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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Above/Beyond: Data Analysis

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

Whenever possible over the next three weeks, I’m going to draw your attention to opportunities to generate evidence for those top profiles. In this case, we’re looking at the idea of doing “more than just what is required,” which is critical to a GAP 8:

Click to see a legal-size PDF of the profile poster in Room 210.

Nothing in this post is required. There won’t be a Google Classroom assignment with a formal assignment. Instead, I’m asking you to think differently about the work you do and the feedback we generate. It’s not just about our different form of feedback, though; it’s about the sort of collegiality that sits at the top of our set of skills and traits:

Click for a copy of the skills/traits poster from Room 210.

You should work together to make sense of these data, starting with…

[Onomatopoeia] Quiz: 9/19

Here is a PDF of the response summaries Google Forms gives us:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2Fdd-quiz-091917-pdf-1.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

You don’t need to read every response to get a sense of the sort of thinking and understanding we’re dealing with, but every response is here. What do you notice?

I see an unwillingness to leave a question blank, despite a lack of specific knowledge that would answer the question. That’s worth unpacking. It suggests that you are trained to try to earn every point possible in academics, even if you don’t stand a chance of actually doing so. You would never willingly leave an answer blank, even in a grade-abated course, because you latch onto any non-zero chance of earning points. But leaving answers blank is precisely what some of you should have done here.

That’s a general observation that’s worth some writing and discussion from you. Why not leave an answer blank if you know you don’t know it? Obviously, some of it is a lack of reading directions. The context for this diagnostic gives you permission to leave things blank. And that’s a secondary observation: Many students fail to read instructional posts first.

What you could do, if you wanted to generate evidence of “more than just what is required,” is to consider the specific questions from the quiz. What patterns do you see in student responses? How do most people interpret the GAP tiers? Is there a common denominator in what’s missing, poorly understood, etc? What information is missing?

Analyzing this set of data will teach you what wasn’t clear on 9/19, which is the point. If you want evidence of an 8 or 9, you’re going to have to get better at the core skills, traits, and knowledge of the course.

You might also look at…

The Summer Reading Responses

Below is an image gallery of screenshots taken from the summary responses to your summer reading assignment. You might be able to see these by loading the Google Form, but this makes it easier.

You should also read this PDF of responses to one of the questions, which gives you more information to consider.

All of this is an even further step beyond “just what is required.” The data from the quiz on 9/19 will help you adjust to the course as it functions all year, so you have a real motivation to spend time thinking about your work, the work of your peers, etc. This stuff, like the writing you did about summer reading, is functionally very different.

Which is why I’ll leave the prompt even more open-ended. What do you notice about those charts and graphs? What about the data might be meaningful? Why should we care about what you and your peers have indicated in these responses?

Ask questions below about all this, and please let me know if there are any errors loading or reading the data.

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[Onomatopoeia] Quiz: 9/19

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

If you’ve invested time and effort over these first two weeks, you’re already beginning to unlock the second course described here. You’ll also want feedback to know how you’re adjusting. Here, take this:

This is a reimagining of the pop quiz. Read about it here, ignoring the irrelevant stuff1:

View at Medium.com

Another way to view this sort of quiz is as weaponized feedback. Your ability to answer those questions will be combined with recent observations of your in-class work and formal writing. You can think of it as sorting you more broadly than the GAP scoring protocol does in order to attack procrastination, anxiety, etc.

I’ll write brief descriptions of where you’ll be after the quiz, and then I invite you to note that this is why cheating doesn’t make any sense: It would only bring on more work and responsibility that you are unable to do.

Weak performance in class, weak performance on quiz | Start by treating these posts as you ought to treat lectures, textbooks, and test-driven packets. This is the instruction. Read it all thoroughly and repeatedly, ask questions, etc, and isolate yourself in class until you’re caught up.

Weak performance in class, strong performance on quiz | There is always more to do, and you can start by helping others understand what you’ve figured out. Teach them, unlock that deeper curriculum, individualize the work. Anything else is disrespectful, so it’s an explicit path to anti-amenability, which is Tier 1.

Strong performance in class, weak performance on quiz | Don’t worry. This means you need more direct feedback, more guided discussion, and probably some extra help with tricky concepts. If we do that, you’ll be able to teach others, which means you’re knocking on the door to an 8 or 9.

Strong performance in class, strong performance on quiz | Great. Start working with others, designing interstitial ways of honing our collective understanding, and figuring out how to make the room more efficient and effective.

Before we even look at the data from this quiz, I can already tell you that most of you need to work harder at the instructional posts. You can’t read them casually or skim the contents. That’s just as harmful as daydreaming during a lecture or falling asleep while reading a textbook.

The other predictably necessary adjustment is something that never stopped being true: If you aren’t on task throughout the period, you aren’t meeting the basic requirements of the course, which means you should not score higher than a 4 on our GAP scale. That 70 should be your ceiling, especially if you’ve been warned to refocus.

This is functionally similar to being made to change clothes for physical education, to clean up your workstation in science, or to complete homework for points on your final average in Math. These are the rules of the classroom, and you can’t break those rules without a penalty.

On the other side of the motivational scale, there is always something to read or write or discuss in here. You will never run out of things to do. These posts are built to be deep and ramiform, and the work is always about an ongoing process; but if all else fails, somehow, you have me to redirect you or suggest further work. So it doesn’t matter if you are bored, tired, angry, possessed by demons – the room is built to help you be productive, regardless.

Ask questions about this below.

  1. Sooner or later, I’ll update this essay to make it more universal. For now, focus on the obvious connections to what we’re doing. ↩

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Cutting the Stone

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

Triptychs and Collective Judgment

A triptych is a multi-panel work of art that offers different perspectives on a subject or scene. Read more at Wikipedia, mostly so you can stumble across The Garden of Earthly Delights and get lost for a while in the very, very strange paintings of Hieronymus Bosch1. If you’d like simpler but just as disturbing triptychs, you might like Francis Bacon.

In here, the triptych metaphor started last year when we shifted to three GAP scores a quarter, as opposed to just one at the end. Here is the post detailing the shift, which remains critical to your understanding of it. The rest of what you need has been gathered in the ramiform materials spread throughout How Feedback Should Work and A Glass Case Full of Lost Treasures and Fossils, plus the introductory post from the first day of school.

This is all flipped instruction, designed to be read interstitially and carefully, at your own pace. It teaches you by making explicit connections and reiterating key ideas. Everything is completely, painstakingly transparent. You must invest in the reading to do what comes next, even though it will take practice and time to internalize the process. When you do, you will be able to handle any class, any teacher, any job — anything at all that life throws at you.

In our course, we stop briefly every three weeks to assess your body of work. It is a collective effort. It’s what Tony Wagner, author of Creating Innovators and Most Likely to Succeed, two books studied by administrators and teachers in your district, calls “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” That’s the first of three ways you should look at the process:

  1. As collective human judgment informed by evidence
  2. As a measure of the value you’ve added to the environment
  3. As part of a story about you

The third one may be counterintuitive, but all data tell a story. The one told by traditional grades is unclear, except in broad strokes: High numbers are good; low numbers are bad. You can’t unpack traditional grades into a clear picture of what was learned, what was created, etc. You need a cipher to do it — a breakdown of weighting, point values, penalties. It’s why the case against traditional grades is so easy to make.

In here, the story is clear, and the cipher is universal. The number out of 100 corresponds to a GAP score, which unpacks into a profile. That profile corresponds directly to universal and timeless skills and traits. Your formal and informal work are all tied directly to those skills and traits, and all of it can be tracked — and therefore assessed — interstitially and transparently.

You’ve been given an opportunity to read about my approach to feedback, which is a window into the kind of makerspace trial and error you are meant to embrace in this room. What once took a week or longer to process and included individual conferences and essays or reports now takes only 24 to 48 hours. This is the paradigm shift.

The technology available to us makes this far easier than it used to be. Our collective assessment is framed by the profiles, and the profiles can be sorted into tiers. Those tiers have explicit criteria, and there is no mystery surrounding how a student meets or doesn’t meet those criteria. It all comes down to the evidence you’ve generated and the value you’ve added, which can’t be faked easily, if at all.

I won’t repeat what is in the many essays and instructional posts you’ve been given. I’ll only tell you that the answers to your questions are in one of them. Where we need to focus instead is on how Google and related technology allow us to make our collective assessment more efficient and effective.

Googolplexes and Other Strings of Zeros

New to Google Classroom this year is a central page for all your work, which is essentially a portfolio of assignments. It looks like this:

Enlarge that by clicking on it. This tells us if you’ve missed any assignments, left any incomplete, and so on. It also lets us click on any response to quickly review the content and quality of the work. It’s the first and most important level of investment in the course: getting work done to the best of your ability.

Then we consider this handout/poster, using that evidence and all the notes and observations made on your in-class focus and feedback loops:

That’s a slightly edited copy of the Scoring Basics on the main page of the site, distributed in class, and embedded in two or three feedback-related posts. As one of those posts explains, we are interested most in what an objective observer would note about your in-class focus and student-generated feedback over these three weeks. Your intention doesn’t matter — not yet, anyway. Intentions will matter more than anything else when we move into the next three-week panel. For now, all that counts is what we could have observed.

As we move into scoring, we have your formal assignment data from Google Classroom, a sense of your in-class focus and the value you’ve added to the classroom, and evidence of the feedback loop generated from those things. If you don’t have enough evidence in these categories, you can automatically sort yourself into one of the lower three tiers, using that GAP Scoring Basics handout or the first section of this longer protocol.

Tier 4 students, on the other hand, might need to provide further evidence. This is a self-fulfilling criterion: If you’re truly a student in that fourth tier, you understand the course enough to know what to do; if you don’t understand the course enough to know what to do, you aren’t in the fourth tier. And if you haven’t asked for help in order to understand the course, that by itself is evidence of a lower tier.

That’s why the final assignment of any three-week period is a Google Form — a self-assessment of your in-class focus, feedback generation, and general value added — with the chance to submit evidence that doesn’t fit one of the other formal assignments. That evidence is made more accessible and more transparent through the tech we use, but it starts with the in-class focus and feedback looping you’re required to do.

One way to look at it is to return to a handout distributed in class, posted around the room, and embedded in a half-dozen instructional posts:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2FHandout-What-do-I-do-next.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

A legal-sized version is available here and embedded at the top of the website. Keep it handy. And, as always, ask questions below.

  1. The title and tags are a reference to his paintings, by the way. Cutting the Stone gives us the featured image thumbnail, if you look closely, and also serves as an apt metaphor for education. ↩

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Summer Reading

  By AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018)

Section I: Where We’ve Been

Summer reading isn’t new to any of us, and it’s worth looking briefly at how it’s been approached in the past:

Summer Marginalia

In the “Some Context” section of that post, you’ll find links to a half-dozen versions of summer reading for a class like yours. And it really does provide context: For years, we’ve been trying to stave off the atrophy of those summer months by engaging you in high-level, high-interest work. A makerspace like ours would obviously take on as one of its problem-solving tasks the issue of summer reading. We have to think divergently about those months away from the classroom, the importance of reading, etc, in order to hack the experience.

Peruse that old post first, noting that “peruse” can actually mean two opposite things at once. Then move on to the actual assignment for this year’s summer reading.

One more thing: Toward the bottom of that post is a section on Reddit, an online resource that still exists for you, albeit in a kind of stasis, and I invite you to consider whether that might help this year. Reddit offers functionality that no other interstitial resource will, and it hasn’t been folded properly into Room 210 yet. (We experimented with it before in our old classroom, which wasn’t outfitted as a full makerspace.)

Section II: The Language of Composition

For those who need it, here is a direct link to the summer reading for AP English Language & Composition.

The purpose of this assignment is to make those who complete the reading more knowledgeable and skilled than those who don’t. Armed with the knowledge and skills from the summer reading, motivated students can take the lead in many lessons and assignments throughout the first half of the year. The fourth tier of profiles requires students to add exactly that sort of value to the learning environment.

These same motivated students can generate plenty of metacognition by attempting to link the summer reading to our work over these first few weeks. But there will be no explicit lesson that does this for you. Instead, you are expected to develop your own conclusions and connections. When you compile evidence to substantiate a higher profile score, this sort of self-sustained analysis is incredibly valuable.

If you are one of the inevitable group of students who did not complete or only partially completed this work, there is no penalty for acknowledging that truth. Consider what would happen if a student transferred into this AP course after the beginning of the year, or what would happen if a student moved to the district well into the school year: This summer reading could not be realistically assigned on top of whatever current work we have to do. Those new students would need to rely on their peers to make connections and learn those basic concepts along the way.

Put more simply and generally, this is your first example of how much more important self-assessment, collaboration, and growth are to us than any kind of perfunctory performance. Your summer reading will help you, if you did it; if you did not do it, pretending otherwise or rushing through it while juggling many other responsibilities will have exactly the opposite effect that we want.

So you are strongly encouraged to take a bit of time this week to write thoughtfully about what you completed, what that reveals about you, and how you plan to adjust now.

Section III: BHS Summer Reading

Now to the formal assignment, starting with this form:

You need to recognize right away that there is no penalty for acknowledging failure here, nor is there a reward for stating that you really did finish your chosen text. What you enter here is data to be discussed and analyzed as we move forward — nothing more, nothing less.

That is not to say that your choices did not matter. They mattered very much. As a student assigned one of these books, your decision tells us something about your relationship to reading and learning. It doesn’t tell us everything, however, and punishing or judging you is no more helpful right now than praising you. What matters now is the meaning you mine from those choices.

And that’s because we are really talking about your reading life. (Later, we will talk about your writing life.) For the last few months, most of you had no classes, no homework, and no immediate repercussions for your reading choices, whether you read nothing or spent each and every day reading something.

It’s that “something” that will open up the conversation. Reading does not just mean reading books, although we will emphasize the importance of literature in a moment. Your reading life includes every scrap of text you decode, from text-message conversations to Internet forum threads to fan fiction. All of that text does something to you. It increases your knowledge, shifts your perspective, opens up your emotions. Maybe it distracts you or just kills a couple of hard-to-kill hours.

One of our central goals this year is to give you an awareness of what your reading life looks like so that you can make more impactful choices. To a lesser extent, that means pushing you to experiment with more literature, but the most important aspect is your self-awareness — your constant, critical thinking about yourself. What do you read? What could you gain by changing what you read?

Again, there is no risk/reward when it comes to the facts of what you did this summer. That can’t be overstated. But we will also learn this year that not every perspective, opinion, text, etc. is equally important or meaningful. Literature does something that no other kind of reading can do:

That is the video you need to watch carefully in order to write the required response detailed in your summer reading questionnaire. (It is also detailed on Google Classroom.) You may have read a book that doesn’t quite fit this definition of literature, but you can connect any meaningful reading experience to the ideas in this video. You can talk about those ideas, even if you haven’t experienced them through your recent reading life.

Ask questions about the assignment below. To talk to each other, consider that old subreddit, Google+, and any other interstitial possibilities. Start in class, though, with a concerted attempt to use our space to learn and then to write together.

One more thing: I haven’t read it over again, but I have a feeling that there might be something worthwhile in this three-years-old post on literature in our classroom:

View at Medium.com

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Orientation in Four Parts

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

Part 1: The Occasional Bottomless Abyss

By the time you graduate from high school, you will have spent around 2,340 days in public education — about a third of your life up to that point, depending on how the hours are calculated. You might remember how it started:

http://www.theonion.com/article/6-year-old-stares-down-bottomless-abyss-of-formal–2510

That’s from The Onion. It’s satire, although some people don’t always get the joke. In our course, we’ll occasionally look at satire as one of the only ways of dealing with unsettling or upsetting stuff — here’s another, more recent Onion article on schooling, for instance, that speaks to some of the systemic problems we face.

You’ve been doing this for a while, though, and are close to the end of the experience. You’re used to those systemic problems. The first day of school, with its flurry of handouts and icebreakers and generally miasmic exhaustion1 is familiar to you.

This course requires you to pay attention from the opening bell. We need to look at education — at your education — from a fresh perspective. Start with this video, which animates a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson:

That video was the initial inspiration for what you will experience this year in our classroom. That’s the philosophical crux, to give you another word worth knowing.

Part 2: The Syllabus

You’ll notice that this post addresses all of you, whether you are enrolled in AP Language or English 11. Each class period is separated on Google Classroom, which we’ll cover momentarily, but this digital space is shared in the same way our physical space is shared.

This is by design. All English Language Arts instruction addresses the same universal skills and traits, and we help you hone those skills and traits through the Humanities. There is a lot to gain from observing what your peers do, hearing their questions, exchanging ideas, etc, so this website expands your ability to do that.

The physical space is known as a makerspace. Load your course syllabus below to learn what that means2. Start with the always up-to-date Google Doc version of it:

Read this syllabus as soon as possible. It hits some of the notes you’d expect from one of these things, but the tune is quite a bit different. Pay attention to those differences. It’s not the last time — not even the last time in this post — that the music will take some getting used to.

Part 3: Starting Up the Feedback Loop

As the syllabus tells you — as every instructional text will tell you, repeatedly — running a makerspace does not mean you’re without deadlines, homework, feedback, etc. Far from it. That’s why Google Classroom is indispensable to us: It gives you formal assignments, due dates, and requirements, all neatly linked to instructional posts.

To register for the right section to see those assignments, use the appropriate code:

  • Period 2 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — vz2wur
  • Period 3 [English 11] — ev8f5c
  • Period 8 [English 11] — uv8afx
  • Period 9 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — jr3ypu

Assignments and updates will appear in the stream. The resource section has a copy of the syllabus and other critical documents.

Now, feedback works differently in a makerspace, so you won’t receive scores through Google Classroom. Instead, we use the intricate and intuitive machinery explained here:

Mongering and Congeries

That post is essential reading. If it isn’t part of a formal assignment during the first week, it will be before the first three weeks have passed.

Part 4: Clarity from Effort

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

In other words, you learn by doing in here. You also learn by reading lots and lots of teacher-written essays and posts. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, for instance, you can read this essay:

Circadian Dynamics

This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background lessons and texts are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with these brief 42 minutes3. We might circle up some days; we might talk in groups or meet individually; we might take practice tests or take a shot at timed writing. Without grades, there is enormous freedom to do what is needed, and you will direct most of the lessons yourself.

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

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

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

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

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

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

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

If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know. I’ll redirect you. During the first week of school, for instance, you might need time to go over the syllabus with me. You might need help setting up your Google account. Or you might know that you need to do your first writing assignment in class, because you won’t do it at home.

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

We’ll end this first post4 with an essay on what it means to take risks like this:

Molecular Learning

Welcome to Room 210, and to Sisyphean High.

  1. That word, miasmic, is a really good one for far too many school-related situations. I first encountered it in this review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was part of a unit on horror movies and censorship years ago. It’s a particularly smart look at horror cinema, but it’s the use of language that made it worth teaching in the classroom. ↩

  2. When I compile these notes into a more formal essay, I’ll give you that, too. I’m still figuring out what different social media and websites are most useful for when it comes to helping you all. ↩

  3. The essays haven’t been updated to reflect our new schedule, mostly in an effort not to lose the Wu-Tang allusions. I suppose we could go with the answer to life, the universe, and everything, though… ↩

  4. Which is much, much longer than most posts for a particular unit or lesson will be. This one has to be as dense as possible, because you need a few dozen chances to realize the most important truth: This course is different, and only by leaning into those differences will you be successful. ↩