Category: AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in AP English Language & Composition for the 2017-2018 school year.

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Antediluvian Discussion

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

The word of the day is antediluvian.

Interstitial Discussion: Another Update

Let’s talk, once again, about how we talk to and work with each other. First, comments.

Comments are grouped, archived, and emailed to me by this website. They appear by post and comment thread. Below is a screenshot of the inbox dedicated to this process. It was taken Monday, November 27, around 6AM. I cleared the previous batch before going to sleep at 9PM on November 261.

Comments are also recorded on the website. The dedicated page for this, which was created on October 1, sorts them by time. Below is a screenshot of some of the comments left on November 26 (or in the midnight hours of November 27). If the inbox I maintain helps sort GAP evidence, this website page helps you sort opportunities to collaborate and to discuss.

The most recent post on how and why this interstitial approach works is here: In the Spaces in Between. It was published on November 20. Previously, you had posts that directly instructed you on using these resources, including The Ironic Use of TL;DR and The Aft Agley Gang, which were both published on October 30; Habits and Habitats, from October 20; Scripta Manent, from September 28; a post answering the question, “What Do I Do Next?” on September 22; and these two posts that opened the year. There are many more.

You’ve been told to use these interstitial resources. You’ve been shown why it matters. The work was never optional2. We absolutely need to figure out why it’s not being done.

Riders in the Storm

Comments are just one part of the interstitial classroom. They extend in-class discussion and allow you to think in writing, which gives you another angle on the instruction, feedback, and formal assignments that comprise the rest of the interstitial work we do.

The calendar offers an example of why this matters. Between the Thanksgiving holiday, last Wednesday’s assembly, several lockout and fire drills, teacher meetings, and the occasional illness, we haven’t had much time together in class. That inconsistency will continue in December with snow, which will give us the weird and muted joy of cancellations, delays, and early dismissals. Individually, you will miss time for sickness.

Without this website and a shared focus on interstitial instruction and learning, that fractured a schedule makes learning unsustainable. You lose the momentum necessary for productive reading and writing. Your academic muscles atrophy. You forget what you were up to, back when you had class, and often shrug your way past that feeling.

Or you try to use the survival skills you’ve learned elsewhere to make up that lost ground. You rush through work at the last second. You skip steps, copy answers, make excuses. That’s why there has been a flood of activity today. We are all creatures of habit, and here, again, that creature is a rat trapped in a Skinner box.

What happens is this3: You load Google Classroom, see an assignment, and spam the switch that looks like it will give a reward. If the assignment asks you to copy your notes and submit them, you might have to create those notes. If it asks you to copy ongoing work and submit it, you might have to churn out whatever you can during the class period. Reminded that you must contribute online, you might add several comments to different posts without reading much of what your peers have written.

There is limited efficacy in that. The sudden influx of comments really is too great for any kind of close, careful reading; instead of the ebb and flow of a digital conversation, there is a deluge. Your peers can’t monitor a thread when there are dozens of them appearing at once. I can’t provide ongoing feedback, because your contributions aren’t ongoing.

Similarly, when you try to take a week’s worth of notes in a single period, that deluge drowns any real learning. The work manages to be perfunctory and overwhelming at the same time4. You are rushing to fulfill a checklist, and that’s not how this kind of learning happens.

This sort of perfunctory and sometimes panicky approach also prevents you from recognizing comments that open up discussion, like this one:

That was one of the few comments left before the flood today. It is also a post driven by in-class feedback from me; the question is an attempt to galvanize others to apply Graham’s logic to an unrelated (but interesting) discussion. It would have helped you practice how to write succinctly and how to sign up for follow-up comments. Instead, it sat there for a week, unnoticed and unremarked.

The Chain

Of course, students who rush through assignments are still doing the assignments. That’s something. There are folks reading this who need to admit to greater need, and there are folks not reading this at all — or not reading it until it has been pushed on you by a teacher, either digitally or through printed copies5.

To take notes on this instructional post, all of you should answer one or both of the following questions about what most motivates you.

Do you want a good grade?

Start looking at your desire for a good grade more closely, then. You aren’t entitled to anything, and in here, your performance is all that matters. What you do is all that matters. And that includes when you do it.

If you want to do well, you mean that you’d like a 90 or higher. That requires you to keep up with instructional posts just as much as formal assignments and central texts. That fourth tier of profiles requires you to be metacognitive and reflective, to do those things consistently and insightfully, and to contribute meaningfully to the class as a result of your introspective work. You have to do that over time.

You might be able to justify a GAP score of 6 or 7 without a regular habit of reading, taking notes, and responding to materials. You might be able to meet the criteria by rushing at the last second, since that last-second work still teaches you more than you’d learn by doing nothing (and there are students doing nothing, as always). It’s unlikely, however, that your last-second work is brilliant enough to make up for your lack of assiduousness, organization, self-awareness, amenability, and self-efficacy.

If you want a good grade, you have to work interstitially.

Do you want to future-proof your skills?

In this question, “future-proof” means to give yourself the skills and knowledge to get into college and/or a career, to make the most of your relationships, and to thrive in whatever future you find. I can’t imagine anyone saying they don’t want that sort of strength, but it might be that you don’t see how reading this long post or leaving a comment gets you there.

Which is when I remind you that we’ve gone over the skills and traits of this course, including their connection to the skills and traits employers and colleges want. We’ve done it so often that it’s almost redundant to link to individual posts, as every post covers this. Here’s the one on empathy, for example. You’ve seen me emphasize self-control repeatedly (and through strangely violent metaphors). If you take the time to read Paul Graham’s essay, you’ll see how important writing is to any career, to say nothing of its importance to understanding yourself and your life. We started the year with the importance of reading, especially as it relates to empathy.

The only way to build these skills and traits is to chain them together, one link at a time, with an eye toward overall progress. You can’t fake your way into a good writing process. You can’t take shortcuts to empathy. You can’t sustain an insincere focus on collegiality for very long, and you won’t be productive while you try.

These posts get at the need for regular practice. They link to readings that emphasize other skills and traits. When you contribute interstitially to discussions, you get to practice organization, collegiality, and amenability. You can use the ramiform resources here to practice autodidactic and individualized instruction. You are always encouraged to lean into the kind of feedback that makes the most sense.

Desultory or perfunctory work barely creates the appearance of progress. It will feel like busywork, because you aren’t building anything; you’re rushing to get credit for what you haven’t been doing all along.

If you want to future-proof your skills, then, you have to work interstitially.

  1. This is not really the place to discuss the work you do late at night, but it’s at least worth a footnote. You know, because it is your lived experience, that work done late at night is work done less effectively. Even if you are a nocturnal kind of person, you don’t get to be that kind of person while you attend school. You get to wake up and attend classes at 7:45 in the morning. We need to figure out how to budget your time and work with foresight for a number of reasons; that your work suffers late at night is one of them. ↩

  2. In the sense that the option not to do it carries penalties. You can always choose to ignore instruction, avoid feedback, neglect assignments, etc., if you’re willing to accept the repercussions. ↩

  3. It should always be repeated that this is not true for everyone. It’s rarely true for the kind of student who reads footnotes. It’s true for enough students, however, that those of you reading this footnote should ask yourself a question: Which peers can you direct to this feedback, because you know they need it? You are stronger together, as the logic goes, and ought to think of how to help each other. ↩

  4. That word, perfunctory, is a helpful word to internalize. It means to go through the motions — to do something without much effort and reflection. Another helpful word is desultory, which indicates a lack of planning or logical connection. The etymology of desultory provides an interesting image, too, that might help you realize how important consistent habits of mind are. You can’t keep jumping from horse to horse. You’ll break something. ↩

  5. But we will avoid printed copies as much as possible. It’s a surrender to your lack of planning, when it happens by default. If you want a printed copy, you should print one; that’s why we have a printer in our classroom, which is a unique resource. Central texts that require direct annotation will be printed. This kind of post? That should be a decision you make as part of your own learning process. ↩

24 Comments

In the Spaces in Between

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Background, Always

Writing is more important than ever In a hypertextual world where the Internet is part of all academic work and part of the work of most jobs. You should learn how to navigate information online, and you should learn how to interact with that information. You should learn how to think in writing with more clarity and cogency and alacrity than the typical person in the comment section of the typical article.

That is one of the purposes of this course website — the one you are currently reading. It affords you a risk-free opportunity to interact with information and ask questions of the person posting that information. You are familiar with the question, “When am I ever going to have to use this?” When it comes to the way you interact with this website, the answer is, “Pretty much every day for the rest of your life.”

In terms of that Future You we so often discuss, you should learn to think in writing and interact with online writing. In terms of this course, you must think in writing, and you must do so in a public space. You must write in response to instruction. You must write reflectively and metacognitively, and you must know the difference between the two. You must ask questions, when you have them; and when you don’t, you must ask yourself why not. You must share information and insight with peers. You must ask for feedback. You must teach each other.

You can do all of this by returning repeatedly to the instructional posts until you’ve exhausted their ability to teach you something. You can only do this, however, if you take notes on those posts. That is not a new requirement. This was the second assignment of the entire year for all students:

Your second assignment is to learn how we can [upend the traditional feedback model entirely] — how, why, and to what extent. First, though, you should recognize that all of this is intended to teach you slowly and over time. You must interact with these instructional posts and documents like you would if assigned annotations. If you let them teach you, you won’t just learn how to do the next assignment; you’ll learn why this all matters, how to be curious about a great many things, how to write, etc.

You must, therefore, recognize that these instructional posts and documents are written explicitly to teach you. They define new vocabulary, link to related readings, and clarify ideas. They are usually structured as a lecture would be, but they are made difficult enough to require effort to parse and process. They deliberately and explicitly demonstrate style that you can emulate in your own writing. In other words, just interacting with these instructional pieces will help you get better at reading, thinking, and writing.

Did you take notes on that instructional post? More critically, did you read that instructional post?

Scripta Manent, Always

You have seen this before:

Verba volant, scripta manent.

“Spoken words fly away, written words remain.” It was the subject of an instructional post from September 28. You should revisit that post, if it has faded from memory, but it would be more useful to revisit the notes you took on it.

On October 16, you were given feedback on your progress:

You should revisit the appropriate post, if it has faded from memory, but it would be more useful to revisit the notes you took on that post, especially on the section titled “Update #3: Interstitial Learning.”

Of course, many of you will not have notes on these posts, nor on any of the other posts you’ve been given over the past three months. That is the issue in front of you today: You must take notes on what you read, beginning with instructional posts. You should use those notes to populate the comment section of posts with observations, insights, questions, and feedback. This is thinking in writing — using the written word to refine and revisit our thoughts, especially as we consider more difficult subject matter and assignments.

For the rest of this week, through Thanksgiving and into the weekend, you must attempt to use the interstitial classroom more effectively. Your primary focus should be the Q&A posts given to you last week. Take notes on any instruction. Answer all prompts in writing. Then extend your observations, insights, questions, feedback, etc., into the comment sections of the posts.

Before you get those Q&A posts, you should revisit/create your notes on Dürer’s Rhinoceros, especially the idea that “[o]ften the simplest or most straightforward GAP evidence is more important than everything else.” Starting with the triptych panel that ends on December 1, a grade abatement profile of 7 requires notes on all instructional posts. Grade abatement profiles of 8 or 9 require evidence of interstitial impact —e.g., meaningful contributions online, especially in the comment sections of instructional posts.

Before you ask: This does not mean that you must leave comments to get an 8 or 9. Not exactly. The interstitial system was set up months ago, however, to encourage you to think about feedback differently, including the habits and habitats you have for learning. You’ve had enough time.

There should always be more activity online for this course. There should always be questions, comments, discussions, etc., because you all want to do well. Whether you define “well” as a high profile or genuinely collaborative growth, this site should be part of the process.

This week, it’s required. All juniors have been given this post, and it needs to become a hub for discussion and feedback:

Q&A: “The Age of the Essay”

AP students have, in addition, this post:

ETA Q&A+: “Alligators” Optional Reading

As an individual, you are responsible for your succinct — succinct! — contributions, plus the way you respond to questions and insights shared by your peers. As a group, you are responsible for the shape of the comment sections themselves. It is, again, about herd immunity: Protecting the group by strengthening as many individuals as possible.

Simulating Rock Bottom, Always

You should take notes on this instructional post, just as you would on any others. What kind of comments can you leave, though? Well, they could be clarifying questions, or observations about the course, or details from your own experience with interstitial learning. But I’ll make it simpler:

https://betterhumans.coach.me/how-to-break-bad-habits-by-simulating-rock-bottom-8e46b5acb027

Respond to that article by connecting it to the universal skills and traits of this course, especially the lifelong need for self-control. Talk about it here, in the comments. Notice that the skills you are practicing — thinking in writing, responding to what’s written online, responding to essays, collaborating, thinking critically, being self-aware, and on and on — are on display here.

(Notice, too, that to see the responses to this article, or to respond yourself, you would need to join Medium, which means a literal premium has been placed on the ability to interact with writers in the real world. It costs money to join the conversation. That, too, is interesting.)

One Comment

ETA Q&A+: “Alligators” Optional Reading

  By AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), Miscellanea

On losing one’s head, you can’t do much better than the original “Sleepy Hollow.” Oddly enough,clicking this image will just give you the origins of the word “desultory.”

TL;DR — Q2 is when we pick up the pace, so to speak, in AP. Use your developing insight into Paul Graham’s essay to help you analyze, in the way that we value analysis, the texts and emulative work in this folder. You must work collaboratively and interstitially. Every choice matters.

Emulation-through-Analysis

The idea of emulation-through-analysis, or ETA, writing is embedded in the Spitting the Atom post you’ve now seen a half-dozen times. You can only emulate art that you’ve broken down into component pieces. Writing is the most essential art for the Humanities; it requires a granular understanding.

The Q&A post on Paul Graham is a version of ETA work. It walks you through the actionable parts of Graham’s essay, focusing on the metaphors and analogies that develop his argument. In AP, you must now begin to look more deeply and more critically at every essay you are given, which means that Graham should be background for what comes next.

ETA work is convergent, for the most part: There are wrong answers, because you are looking at how the writing is put together. You can misidentify a rhetorical strategy, misinterpret a stylistic choice, and misread the purpose of an essay. It takes expertise to suss this out. That starts with your teacher, but you must be autodidactic and collaborative, too.

Use the interstitial tools of the course and the Internet’s vast resources to learn whatever you can from this post. Maintain your focus on this question: What can we create with this?

ETA Blitzkrieg: Alligators of the Mind

This folder will be shared again when we write our first river-inspired essay:

Alligators of the Mind – Google Drive

Required and “optional” reading for a study of violence in fiction, censorship in schools, and the nature of obscenity.

You saw these materials almost three weeks ago. This post focuses on the ostensibly optional reading1:

Google Docs versions of these texts are in the folder. If you’d like to read the original texts where they were published, use Google to search for the title and author.

The ETA framework for these three texts teaches you rhetorical strategies that can be used your own writing. There are also framing questions on censorship that could be used to generate a focus for that writing. There are, respectively

  • 22 specific strategies and techniques, plus a look at seven overall strategies;
  • 30 specific strategies and techniques, plus a look at 11 overall strategies;
  • 21 specific strategies and techniques, plus a look at seven overall strategies.

There are two versions of that ETA document in the folder, too. Use Google to learn about techniques, terms, and strategies, and focus in class on talking to me about what you are learning.

Self-Control and Foresight

You received all this on October 30. Two or three weeks is more than enough time to read the essays in preparation for a fast-paced look at emulation and analysis. If you didn’t read ahead, that speaks to your organizational strengths and weaknesses, and you need to reflect and be metacognitive about the guillotines flitting about:

The Fatal Flying Guillotine

As I’ve said before, that post will never not be relevant. You are in Q2 now, which serves mostly as a threshold for us to start expecting the most from you, a student in a college-level Humanities makerspace. You have vast, unique resources available to you, and a framework that invites and rewards risk. You must be better than the average.

Use the comments here to talk about any of this, but especially to work on the ETA questions for the optional (read: not really optional) reading.

  1. You now know that “optional” is an invitation to do “more than just what is required,” and that is language from a GAP 8. This work is “optional” only if you are comfortable setting your ceiling for learning, growth, and scoring at a 7. ↩

20 Comments

RE/AP Updates (11/14)

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Ono. Quizzes

I gave you all these quizzes (that aren’t quizzes) recently:

Two interesting things happened as a result of this. First, you all were eerily focused for a few days on just filling in those boxes. The second, unrelated thing is that I realized these quizzes were a bad idea.

My original intention was to provide traditional feedback to some of you in the form of handwritten commentary and scores out of 100 points, thereby empowering you to teach others about the content of the quiz. The scores wouldn’t count, of course, but I thought they might let us weaponize that lizard part of your brain again. Hence this:

Except, well… that last hyperlink (“that lizard part of your brain“) is to a post called “How Feedback Should Work,” and everything we’ve done since then is expressly about pushing the boulder away from the Pavlovian, Skinner-boxed logic of the system. Attaching a point value to your work is toxic, even as a symbolic exercise. You don’t need unilateral commentary to teach each other, either. Feedback can’t be forced; that defeats (or at least undercuts) the purpose, which is to give you a universal language for learning and writing while encouraging you to experiment and grow as students.

Instead of focusing on these quizzes (again, not quizzes), I want you to focus on the links in this post, if you need to look at them again, the full scope of the instructional post given before reading Graham, and the Q&A that will be posted later tonight.

Walking Deadlines

Except for the assignment due on November 6 — the one that asked you to respond to The Aft Agley Gang and The Ironic Use of TL;DR — you won’t have any formal deadlines in Google Classroom for the rest of the month. Instead, you must use the space and each other to organize your work, keep goals in front of you, and track your learning.

This is an extension of our look at self-control. If you want to see why that is, read the sixth section of this essay:

View at Medium.com

That conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons touches on the psychological danger of preparing, since it makes your performance entirely about your ability, not some outside factor. For a while, at least, you won’t be able to self-medicate through deadlines in here, so let’s see what we can do to avoid other forms of self-handicapping. (The opening of that essay also shows you what kind of abomination my traditional gradebooks were, along with other interesting perspectives on the course.)

Remember, too, that there is a date on which we pause to determine a GAP score. This time, it’s December 1. See the calendar again for more information:

Ask questions about these updates below.

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The Age of the Essay

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

 

Camille Corot’s “Interrupted Reading” (1870)

Start here, with this updated essay from the Medium account for this course:

View at Medium.com

That is the first part of your assignment: to use that instructional essay to help you analyze the central text below. Any discussion of how we are redefining the act and art of writing essays has to start there, with a meta-discussion of analysis and critical thinking.

Paul Graham, “The Age of the Essay”

I encourage you to practice interrupted reading with this text. The copy provided to you in class numbers the paragraphs, which goes along with the subheadings the author uses to encourage interrupted reading:

Interrupted reading is what it sounds like: You read a bit, pause, and then analyze what you’ve read. You don’t want to destroy the act of reading, though, which is why you’ve started this assignment by looking at analysis and over-analysis. You need a balance.

To encourage you to get started, here is an excerpt from the beginning of Graham’s essay on essays:

The most obvious difference between real essays and the things one has to write in school is that real essays are not exclusively about English literature. Certainly schools should teach students how to write. But due to a series of historical accidents the teaching of writing has gotten mixed together with the study of literature. And so all over the country students are writing not about how a baseball team with a small budget might compete with the Yankees, or the role of color in fashion, or what constitutes a good dessert, but about symbolism in Dickens.

With the result that writing is made to seem boring and pointless. Who cares about symbolism in Dickens? Dickens himself would be more interested in an essay about color or baseball.

How did things get this way? To answer that we have to go back almost a thousand years…

The complete essay gives you the rest of the history, and then it gives us the philosophy and practicality we’ll need to spend the rest of the school year developing your ability and desire to write.

Remember to use our reformatted copy for in-class and interstitial annotations, questions, etc., and to use the comment section here to talk to me and to each other.

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A Looking-Glass Book

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Full of Looking-Glass Creatures

The following Google Form asks you to self-assess the three-week period of work that ends on November 3. See the complete calendar for the start date (and the start/end dates for all GAP periods).

You should technically include the work you do on Thursday, November 2, and Friday, November 3, in your self-assessment, which would mean waiting until the weekend to complete this form. Instead, any evidence created after you submit the form will be folded in by me, over the weekend, when your self-awareness and self-efficacy and so on are being evaluated.

You need the next 24 hours or so to review the things you seem to have forgotten. As always, this does not apply to all of you. It applies to enough of you to justify a post, though, which always brings us back to the idea of herd immunity. You are responsible to each other.

The basics:

  1. Profiles, Skills, & Traits (goo.gl/LGaKUU)
  2. Keys to the Course: Focus & Feedback (goo.gl/efm6CS)
  3. Three Steps: What Do I Do Next? (goo.gl/4zcqCd)

You are assessed on eight pairs of universal skills and traits. You make dozens of choices every week as part of the usual variety of ELA assignments, from how you read an article about empathy to how you craft your own writing responses. You answer questions, take notes, have in-class discussions, etc., and are required to be metacognitive more or less constantly. It can seem very, very complicated.

It’s not. It all comes down to focus and feedback. The system is built to take the most basic level of investment from you and turn it into something meaningful. It’s demonstrably more difficult to fail than it is to succeed.

We’ll see what you know about this on Thursday. You also have the next 24 hours or so to pull together any evidence you feel is necessary, which you should do before you fill out the required self-assessment form. Anything submitted after 2:30PM on Friday is late. It’ll be factored in, but so will its lateness.

We’ll take Friday to refocus on your Pareto Projects, too, since we’re nearing some of your self-imposed deadlines. If you have let that ongoing work lapse, revisit the original post now:

Pareto Project Guide (2017-2018)

Ask questions below, and remember: You are what you do, and you must be honest about what that means.

7 Comments

The Ironic Use of TL;DR

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

That last post is an example of how to practice empathy. It recognizes your efforts and encourages you to make better choices. Read it carefully, and you’ll see a teacher trying to accept that many students’ lack of self-control and focus isn’t malicious or intentionally disrespectful. The post is clear about the consequences of bad choices, but it uses the language of invitation. It’s still trying to teach you.

In fact, like every other instructional post, that one is written to help you practice close reading and to model a few strategies along the way, in addition to inviting you into a discussion of your decisions, the metacognition that improves those decisions, and so on. The first section starts two paragraphs with a periodic sentence, for instance, which is one way for you to vary your sentence structure.

This post is a little different, in that it isn’t trying to teach you like that. It just wants to tell you one thing: Do your job.

TL;DR — Do Your Job

All the talk about self-control and respect and assiduousness, through a dozen different posts and lessons and texts, can be reduced to that idea: Do your job. The classroom’s ability to accept any other choice is waning. This requirement, after all, isn’t new:

That handout is all you need to make sense of your current progress. It tells you, like this post, to do your job. Your job is to be a student. You don’t have a choice in this. Here’s a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist quoting a Hall-of-Fame basketball player on the subject:

[David] Halberstam summed up his approach to work by quoting a basketball player. “There’s a great quote by Julius Erving,” he said, “that went, ‘Being a professional is doing the things you love to do on the days you don’t feel like doing them.'”

Do you love to read, write, think, etc? Maybe not. A better version of that quotation, then, is this: Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don’t feel like doing it.

When you come into the classroom, you need to get to work. If you have an assignment, you need to get it done. That’s your job. If there’s a crisis or catastrophe preventing either of those things from happening, talk to me about it, and we’ll work out an alternative path, which is the flexible part of this course that a more patient post might take the time to explore.

If you don’t feel like doing your work, you have to do it, anyway. If you have homework for another class that feels more pressing to you than this class, let’s talk before you sneak that lab or outline into our space, because the odds of that decision working out well are just south of 0%.

Anything but you doing your job is unacceptable from now on. It was unacceptable months ago, too, of course, and equally unacceptable when you were no longer a four-year-old trying to understand cause and effect; the difference is that it is now going to cause you to fail in here.

I hate using the language of failure, by the way. This system was built to be the risk-taking, innovative, student-centered classroom of the future. But you must recognize, even if your eyes have been screwed tightly shut for the last few months, that refusing to change your behavior is disrespectful in any classroom. This is not some bizarre anti-classroom that violates the laws of physics. You have to do the job and follow the rules in every situation.

And you can only shift blame and duck responsibility a few times, even with someone as secretly empathetic and soft-hearted as me1. Then it is failure. It’s a choice to ignore the tools available to you to hack your brain so that it makes better choices.

Whenever you find yourself wondering about your progress and performance, go back to that handout:

Would you say you were focused in class? Would you say that you have been taking feedback, including this post’s message that you need to do your job, and applying it? If not, you failed. If there’s a question about whether or not you’ve been doing your job, you need to ask why there’s any question about it. There shouldn’t be.

So it is simple: Do your job, or fail.

No Accident

Now, the tone of this post is quite different from the one before it. This is on purpose. I’ve juxtaposed two instructional posts that say some of the same things in different ways. This, like everything else, is deliberate. It’s a teaching exercise.

By way of further explanation, and despite how much it will lengthen this post (hence the ironic TL;DR earlier), let me tell you a quick story about this afternoon.

While I was conferencing with a student near my desk during P9, I was also listening to the conversations going on in the rest of the classroom. I had started the period, of course, by reminding everyone of the assignments in front of them and the need to stay focused and productive. I also walked around to answer any initial questions and to get people up and running.

So it might not surprise you that I was frustrated by how many students were ignoring all the work in front of them to gossip, to work on science labs, to send what I can only imagine were critical and time-sensitive Snapchat messages, etc..

I got up and walked to the middle of the room, which caused everyone to fall silent. The students who had been exchanging gossip a moment before went back to their seats. Phones were flipped over, perhaps to protect those critical and time-sensitive Snapchat messages.

Then I said, “My sight is slowly failing, my insides are rapidly decaying, but I have preternatural hearing. Do you know what that word means? Preternatural means extraordinary. So I can hear your conversations, even from across the room.”

I wish I hadn’t said that. It was an expression of frustration, but that part is okay; we all need to express our frustration, and self-deprecating language helps to soften criticism. No, the issue is that I made it about catching students in the act, not the disrespectful actions themselves.

This is the arms race I want to avoid in here. I’ve always thought of it as academic brinksmanship, even when I bought into it completely. Students try to get away with not doing work, so the teacher tries to force them to do work. We scan for plagiarism and watch students take tests by hovering above them. We surprise classes with pop quizzes and give out daily participation grades.

I think this is deeply and reflexively cynical. It relies on the assumption that most students want to (or are forced to) cheat the system. It says that the actual work is not worth doing except when it is forced on you, in defiance of your every instinct, as if most students are toddlers refusing to take their medicine.

Look, it’s obvious that some of you struggle with self-control. Most people do, hence the guillotines. We all struggle with procrastination and distraction. But that doesn’t mean I need to talk about having superhuman hearing to scare you into having the right kind of conversations in class. All that does is reignite the arms race. The first time I don’t hear an off-topic conversation, the threat is gone.

The true threat in our classroom, if there is one, is that you could end up being an uninteresting and shallow and unskilled person. All of your choices concatenate, which literally means that they link together into a chain. All the missing evidence, the lack of preparedness, the poor choices, create the links of that chain.

Here’s the unexpected part, at least for me:

In the end, what you’re up against isn’t my effort to thwart your plan not to do work — it’s the opposite. Once you start making poor decisions and showing disrespect and ignoring the most basic requirements of the class, the only thing stopping you from failing is that I don’t want you to fail.

The system is clear about what it means not to do your work and/or to waste class time. It caps you at a 70 if you don’t meet basic requirements, including constant in-class focus. If you keep making bad choices, the system then treats that as deliberate disengagement and deliberate refusal to follow feedback, which caps you at a 60.

I am not the system, however, and I don’t want you to fail. I want you to succeed. In the end, what you’re up against is my willingness to bend the rules of the system — one I built, importantly — in order to prevent causing you pain. I empathize so much with you that I vacillate between giving you consequences and giving you just one more chance, just in case this time, unlike every other time, you’ll figure out how to do the right thing. Grade abatement allows the idea of growth to outweigh mistakes. It rewards self-awareness and even the willingness to change.

In other words, when you don’t do your job in here, you’re hoping that my heart continues to guide me more than my head. Your hope is that I keep doing exactly the wrong thing as a teacher: not respecting you enough to hold you accountable.

  1. It’s true. Beneath the ogre-like exterior is a soft heart. Beneath that, of course, is a hunk of coal that’s being compressed, slowly and painfully by ravaging pressures, into the angriest diamond. ↩

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The Aft Agley Gang

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Read the following updates carefully. The title of the post comes from this poem.

On the Quixotic Attempt to Go Paperless

In various corners of the classroom, under the windowsills, on desks and stacked precariously on bookshelves, you will find photocopies of materials for this course. The windows, for instance, frame the most recent posts and texts — the AP reading on horror movies; the instructional post on empathy, which is next to Chad Fowler’s essay; the post on “Habits and Habitats”; the always relevant post on guillotines, self-control, and the intersection thereof; and so on.

Way back in September, in what now seems like the fever dream of another life, I told you that we would be trying to go paperless. We are still trying. I’d like to ramp up that effort, too, in light of these data:

  • The Fatal Flying Guillotine — 51
  • Habits and Habitats — 53
  • The Most Important Skill — 92 (!)

Those are three of the photocopied posts, with the total number of photocopies left as of Monday, 10/30. They’ve all been there at least a week; the guillotine post has been there since October 8.

Unless a majority of you can explain those numbers, I will no longer print copies of instructional posts. Any central texts, yes, but no posts. It’s a waste of resources.

[Onomatopoeia] Quizzes

Note for AP students who have been hardwired in a particularly unfortunate way, and who, despite spending all of Friday discussing cheating, will react to the word “quiz” in an unhealthy way: Read carefully. There’s a reason you’re getting this online before it’s distributed, and it has everything to do with how you hold yourself accountable. You might be able to cheat your own integrity and honesty here to generate evidence of internalization, but that sort of poison seeps into your bones. I don’t think you should do that.

Below is a an [Onomatopoeia] Quiz. It asks you to write down everything you learned from reading the instructional post and the central text by Fowler. Photocopies will be distributed in class on Wednesday, November 1, for AP11 students. They were distributed on Thursday, October 26, for RE11 students. Read this first:

View at Medium.com

Moving forward, that is required reading. It explains more about how and why we would use this sort of “quiz” to help us learn.

This particular “quiz” takes the form of a reformatted copy of the post and central text for our study of empathy. You’ll find some (but not all) of the original subheadings and images from those readings, plus enough blank space for you to write. Your prompt for this “quiz” (which I’ll stop putting in quotation marks now) is to fill in that space with what you know about these lessons, texts, etc.

Regardless of your course designation, this is a required diagnostic. Load a copy of the two documents here:

You have been trained all your life to look at quizzes as a risk/reward system. They are Skinner-box switches you press, hoping for a reward. If you know the material, you get a prize in the form of a high score; if you don’t know the material, you are punished with a low score.

In this course, the question is different: What does your performance tell us?

The answer to that leads to metacognition, collaboration, and all the other stuff of growth. Perhaps your performance reveals an eidetic memory. That’s a rare skill, and we need to weaponize it. On the other hand, your performance might indicate a weak memory, some performance anxiety, or the struggle to read critically and closely. As frustrating as those results can be, they also provide the best starting place for growth.

The reason is simple: As long as you’re putting in the time and effort necessary, you are exactly where you want to be. This [Onomatopoeia] Quiz is, in that case, just a diagnostic. It tells us which of our universal skills and traits need attention. It gives us a blueprint for the feedback loop you need to improve (and for a fourth-tier GAP score).

What is not acceptable is a lack of self-control. This could be posted once a week, and it would always be relevant:

The Fatal Flying Guillotine

You must learn self-control. You can recognize, as that post argues, that self-control is difficult to master, but you must put all your effort into developing it. It springs from self-awareness, assiduousness, integrity, collaboration, organization, and a few more of our skills and traits; as a result, you develop self-control by doing your job in this course.

Let this [Onomatopoeia] Quiz reveal your level of self-control, in addition to what it might reveal about your understanding of the posts, especially your ability to internalize key concepts. You can talk to me about this in the comments here.

More on Self-Control

This is a review of how to take control of your learning in our makerspace.

Start with the idea, first given to you in the syllabus1, that the problems we are solving are often unique to you. The components we are using have universal names and definitions, but they take on a unique appearance in your individual learning.

One of the makerspace problems given to you to hack is the lifelong problem of self-control:

The Fatal Flying Guillotine

Yes. that’s embedded twice in one post. It matters that much, in part because this process continues well past the end of our formal in-class discussion and writing. Every assignment, lesson, text, class period, etc., for the rest of the year provide opportunities for you to work on your self-control.

You could compare this to an attempt to build a robot arm in a robotics makerspace.You’d start with instruction in the basic skills, from electrical wiring to coding. Once you had the basics, the focus would shift to your vision and needs, your work ethic, and a lot of testing and restarting and refining. You’d expect setbacks. You’d measure progress.

A compelling example of how this works is the assignment that was due October 30 around 7AM2:

When you load this assignment, you also load the work you completed. A document was created for you, and your instructions were to divide your writing between the explicit exercises and a separate box for metacognitive analysis. At this point, Google has recorded all of your submissions, resubmissions, edits, and so on.

If you did everything by 7AM, you demonstrated self-control over the weekend. You avoided procrastination, hacked your brain’s tendency to get distracted, made a plan and followed through, and so on. That self-control lets us focus on metacognition, which is the key to your learning (and, not to put too fine a point on it, your performance in this course).

That’s the point of covering this all here, with an eye toward referencing it in the future: Metacognitive writing is what makes learning permanent. You need enough self-control to get you through the first level of the assignment — the one on Google Classroom, usually — because that’s the only way to generate something to be metacognitive about. In this case, I built metacognition into the assignment, instead of asking you to add it after the fact.

You can use any and all choices you’ve made lately, from the amount of focus you had on Friday in class to the way you spent your weekend, to fuel good metacognition. And if you are struggling with the self-control necessary to get your work done, let’s put the space to work on that as soon as possible. It’s not a habit you can afford to keep.

  1. Load the main page of this website for a copy of the syllabus, or look to the “About” section of Google Classroom. ↩

  2. This empathy work is, by itself, another example of iterative and innovative work done in this makerspace style, but we can come back to that later. ↩

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The Most Important Skill

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

As xkcd notes, pretty much everything in life is optional, but that doesn’t make any of it useless.

Empathy and Excellent Sheep

This course self-iterates, applying the ideals of a makerspace to itself on a consistent basis. One of the driving questions for that iterative work is the old standby, “When will I ever have to use this?”

Answering that questions led to our profiles and set of universal skills and traits — not just an assessment model, but a way of treating the Humanities as the study of being human, which applies to every human being by default. Literature becomes a means of opening ourselves up to new experiences, of developing empathy, etc, and writing becomes the best tool we have for getting at truth.

The most recent version of our universal skills and traits looks like this:

Grade Abatement Profiles with Universal Skills/Traits

The banners on the second page are new this year. The first of those banners, for those of you who need to see it isolated, looks like this:

Click for the printable PDF.

It emphasizes what the rest of course repeatedly does: Empathy is the most important skill you will ever learn. It’s also how you get at the “stuff of growth,” as Ken Robinson said. We’ll look at an essay that addresses this specifically and directly in a moment, as part of a formal assignment. For now, you can consider the answer to the question, “When will I ever have to use this?” in terms of how it will get you into college and then into the job market.

First, colleges want empathy:

You’ll have to read the entire article to gain a sense of how colleges are reevaluating student admissions, but the trend is national and inexorable:

Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut, began making changes even before the Turning the Tide report debuted, but it’s since done even more, launching a scholarship for students who exhibit kindness and empathy and recruiting students through community-based organizations. Since it stopped requiring standardized-test scores last year, it drew the highest number of first-generation students in its history.

Kindness and empathy are now just as important as any other transcript element. In a few years, I believe you will see test scores and GPA fade even more, with broad evidence of empathy and collegiality necessary for admission to the best schools. And if this is probably seems like it applies only to high-achieving or Ivy-League-bound students, that’s not the case. The pressure to perform and the dehumanizing aspects of the system affect students across the spectrum.

Which is why I’d invite you all to consider this, too:

That’s a lengthy article on Ivy League schools and the work over the last few years of William Deresiewicz, who wrote Excellent Sheep and a number of related essays. Look past the surface level focus on top-tier schooling and the “excellent sheep” he describes and recognize that all of us are warped by the system. That’s why the New Yorker essay is worth a read. It gives you insights like this, which is actually a quotation from Deresiewicz:

The system manufactures students who are smart and talented and driven, yes, but also anxious, timid, and lost, with little intellectual curiosity and a stunted sense of purpose: trapped in a bubble of privilege, heading meekly in the same direction, great at what they’re doing but with no idea why they’re doing it.

That speaks to our course’s spectrum of skills and traits, from self-awareness to assiduousness. It also mentions again the “bubble of privilege,” which is really a lack of empathy. It doesn’t matter how you define that so-called “soul,” either; a lack of it affects your prospects as you apply to college and work toward a career.

In fact, the job market makes the need even clearer:

Those match up to the skills and traits we use to an encouraging extent, and you’ll once again see empathy and collegiality at the top. The lesson is simple: If you want to be successful, you need to learn how to empathize.

Your Most Important Skill: Empathy

In a high school classroom, we need a way to practice, not just prioritize, the skill of empathy. We will use Chad Fowler for that:

http://lifehacker.com/why-empathy-is-your-most-important-skill-and-how-to-pr-1505011685

That’s Lifehacker’s coverage of the original article, which has also been photocopied for you.

Read and annotate Fowler’s essay, and then find time to practice empathy in each of the four ways he lists. I will give you a document through Google Classroom so you can transcribe your experiences and what they’ve taught you, but you need to look beyond the assignment. Fowler obviously isn’t writing just to high schoolers; you can practice empathy with or without a Google Doc and deadline. You can answer Fowler’s questions, reflect on the experience, be metacognitive about your choices, and try to draw some insight into yourself.

The following list might help you to focus this practice. Keep in mind that there are other ways to approach the work.

  1. Listen | Do this with any conversation, but look for one that is about “heated topics,” as Fowler puts it. You can also deliberately begin a conversation you know will get heated in order to practice listening.
  2. Watch and Wonder | Do this during a study hall or lunch period, since they offer the easiest (and least awkward) opportunities.
  3. Know Your Enemies | For best results, pick an “enemy” with whom you have an ongoing dispute. Follow Fowler closely when thinking about this enemy, putting your thoughts in writing as much as possible. Then reflect on whether this exercise did “reduce your frustration and anxiety over some of the most stressful interpersonal situations.”
  4. Choose the Other Side | Choose a debate about a subject that matters to you personally — one for which you have a definite position. Then force yourself to take the other side, writing that opposing position out. Focus your metacognition on how easy or difficult this is, what it reveals to you, etc.

Again, a preformatted document will be available through Google Classroom. Use the post here to talk to me about the process, the lessons and learning in the other essays embedded in this post, the overarching importance of empathy, and so on.

Additional Depth

The following two articles are required in AP11 only, but you are all strongly encouraged to find time over the next few weeks to read them. They may be folded in more formally as the subjects of discussions, writing prompts, etc, because they provide more real-world context for empathy. Why would you need to hone the skill? Because you are going to encounter that line between opinion and fact. You are going to need to question your beliefs when they are challenged by someone else. You will need to recognize your own echo chambers and open-mindedness, as well as the expertise and guidance of the folks who want to help you.

If you read these, write something responsive and put it aside. You can ask questions about either in the comment section here, too.

 

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Spider Graphs: Self-Evaluation

  By AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018)

You should be fairly immersed in this by now:

Gestalt Suite: Getting to Know You

As it says in the body of that post, part of this self-assessment and introspective work will be kinesthetic. So let’s color:

Click for the full image.

Click for the full image.

 

Those are printable copies of, in order, a blank spider graph for our GAP skills and traits and a blank spider graph for Howard Gardner’s multiple intelligences. You are meant to figure out how to use those from your close reading of that instructional post. In addition, you might want a printed copy of this handout, which helps with self, holistic, and performance-based assessments1.

When properly filled in, a single spider graph looks like this:

Click for the source, which is about rating coffee.

And an iterative spider graph — one filled in now and then again later, or filled in to compare two sets of data — might look like this:

Calvin really needs to get it together.

You should end up with a visual approximation of these skills, traits, and intelligences, at least according to your self-assessments.

Two things:

  1. This is about valuing yourself differently — looking not at GPA, class rank, social status, etc, but at the stuff that really matters. You are smart in different ways. You are skilled in different ways. You want to fight the Dunning-Kruger effect, sure, but you must also learn how and why your skills matter. Imposter syndrome is just as limiting as an inflated sense of self.
  2. This is also a test of your efforts lately, because you’ll either have done the necessary research to learn about multiple-intelligence theories or not, just like you’ll have invested in learning the skills and traits of the class or not. You’ll have looked up the Dunning-Kruger effect, because it was assigned to you, or you won’t have.

These aren’t mutually exclusive. It matters if you didn’t do the reading assigned in that post. It matters if you aren’t carefully reading directions, looking up concepts, etc, because that was the assignment. And if you’ve gotten to October 17 without figuring out how your English course assesses you, that definitely matters.

But if you use the opportunity to plot these graphs and color them to learn about Gardner’s multiple intelligences, that’s great. If you only now start to teach yourself about the language in our set of universal skills and traits, that’s great, too. If it’s only now that you ask me for help, that’s not anything but fantastic. It’s never too late to commit to growth and improvement.

In other words, let’s focus here on what you see in yourself, on what makes you unique, but let’s make that self-assessment an informed opinion. Don’t make an assumption about these labels and what they mean. Do the research — into multiple intelligences, our GAP skills and traits, what a spider or radar graph looks like — and then do the work.

Ask questions below.

  1. You want the printed copy, because browsers want to take the emojis I like and replace them with frankly terrible versions. This is an example of browser-based umwelt, by the way: See xkcd here. ↩