; errors are almost guaranteed in this kind of extensive, interstitial writing, and I’ll need your help to correct them.

Google Classroom

Your assignments will always be sectioned out by class period and posted to Google Classroom. You must register for the right section to see those assignments, of course:

  • Period 2 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — joqb9v
  • Period 4 [English 11] — 21n73p
  • Period 5 [English 10] — 15wtqr
  • Period 7 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — s1epxu
  • Period 9 [English 11] — 1y60dxk

Use those codes to register for Google Classroom. If you have never used Classroom before, enlist a peer or talk to your teacher about what to do. Right now, each classroom stream is empty; on Thursday, you’ll get your first reading and writing assignments.

A Typical 24 Hours

As you complete your first assignments and work with me and your peers, you will experience firsthand what the typical day in here looks like. You will see what each part of the interstitial classroom is for and learn more about how grade abatement functions. You’ll begin to learn what the interstitial classroom and grade abatement are.

You learn by doing in here. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, however, you should read this essay:

Circadian Dynamics

This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background lessons and texts are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with these brief 39 minutes. We might circle up some days; we might talk in groups or meet individually; we might take practice tests or take a shot at timed writing. Without grades, there is enormous freedom to do what is needed, and you will direct most of the lessons yourself.

Your job, then, is to know what you are doing each day and to waste no time in doing it. That is the most important part of this course: When we are together in our classroom, you must be ready to work.

The interstitial/online elements are there to support this (and to make the Sisyphean grind of high school a little more manageable). Grade abatement is there to free you and empower you. Still, technology is only a tool. There is no replacement for the learning that occurs through discussion and collaboration when you share a learning environment with someone.

This essay explains more about how crucial our face-to-face work is:

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

(It also lets me reference Wu-Tang and Grindhouse kung-fu movies, which is important stuff.)

If nothing else, I want you to be able to answer these two questions each and every day:

  1. What are you working on?
  2. How can I help you?

If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know, because you are wrong.

This week, you might need time to go over the syllabus with me. You might need help setting up your Google account. Or you might know that you need to do your first writing assignment in class, because you won’t do it at home over the weekend.

You face no risk right now, so ask questions and try things out. The more you experiment and the harder you work over these first few days, the easier you will find it to begin generating evidence for your grade abatement profiles — a concept that will be second nature to you soon enough.

  1. Look to The Onion, as always, for some perspective on that time. ↩