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The Age of the Essay

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

Dante at the river Lethe in Purgatorio.

Our Approach to Writing

Our writing philosophy in this course is best expressed by Neil Postman:

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

That quotation, along with an overview of what we’ll call emulation-through-analysis work, is in this PDF overview. As that document notes, we also pay attention to Paul Graham and his theory that essay-writing in school focuses on literary analysis through “a series of historical accidents,” with the end result that most school essays are “now three steps removed from real work.” (If you are an AP junior, by the way, you’ve already seen this stuff.)

Except when test prep is necessary, you will read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate her, of course, but we are focused on using what we read, not doing what David Foster Wallace described as “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty.”

This essay, while focused in part on one particular quarter/class, explains more of what analysis means to us:

View at Medium.com

Find the River

Our focus early this week is on “The Age of the Essay,” which was written in 2004 by Paul Graham. You have a hard copy of this text — here it is in Google Drive — but it was originally published online:

Graham, “The Age of the Essay”

Whichever version you read, do what seems most effective to you as you go. You don’t need to annotate the text, unless that’s what you would naturally do. You simply need to understand it. That is most often helped by interacting with the text, of course, and annotating is one way to do that.

At first, you should read this essay individually and silently. The reason: Sometimes you need to sit with your own thoughts, free of distraction, in order to find meaning. The collaborative chaos you create on most days is vital, and I think we will always be more inclined to spend our time that way than any other; it’s important, however, that you occasionally let silence into your life, especially while you read. It deepens the experience and allows you to get a bit more out of the text.

Look to Google Classroom for further instructions and any required assignments for this reading. After tackling Graham on your own, you should focus on the protégé effect, which we will define most often as proxy feedback. Read alone, and then talk to me and to each other.

One more thing: English 11R students began reading Graham last week; AP students will begin today, Monday, with a day to catch up. (That’s the burden of a college-level course.) You can and probably should work together, because the cross-pollination of ideas is a powerful part of collaboration.

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Habits and Habitats

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

Pictured: A typical classroom setup.

The Stuff of Growth

Ken Robinson on Education

This video appears elsewhere on this site, which tells you how important it must be to our work:

Every time I come back to this speech, another idea resonates with me. I’d like to know what resonates with you, especially as you continue in our classroom. My explicit goal is to make Robinson’s ideas actionable — to do more than just agree with him. I believe that grade abatement is the key. It helps, though, to consider another luminary:

Dan Pink on Motivation

This is another RSA Animate video:

Again, I find that different ideas in this speech resonate with me each time I watch it. I’m drawn to the idea of autonomy right now, because we’ll be attempting a Genius Hour from Q2 on. I’d like to know what resonates with you, too.

Talk to me in the comments below, and extend your own conversations to your specific course’s Google Classroom.

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I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read

By Mr. Eure AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

Origin unknown (at least, unfound through a cursory Google search).

Update, Oct. 18: I’m giving you the corrections/exemplars guide for the Prose ETA questions. The normal assignment protocol — complete the work, check your answers, revise — may not be the most effective approach, and the stated purpose of this week’s lessons is to put you in charge of learning. You’ll find the “answer” key attached to your Google Classroom assignment, and I’ll stack printed copies on the bookshelf by our textbook.

Emulation through Analysis

The following is a version of this document. It has been reformatted for the website.

Overview of the Concept

In 1946, George Orwell noted that

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

Later, he summarizes this idea: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” Our work isn’t so negative, though. We are focused on a feedback loop that builds strength in thinking through strength in writing. We listen to Orwell but invoke Neil Postman:

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

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

The path forward has you read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate her, not to produce the sort of analysis that a cursory search of Google would reveal. It’s the difference between applied and theoretical science.

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

Because you must know how to create in order to create. A makerspace requires granular expertise before experimentation and iteration will yield results. Otherwise, it’s just a sandbox.

Meanwhile, keep another idea from Orwell in mind:

A scrupulous writer, in every sentence that he writes, will ask himself at least four questions, thus: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? And he will probably ask himself two more: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

The following ten questions deconstruct elements of an essay by Francine Prose. Copies are available in the classroom. Focus your response process on speed, clarity, and insight. Ask questions about the ETA process or these questions in particular in the comments.

ETA Practice: “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read”

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

The next two sections offer you more context for this assignment. Read both carefully.

Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism

These questions are an unusual test, in that they don’t test knowledge you’ve learned. They teach that knowledge through process of answering each question. You’re going to have to look up terms, define concepts, and collaborate. To be most effective, though, you should start with an inventory of the resources available to you in and out of the classroom.

Google, as ever, is your friend. And like some friends, Google doesn’t always know what it doesn’t know — it just acts like it has an answer. Certainly you could learn a lot by searching Google and Wikipedia. I will suggest, however, that there are two compelling reasons to use a textbook, instead:

The information has been vetted by an expert.
The information is organized and indexed.

There is an erstwhile textbook for this class. We have 32 copies of it sitting on the bookshelf in the corner of the room. It’s called The Language of Composition, and one of my favorite facts about it is that it was written in part by a former Brewster teacher, Larry Scanlon.

The opening chapters of the textbook walk you through the three appeals that are mentioned several times in these ETA questions. Whether you are versed in these Aristotelian appeals or not, the textbook is an excellent review. You’ll also glean a dozen more helpful strategies and techniques through those first few chapters.

You have probably guessed by now that this next week is as much about proving that you can utilize the resources of a space like ours to learn as it is about deconstructing and emulating Prose. Before we can start writing earnestly and frequently, you need a foundation. For some of you, it will be review; for others, it will be a crash course. Remember that I am here to help.

Postscript: Occam’s Razor

Good. You’ve gotten through this post, and with some luck, you feel a little more clarity than you did 30 minutes ago. You have one more test this week:

Eleven perspectives on Sisyphean High

Read that. I will read it, too, in order to update any sections that need updating. Then we’ll come together in mutual understanding — or we won’t, and I will know who hasn’t read by the way your ignorance undermines your choices and interactions over the next week.

Understand that the greatest strength of this course is its 100% transparency: If you want to know what to do and how it all works, you only need to read. When I direct you toward something specific to read, that should be an immediate priority. We learn by doing in here, but the explanatory and instructional posts are a prerequisite; trying to create something meaningful without that background would be like trying to use power tools without any safety precautions. You’re going to lose a limb.

On the subject of losing limbs: If I’m not convinced by the end of the first-quarter that you belong in this AP class, then you don’t belong in this AP class. Does that mean you’ll be kicked out? No, of course not. But you should emerge from a close reading of that “Occam’s Razor” essay with an understanding of what it does mean.

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10/11 Post-Writing: AP11

By Mr. Eure AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

*Image from Garfield Minus Garfield. Its message ought to be obvious: Read this post very slowly.

SWOT Post-Writing

Starting today, and using the SWOT analysis given to you last week, you will answer the following prompt:

Spend a significant amount of time reflecting on your process. Then tell the story of that writing process, start to finish, viz.

your use of class time;

your collaboration with your peers;

any questions you asked your teacher;

your use of other resources, like the Internet; and

especially your overall sense of how that writing process unfolded.

Before we can analyze how effectively you wrote, we must have a sense of how you, like some sort of ersatz Frankenstein, brought the response to life.

This is the first step of the post-writing protocol we use whenever you produce a piece of writing. It applies to a SWOT analysis as much as it will apply to your first full essays, and is just one of the writing tools you will learn to use as part of this makerspace:

Opens in Google Drive

The rest will be introduced and practiced over the next few weeks. For now, you are being asked only to write a process reflection. You still need the entire post-writing directions:

Post-Writing: Guide

When you load the modified template given to you in Google Classroom, you will see space only for Step #1.

Step #1: Process Reflection

Start by collecting your work. As necessary, print a copy of your responses. Then turn off your devices and look at the product(s) in front of you. For the moment, you are assessing exactly what you have — no more and no less.

In this first step, you are also analyzing the extent to which you meet the criteria for a fourth-tier GAP score. This is not, however, a completion check. Some of you will have negotiated a slightly different assignment by speaking to your teacher; that meets the threshold for a “student-generated feedback loop,” which is a significant part of these higher profiles.

Many of you, unfortunately, 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. These are the facts. They are part of the evidence that we must process in order to improve your work ethic.

For now, any of you who do not have a finished assignment or a clearly articulated alternative track 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 — a significant change in attitude and approach that will create a more assiduous and invested version of you.

If, however, your habits do not change, that is a failure to take this feedback — what you are reading right now — 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:

GAP Tiers

After you’ve taken stock of your work ethic and time management (among other things), you can use those observations to produce an answer to the prompt. You are, as the directions suggest, telling the story of your learning: a short and hopefully edifying narrative about how you have approached this class, especially over the last week or two. (You’ll want to define “edifying” before you begin.)

This writing response shouldn’t just address the past, however; the purpose of the SWOT analysis you were assigned is to prepare for the future, and you will need to write about that, as well. Before our next class, you need to have produced a piece of writing that connects what you’ve done to what you will do.

There are no other formal requirements. You can write this response by hand or type it. If you choose the latter, you will need to print a copy before arriving to our next class, and you’ll need to attach it somehow to the Google Classroom portion. We will run a kind of triage on these responses before we begin our next unit.

Preview of Next Unit

For you, that next unit will include a focus on emulation-through-analysis (ETA) work. We will use the three essays you’ve read to fuel a full-class discussion, and then you will analyze one of those essays in order to emulate its rhetorical strategies. There will be an additional post here and/or on Medium about reading itself.

More important to you, at least right now, is that this week is a test. By the end of it, and certainly by the end of next week, we will know much more about you as a student. We will certainly know if you can parse complicated directions, navigate an interstitial classroom, budget your time effectively, advocate for your own learning, and so on¹

We have one additional essay (appropriately called “The Age of the Essay”) to read, analyze, and fold into everything else we’ve learned this year; you can preview it here, if your curiosity overtakes you. We will use Graham’s text to differentiate between digital and analog annotations, to discuss your writing habits, and to set up your first full essay assignment, which will also be when you to experience the makerspace in full.

You can begin thinking about that first essay, too, if you like (and are capable of multitasking more than most). We are going to use the “find a river” philosophy to write about your own journey, with “journey” used to invoke the summer reading, Enrique’s Journey. This will be a personal narrative conceived and iterated through the tools of our course.

There might even be something this week that looks like a traditional test — a diagnostic of how much of the language and machinery of this course you’ve studied and internalized since June of last year. I think we would call it DDT, which could stand for data-driven test or doki-doki test, since that was the onomatopoeia chosen by your predecessors. DDT is also pretty good/bleak historical analogy to traditional testing: ostensibly a way to help, but really just a lot of poison. ↩

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10/11 Post-Writing: RE11

By Mr. Eure English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

*Image from Garfield Minus Garfield. If you read this assignment carefully, you can avoid the wall.

SWOT Post-Writing

Starting today, and using the SWOT analysis given to you last week, you will answer the following prompt:

Spend a significant amount of time reflecting on your process. Then tell the story of that writing process, start to finish, viz.

your use of class time;

your collaboration with your peers;

any questions you asked your teacher;

your use of other resources, like the Internet; and

especially your overall sense of how that writing process unfolded.

Before we can analyze how effectively you wrote, we must have a sense of how you, like some sort of ersatz Frankenstein, brought the response to life.

Opens in Google Drive

The rest will be introduced and practiced over the next few weeks. For now, you are being asked only to write a process reflection. You still need the entire post-writing directions:

Post-Writing: Guide

When you load the modified template given to you in Google Classroom, you will see space only for Step #1.

Step #1: Process Reflection

GAP Tiers

Preview of Next Unit

That next unit will be to read, analyze, and then utilize “The Age of the Essay,” by Paul Graham, which you can preview here. We will use it to differentiate between digital and analog annotations, to discuss your writing habits, and to set up your first full essay assignment.

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10/11 Post-Writing: RE10

By Mr. Eure 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:

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:

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 Mr. Eure 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:

Your choices are central to grade abatement.
These choices are correlated with academic success — as well as stress and anxiety.
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:

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.
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:

Student SWOT Analysis

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 Mr. Eure 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:

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:

From You Are Not So Smart: Procrastination

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 Mr. Eure 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.

: Rorschach #1

: Rorschach #2

: Rorschach #3

: Rorschach #4

: Rorschach #5

: Rorschach #6

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Writing Background: Gestalt

By Mr. Eure 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.

Title: The Dog. ↩