Category: English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in English 11 Regents for the 2017-2018 school year.

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Character and Catcher in Context

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

The Aft Agley Gang Rides Again

If you search this site for the word “agley,” you get more than a few posts on the unpredictability of our schedule. Most of those posts make some allusion to Robert Burns’ poem, which gives us the phrase “gang aft agley” and a chance for a very weird pun.

This week was another microcosm of unpredictability. A snowstorm kept us out on Wednesday, which was naturally the first day of spring; we lost three hours on Thursday to a weather-related delay; many of you were, therefore, forced to spend all day on Thursday preparing for the spring musical; and some of you spent the period on Friday taking the the twice-rescheduled DCC Accuplacer exam.

Even the predictable elements of that lineup are chaotic. That’s why we use the term interstitial here: When the learning is accessible anytime and anywhere, we can ride out the chaos. All it takes is a focus on preparing in advance and watching each other’s backs. Hence the Aft Agley Gang.

Regulators, Mount Up

We will meet four times next week (barring another misplaced winter storm), have five days for a makeshift spring break, and then return for more than seven consecutive weeks of classes. It is a good time to self-assess.

We’ll start on Monday with a period of extemporaneous writing about writing and continue on Tuesday with a period of extemporaneous writing about reading. This worked well when we did it in mid-February, and it works especially well to tie together the writing and reading processes that were disrupted last this week.

The prompts for Monday and Tuesday are below. The first will be posted to Google Classroom at the start of the period on March 26. You will have the next 42 minutes to answer the prompt and submit your response. On Tuesday, March 27, you will answer the provided prompt by hand, with your phones and computers stored until the bell rings at the end of the period.

If you’re doing your job, you should be reading this well in advance of the work itself. That’s why we’re using the term extemporaneous, which has a number of possible meanings in context. You can prepare as much or as little as you like, because the focus will be on the skill of extemporaneous metacognition.

Monday’s Prompt: Character Essay

Here is how we planned out the writing process for your essay on character, starting with a bit of direct instruction on Monday, March 19:

You had the rest of the week, starting on Tuesday, to work with me and each other. The focus, whether you were applying to NHS or not, was on finding an unexpected or surprising approach.

You’ll be asked to submit copies of any and all digital evidence related to your character essay work. This includes final drafts, outlines, and collaborative notes. This evidence will be checked in separately from what you do during class on Monday.

For that in-class writing, you will spend about 40 minutes of a class period writing about the writing. How did you use the notes taken on the whiteboard? How did you use feedback from your peers and teacher? What did you discover in brainstorming, and how did that fit your various intrinsic and extrinsic goals? Most importantly, what did you learn about how you write from this week’s process?

This response must be submitted before you leave and folded into the GAP scoring process that culminates on Thursday, March 29.

Tuesday’s Prompt: The Catcher in the Rye

You started this novel on February 25 with an atypical look at online annotations. Since then, you could have signed out a hard copy of the novel. You’ve also been invited repeatedly to return to the story when you have time, sometimes as an in-class alternative to your formal assignments. It’s now been a month.

On Tuesday, you will spend about 40 minutes of our class period writing about your reading. You should start with what’s going on in the book. How far have you gotten? What’s happening? What do you know? Then you should write your reactions to the novel, including your perspective on the narrator. Finally, you should write about the most important aspect of this process: What have you learned about how you read over the last month?

This response will be written by hand — no computers, phones, etc. — and collected before you leave class on Tuesday. If you are absent, you will have the usual 24 hours to make up the work. It will then be folded into the GAP scoring process that culminates on Thursday, March 29.

Video meliora, proboque, deteriora sequor.

For some of you, these two days of silent, introspective writing are opportunities to focus on what you’ve learned about your learning over the last month. This will put you in the right frame of mind to self-assess as the GAP panel ends, too.

For others, it is your last, best chance to drag your body of evidence out of the lowest tier of profiles and earn a passing score for the quarter. This is it. Look at the threshold for failure:

That untiered set of profiles hangs on our wall. The key language in that 2: “a deliberate and systemic disengagement from the learning process.” It’s repeated a sentence later: “There is no investment in the learning environment.”

If you invest for this entire week of focused self-assessment, writing as much as you can as honestly as you can each day, then you will genuinely fit a higher profile. It’s an incredibly forgiving system.

But if you continue to be weak in virtually all facets of the course? If you continue not to meet even the most basic requirements? You will fail, just as you would in any classroom.

As always, this is about self-control and choice. (And flying guillotines.)

GAP Scoring and Miscellanea

These instructional posts are used to set up our in-class work, so I want to explain a change to the GAP protocol for next week. On Thursday, March 29, you’ll be asked to complete the usual Google Form to self-assess your performance since March 12. In addition, you’ll be asked to submit a link to a Google Drive folder that contains organized evidence.

Here’s what that will look like in Google Classroom:

When clicked, that will open up a folder of evidence that is clearly labeled, like this:

This may require you to make copies of evidence, depending on your existing organizational strategy. It may require you to move a few things around. It should be easy enough, however, to organize your work under one hyperlink. We’ll talk more about the process on Wednesday.

A few more notes:

  • AP students will need to complete both the multiple-choice assignment and the required analysis outside of class, since Monday will be dedicated to something else.
  • Updates to the course calendars will be online as soon as possible, but probably not until spring break.
  • Previous GAP scores will be posted tonight or tomorrow morning. Because of the extensive feedback and data released last week, there will be no further discussion or revisiting these scores.

If you have questions about anything in this post, ask below.

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Verbing Weirds Language

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

Click for the source. Read the feedback below for why it’s here.

TL;DR

This is less a summary, per the usual application of TL;DR, and more a warning: Do not gather your pitchforks and torches without reading everything available to you in this post.

If you read everything, you will not need those pitchforks and torches. That’s the self-fulfilling prophecy: If you invest in this feedback, you will see no reason to mob together and storm the castle; if you don’t do the assignment, that will be just another example of where those Frankenstein numbers came from.

Unlearning Helplessness

This space is reserved for interstitial discussion and Q&A feedback on the following documents:

These have been posted to Google Classroom. The notes are the same for all students; the spreadsheets differ by roster, as you might expect. All students should also look carefully at their Google Classroom portfolios, since those assignments are represented in these spreadsheets. As a reminder, you see all assignments by clicking “VIEW ALL” at the top of the Classroom stream:

You’ll see that the lesson in most of the feedback you’re being given today is about taking responsibility for your own progress. You have an extraordinary number of resources to help you; if you won’t use them, that is a poor choice that may further roil a sea of poor choices.

This Assignment

All students should read the guide/overview first:

This will explain the notations in each spreadsheet, contextualize the feedback embedded in those data, and provide direction for metabolizing all of it. If you do not read this carefully, we will have nothing to discuss.

When you’re ready, you should fold what you’ve learned into reflective and metacognitive writing. Set aside time this week, over the weekend, or next week. You have enough time before the end of the next GAP panel to adjust, but this is much more about success beyond that — success not just in this course, but in any situation where you are expected to demonstrate growth, understanding, mastery, and so on.

In a day or two, I will post the indicated GAP scores to Infinite Campus. They will not surprise you, if you’ve set aside time to read this feedback, consider the data, and analyze your performance. If those Infinite Campus scores do surprise you, we’ll talk about the need for greater awareness and vigilance when it comes to interstitial instruction. Again, this is about taking responsibility for your choices.

Above all, please help each other. Ask questions here about what I’ve given you. Use class time to collaborate. Use interstitial access to me and each other to investigate. Do the work.

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Canvassing the Area

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

Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [three panel], 1951

The paragraph below comes from this blog post, where you can read more about the French philosopher who wrote it:

It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model, but such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it.

Read that carefully. It should test your ability to read closely and critically, and we should discuss what you find difficult about its language in class. The point of a metaphor, however, at least in this kind of instructional post, is to elucidate an idea. It should move us closer to an understanding of a process, usually so we can refine that process.

So the gist of that paragraph is this: You create from what is already in your head. You add value into the world based on who you are as you go about the business of creating. The canvas isn’t blank; it contains all its possibilities already. It’s a version of Michelangelo’s angel in the stone.

A Humanities makerspace leans on this philosophy. You can’t just study the work of others; you have to create, too. And the most important creation is your self — the person you create through your choices. How do we create the best version of ourselves? How do we create meaning on the blank canvas of the self?

Those questions are clichés, but so are roses on Valentine’s Day. There’s a lot of power in clichés, and irony has to yield to sincerity at some point. You can’t always talk in memes.

‘Waiting’

So. You’re a blank canvas. Every three or four weeks, this course gives you a chance to reset your assessment of what you put on that canvas. We’ve been experimenting with that triptych model for about a year now, and it seems to work.

For those of you who want to create and explore and learn things, this is sort of unimportant. You take stock of yourself every so often, get a reward for doing well, and recognize that it’s all right to use a few extrinsic motivations to prime the intrinsic ones.

You share a space with another group, however, and they are reading this now with a different purpose. Whenever we reset, it’s also a chance to slough off the burden of mistakes. It’s a chance to start over.

Three or four weeks of hard work in a makerspace will yield the evidence for one of those top profiles:

Click to load the entire set of profiles, poster-sized.

It takes three or four weeks to do that. Filling a canvas with purpose is time-consuming, contemplative work. It’s an aggregate process, not a subtractive one. You don’t start with a perfect piece of artwork and lose beauty from it.

On the other hand, it takes only a moment to damage a canvas.

Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept ‘Waiting,’ 1960

That’s the real lesson: Destruction is always faster and easier than creation. Some of you walk into a new opportunity for growth and immediately slash the canvas, instead of searching for what’s inside of you that can be brought forth. Your reasons are incredibly important, but there’s also this: You destroy the canvas. It can’t be undone.

As a result, some of you are going to find a new number in a new column in the online grade book. That number will be clearly labeled as a work-in-progress assessment score. It is inactive. It will never affect your “average,” because it exists only to provide feedback to you when you need it.

The number corresponds, as always, to a grade abatement profile. It reflects, at this point, your choices over a single period of learning: Monday, March 121. The number tells you, in other words, if you took a knife to the blank canvas as soon as you could.

And the number doesn’t care if you meant to damage the canvas or not; it’s a number based on evidence, and that’s all. It can’t be undone. Fortunately, you always have a way to start over in here. You acknowledge that this particular canvas has been slashed/burned/covered in spilled coffee, and you get a clean one.

The rest of the feedback this number gives you is built into the language of the profiles. Read them. The classroom is filled with every other tool you need. You have a few weeks to use the new canvas in front of you to create something meaningful. There is time to earn a very good profile score, which will mean that you’ve created meaningful work.

First, take some time to look at the calendar for your course again:

The learning and content goals for every unit are listed for you. This is the blueprint, if you want to switch from painting to architecture. Use those goals to set up your choices, and look to the lessons for each day or week for what’s expected of you.

If you’re told, for example, to spend a Monday doing test pre, you have to do that. If you’re told to read the first chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, you have to do that. Not doing what you’re asked to do, especially without any sort of discussion in advance, is what leads to low performance and low skills and low interest and so on.

Next Steps, or TL;DR

If you have a number online to look at, look at that number. Read this post2 with that number in mind, examine your recent choices and current mindset, and then talk to me about how you’re going to make better choices to get into a more productive mindset.

Look to your peers, too, since they ought to help you to make better choices. If your peers don’t help you make better choices, your first choice ought to be to distance yourself from them for the 42 minutes you spend in our space each day.

Almost all of this boils down to staying on task and getting work done. Those choices have been tied into profiles that reward hard work and amenability much more than performance on tests and quizzes.

Which means, in our class, that low grades indicate a student who is not following directions, not responding to feedback, and not completing assignments. Those are probably the three easiest elements of learning to control, and the rules of the room are simple, forgiving, and logical.

Let’s talk in the comments.

  1. Having to cobble this post and its feedback together ate up our snow day on Tuesday, so your GAP scores for the work done through March 9 will be a little late. The solution to this really is that everyone focuses and works hard, by the way. The design of the course means that universal hard work would make the scoring process perfunctory, while the feedback process became much more enriching. ↩

  2. There is no TL;DR for meaningful information. Read the whole post. ↩

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The Catcher in the Rye

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

A screenshot of the Genius site for Salinger’s novel.

A Kind of Ingenuity

We’ve talked before about why we write and why we read. Look back on those discussions as we start our work on The Catcher in the Rye.

Note: AP students will start this unit on Monday, February 26. Everyone else will begin on Monday, March 5.

From our first day on, this has been a course about experience and experimentation. Based on AP student feedback here and in class, the next experiment will be in how we read and interact with canonical literature.

Here is J.D. Salinger’s “album” on Genius:

The direct link will be sent through Google Classroom, too, when it’s time for your class to start reading. You’ll click through to find folks of all ages and backgrounds contributing to a collective annotation of The Catcher in the Rye. They ask questions, offer insight, unpack symbols, and share personal experience as they move through the text.

Note: If you want to read a paper copy of the novel, let me know. All of you are required to experiment with this online mechanism, but you are not restricted to it. Far from it. I’ll sign out copies to you upon request, and you are encouraged to give yourself a contrasting experience. That’s excellent fodder for metacognitive writing.

The essential questions here are about how we read, why we annotate, how we talk to each other, etc., in addition to what we learn about ourselves and our world through the novel. Remember that analysis has its place, and it can add to the experience of a story.

As an example, here’s the director of Black Panther, Ryan Coogler, on how we created a scene in the movie:

Each of his choices is deliberate, and watching him unpack them doesn’t lesson our enjoyment of an action scene. It adds to that enjoyment.

It helps when the author is the one telling us what is happening. There’s an explicit level of trust when the artist tells us what each element means. It activates the white matter in our brains to create the “hooks” that Paul Graham talks about. That’s what adds to the depth of experience.

Whether we have the author’s expertise or not, this kind of analysis is one reason to go back to films and stories and songs again and again. The experience deepens with repetition. We find surprises.

In our classroom, we’ll read The Catcher in the Rye without taking quizzes and tests, without essays on symbolism, and without deadlines, because we want the experience. I want you to use Genius as a collaborative site where regular folks try to break down Salinger’s writing.

Another reason to experiment like this: You need to learn how to use the Internet for learning. It’s not going away. And that means figuring out how to focus on a single tab or text, not just how to learn in the ramiform way most sites encourage.

That Vanity Fair video is an example: You can’t click anything until the end, so any distraction is caused by you, not hyperlinks in the text itself. You have to invest in learning what Ryan Coogler is teaching you, or make the very deliberate choice to turn away.

The Genius site for Catcher will have links, too, and you have to figure out how to bounce through them and back to the text in a meaningful and purposeful way. You need to learn how to focus on what you are learning. That’s the metacognitive piece in this: You need to figure out how you read online, and then you need to get better at that skill.

Again, if you want a hard copy, and you don’t want to buy your own, I’ll sign one out to you. That, too, should be your choice, not one forced on you.

All right! Let’s dive into this annotated copy of Salinger’s most famous novel to see what we find there. The link again:

Watch Google Classroom for more information, and ask questions about this experiment in the comments below.

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Silence and Space

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

From the Montserrat College of Art.

RE/AP Plans, Feb. 12-14

On Tuesday, and then again on Wednesday, you will spend the 42-minute class period writing. The subject of Tuesday’s prompt is your reading process, particularly with regard to 1984; Wednesday’s subject is your writing process, particularly with regard to the classification and division essay inspired by Stephanie Ericsson’s “The Ways We Lie.”

You will write by hand to start. That helps you practice the physical act of writing, which matters in a year when all of you take at least one timed, high-stakes English assessment. Writing by hand is also a way to engage the kinesthetic part of learning more directly. It’s as we discussed earlier in the year: Sometimes we need to focus on the physical and tangible. We spend enough time in front of screens in our lives.

When you arrive on Tuesday and Wednesday, plan to store all of your devices and electronics. As necessary, you can put them in that anti-distraction corner that was built for this purpose. The act of storing your phone and computer for two days will help you into a different mindset, and that’s what we want: the kind of interesting, authentic writing that needs silence and space to develop.

You will be strongly encouraged to take these responses with you over the long weekend for more reflection, metacognition, and revision. At that point, you should return to instructional posts that set the context for the work. For instance, this is how you were introduced to reading novels:

Well, Why Read?

Look over that instructional post again, and begin thinking about how you approached 1984. Do the same thing for the instructional posts that contextualized the writing process for your classification and division work.

Use the comment section here to ask questions, share ideas with me, etc., and keep an eye on your assiduousness this weekend. Six days off is just enough time for your brain to atrophy.

Two more admin notes:

  1. You will need to sign in your copy of 1984 during the week of February 211.
  2. It will be ten days until we are able to resume the required conferences that started on January 22. Let’s use those ten days to conference interstitially — over email — where possible2.

  1. If you’ve lost it, that’s actually an interesting approach to your writing: What’s the story behind the novel going missing? ↩

  2. Remember that these conferences have always been available to you as part of a better form of feedback. They are required now to make sure you’ve talked to me individually about your progress. You’re not limited to one conference, and you’re not required to do it in person. It’s about the feedback loop. ↩

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Negative Capability

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

The title and central link in this post are allusions to John Keats, specifically his idea of negative capability. The image is another take on Leliel, borrowed with thanks from this artist.

Content with Half-Knowledge

While writing that last post, I got distracted by etymology (as one does). I wanted to link you to the origin of quixotic, a word that means “exceedingly idealistic; unrealistic and impractical,” both to teach you the term and give you the allusion to Don Quixote, which also gave us an interesting idiom about windmills.

Anyway, I discovered two things to share with you. The first is the Chrome extension for the Online Etymological Dictionary:

Install that on your school Chromebook, if nowhere else, so that you can quickly look up the etymology of new and interesting words you encounter. The more you learn to recognize roots, the more easily you’ll intuit the meaning of unfamiliar words. (Note: The extension seems to be blocked right now. I’ll apply to get it unblocked. Bookmark the address for later.)

Remember what Paul Graham wrote: “[T]he more you learn, the more hooks you have for new facts to stick onto — which means you accumulate knowledge at what’s colloquially called an exponential rate.”

The second thing is this bit of writing by the author of the Online Etymological Dictionary:

 

I think the title should be “Cloud of Unknowing,” but ignore that — this fits our space perfectly. One of our goals is to “get the feel of things in fog or dusk,” which means trusting that the search is more important than any final answer. It’s again the idea that “the most important thing one learns is something about how one learns,” which is part of the Neil Postman quotation at the top of this website1

I want you to take a moment this weekend to think about your own relationship to uncertainty. To what extent are you comfortable with not knowing? Write about that, and will you have a better sense of what it really means to study the Humanities. After all, there are very few things as human as being a little bit lost and trying to find a way forward.

That’s lofty stuff, so here’s the bathetic bit: If you write about your relationship to uncertainty, you’ll also generate evidence of (1) doing more than just what is required, and (2) a precocious strength in metacognition, which are two of the criteria for the top tier of GAP scoring.

By the way, “bathetic” is another of those words that stuck in my head when I read Perdido Street Station, which first came up here. “Bathetic” is the term for a sudden drop in conversation, writing, etc., from the elevated to the commonplace. So we go from discussing the philosophical heights of the Humanities to motivating you through grades. The root of the word is bathos, which is fun to say, if nothing else.

  1. How we access and process knowledge is changing in the hypertextual era, which is the era of immediate access to the Internet. It’s a commonplace question, although that doesn’t make it any less important. Here is Pete Holmes talking about uncertainty in a stand-up act:

    [youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQ4o1N4ksyQ?feature=oembed&w=920&h=518]

    You have Chromebooks, smartphones, and desktops that give you immediate answers to any questions you have, from how to complete homework to the meaning of life. That’s an important and mostly unexplored part of your learning. ↩

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Calendar Updates: RE/AP

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

The Return of the Aft Agley Gang

You might remember our syllabus and its quixotic desire to go paperless:

We need to be able to edit documents in real time and to collaborate in a more 21st-century way. You need access to the hyperlinks and connections that make up the bulk of contemporary writing and reading.

Which isn’t to say that you can’t have printed copies of this stuff. Think of it as responsive printing: If you need a copy of something, then you’ll get it. It’s up to you to determine that need, though, and usually to take care of it. We have our own printer, but it is connected only to the desktops in Room 210; if you want to print, you’ll have to be deliberate about it.

We will also print some essays as we workshop them, depending on need. Not everything can be done on a computer, but we are going to attempt to minimize our paper use.

As I write this, I’m staring at stacks of paper on every bookshelf and tabletop, so “minimize” didn’t happen. It’s hard to let go of the desire for printed copies of everything we do, and there is still a need, in many cases, to maintain that kinesthetic connection.

There was one reason above all others to go paperless: to be flexible. Photocopies, especially laminated ones, are a commitment to a particular state of things. Edits require us to reprint 100+ copies of a handout or text, and that’s not always possible.

Case in point: The calendar needs to be revamped.

If the Google Docs versions don’t load correctly, use the PDF. Obviously, only the Google version will be updated.

I’ll also replace the links on the main site and Google Classroom over the next few days. Make sure you’re using the updated version of the calendar. I’ll make copies next week. I’m also going to leave the earlier calendars laminated on our bulletin board as a testament to the folly of man.

Most of the changes are small. The only major change is to the GAP scoring process for the next month:

  • There will be no Q3A score.
  • Your Q3B score will reflect the entire time frame between January 22 and March 9.
  • Your Q3 average will come from that score and your Q3C score.

Infinite Campus already reflects this change. It works out in your favor, since it will give you more time to show growth, develop your skills, and conference with me, if you haven’t already done so. Use the new calendar to plan for that.

One reason for this change is our ongoing (and possibly quixotic) attempt to develop more self-control and self-awareness. In the last post, I explained the latest version of the Rubicon protocol. To reiterate:

  • You can accumulate a “point” more than once per period.
  • If you stay focused and productive, you won’t accumulate any.
  • If you don’t stay focused and productive, you’ll keep accumulating points.

The number you see in Infinite Campus won’t always be up-to-date, and you aren’t going to get a memo telling you what you did. This is basic stuff. Stay focused, follow directions, and do your job.

Rubicon scores factor into your grade abatement profiles, but there’s a caveat there. You aren’t going to fail because you see that Rubicon number tick up. It’s one data point among many. A low number there probably doesn’t exclude you from the fourth tier of profiles. A high number doesn’t necessarily drop you to the second tier. We’ll look at everything when fitting you into a profile.

The most important thing for you to keep in mind is that this is a learning tool. It’s designed to focus you. If it doesn’t do that, we can have a conversation about what’s happening. So far, you all seem to understand the purpose of it, and you’re buying into its efficacy:

Optical Delusions

That should link you straight to the comment section of the last post. Enter that discussion, if you have some insight into how best to motivate you and your peers from period to period.

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Optical Delusions

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

Necker Cubes and Rhomboids

This is a Necker cube:

It’s an example of shifting perspectives. You can push the front of the cube to the back, move the back to the front, and even flatten it into a six-sided, two-dimensional shape. You can feel your brain shifting its focus as you do this — a kind of gestalt click as the perspectives snap into place.

Shading the cube makes this clearer:

Since we’re focusing on our use of metaphors lately, let’s use the Necker cube to discuss perspective, optics, and in-class focus1.

In-class focus remains the most powerful predictor of your eventual success. Notice how much it’s interwoven throughout these posts:

The Fatal Flying Guillotine

The Aft Agley Gang

The Edge of the City

Note the dates of publication for these, too. Every month or so, you’ve gotten an interstitial lecture — the equivalent of a chapter in a textbook or an actual, in-class lecture, as you no doubt know — that clarifies and explicates the need to stay focused in class.

An Important Reminder of How You Receive Instruction

Every post is a lesson unto itself. This one, for instance, is mostly concerned with an update to the “Rubicon protocol” that tracks your in-class focus, but it also links back to important class updates while teaching you about perception and optics.

The depth of this course lies in interstitial teaching. That’s how we weaponize your class time: by arming you with a dozen different kinds of instruction before you walk in the door.

If you aren’t reading carefully, you miss out on that chance. You won’t understand what we’re doing, why we’re doing it, or how it helps you. It’s a self-inflicted wound, but that’s not the point; the point is to treat the wound before you bleed out.

Back to the less violent metaphor of Necker cubes:

A Shift in Rubicon Scores

In the most recent update to the course, I explained what the numbers in Infinite Campus mean. Now I’m shifting that online feedback in a small but significant way. It’s a shift in perspective only, like the shift of a Necker cube’s front and back.

What you’ll find now are assignments linked to each GAP panel. They will be named, for example, “Crossing the Rubicon: Q3A.” These assignments have had every parameter set to zero: zero points available, zero weighting, etc., and they aren’t factored into your averages at all.

Every “point” in this category indicates one of the unacceptable choices outlined in this guide. That occasionally ironic list, again:

  • doing homework for another class
  • playing games
  • sending text messages
  • watching videos
  • sleeping
  • rappelling down the side of the building and escaping into the woods
  • gossiping
  • complaining
  • gazing too long into the abyss
  • checking social media accounts

Last quarter, each Rubicon “point” reflected a single period during which you made a choice like these. The shift in perspective is this: You can now receive a “point” multiple times during each class period. Think of it as pro re nata, or PRN, which means “on demand.” These are PRN Rubicon tallies.

As an example, imagine that you are given the makerspace for the period, and you can choose between three separate course assignments: reading a book, writing an essay, or analyzing recent test prep. You work on the essay, but you get distracted by text messages for five minutes in the middle of the period. That ought to be tallied up as a Rubicon “point,” right?

But it can’t be treated exactly like the student who was sitting next to you, since she decided to do homework for another class for the entire period, including a trip to the iLC to pick up a printed copy. That has to yield more “points” than your (admittedly avoidable) lapse.

As another example, imagine that it takes you five minutes to settle down and begin a timed assignment that requires 40 minutes to complete. That’s a lapse in assiduousness, and it ought to be noted. It affects your learning. It’s not equivalent, however, to the student who stops every five minutes to gossip during the timed writing, effectively ruining the essay as a representation of her best efforts.

What this means is that the online grade book will reflect point values above a zero, indicating the frequency and severity of your lapses. We’ll try that for a GAP panel or two, see if it motivates you differently, and discuss other options.

As you accumulate “points” for this Rubicon tally, you can always sit with me during a free period and go over what you’re doing wrong. It should be obvious, though, and that brings us back to Necker:

It’s actually not about perspective. It’s not, at least, as subtle as pushing the front of a cube back and forth. There’s no optical illusion at all. When I note that you’ve crossed the Rubicon, it could be for any number of obviously inappropriate decision. You’re one of those cubes, or some variation thereof; but you’re obviously, irrefutably some kind of Necker-like shape.

The metaphor’s getting away from me, so to put it plainly: If you don’t want “points” for doing the wrong thing, don’t do the wrong thing. There are multiple perspectives on every choice you make, and I’ll always err on your side. I’ll always try to give you the benefit of the doubt. If you accumulate “points” (which I keep putting in quotation marks, hoping to find a better noun; this whole operant-conditioning thing makes my skin crawl), it means you were obviously and irrefutably doing the wrong thing.

That’s the feedback. Numbers in that column online indicate that you need to refocus. Make that in-class focus a strength, and you’ll see greater success overall. Remember to read this poster:

It’s the poster by our door. You can’t miss it.

Focus on in-class focus. And, as necessary, stop making excuses for your lack of self-control.

  1. I actually prefer the original version of the cube, which is the Necker rhomboid on the right of this image:

    I hadn’t heard of it until I looked through the notes section of the New World Encyclopedia entry on Necker cubes, which is the first link in this post. The lesson, as always, is to train yourself to click on links and follow ramiform paths to new information. That encyclopedia’s next entry, for instance, gives us an even better metaphor for what we do, although it isn’t one I’d advertise too much. ↩

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The Paradox of the Heap

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

By Simon A. Eugster (citation in link)

“Moving Slowly, and That’s Okay”

I want you to read the excerpt below in its entirety. It comes from a student’s GAP Q2C reflection, and it details what I imagine is a relatable experience:

Well, it’s that time of the quarter again, and there’s only one work I can use to describe my work pace this GAP period, and that is… slow, really, really, slow. I’m going to be 150% honest with you Mr. Eure, coming back from Christmas break and over the course of those next two weeks looking at our Google Classroom put so much anxiety in me that I could barely even look at it without getting a headache. There were also multiple times whereas the posts on Classroom were piling up I thought to myself, “he must be out of his mind”, only to come to find that none of them had due dates, and although that shouldn’t matter (but let’s be real, it does), it took a huge burden off of my back. Through much talking with my peers, I realized that most of them are not understanding that all of this stuff doesn’t have to be turned in by the end of Q2C, and that by submitting everything right away, they’re not grasping the point of all of these things, they’re for us to take our time, to put forth our best work, and to try, give up, and try again. I have not much at all to turn in by the end of Q2C, and ya know what, I’m not even going to stress about it, because the point of all of this is progress. I really started to bother myself when I kept scrolling down classroom, seeing little to no assignments with the green letters DONE next to it, because usually I have everything done by the end of the GAP period and have a bundle of fun metacognitive stuff to turn in as evidence. I felt as if I was not succeeding as a student, and that really drove me up a wall let me tell you, but little did I know that this GAP period I have grown and matured more than I ever have over the course of this entire year. I’ve had to sit down and tell myself that in the real world, progress does not happen overnight, and things take time. I kept asking myself “but what if you get a low GAP score because you don’t have a lot of evidence”, and I eventually came to the conclusion, unfortunately towards the end of Q2C, that I’ve been doing everything I have to, just slowly. I’ve been focused this quarter, just moving slowly, and that’s okay. Assignments don’t take me ten minutes like they used to, but that’s the best part of how much I’ve grown, I’m caring way more about the quality and advancement of my work over when it’s due.

She got it. And this is the right chain of logic to follow, for any other students who had the same he-must-be-out-of-his-mind reaction.

Look back at two of the end-of-quarter posts to Google Classroom:

Posted Jan 19.

Posted Jan 18.

These are key announcements and assignments, built to give you perspective and direction. Whether you felt overwhelmed or confident has something to do with how carefully you read these posts.

Anyway, as the student at the top of this post noted, “in the real world, progress does not happen overnight, and things take time.” Grade abatement is about process — about “caring way more about the quality and advancement of [the] work over when it’s due,” as she wrote.

You have many ongoing assignments and almost no deadlines, because your learning should be understand as a process. This is why your reflective and metacognitive work is so important.

Rinse, Repeat

This came up in many conferences last week: You need to know how to view your Google Classroom portfolio. To see it, just click the “VIEW ALL” link at the top-right of the course page:

You should see a list of assignments for the class. All of your work is here. This is your online portfolio, and it’s exactly what your teacher sees.

While you’re there, look at what you handed in for the “GAP Score: Q2C” assignment. Did you submit evidence? Did you account for your works-in-progress? Did you reflect on the skills and traits of the course? This is the self-monitoring that matters.

In fact, it’s so important that you practice metacognition and reflection that there are always formal assignments that require them both. For instance, even if the answer to all those questions about submitting evidence is a resounding nope, you had this chance to generate process-based reflection and metacognition:

Engines That Could

Did you complete the Google Form embedded in that post? It was more than a chance to talk to your district about its Strategic Coherence Plan. It was also a way to generate evidence of those higher profiles. That’s why the Google Form and GAP scoring itself were the only assignments with deadlines: That was my way of guiding you toward the right kind of metacognition and reflection. The form responses, for instance, will always be available in your Gmail inbox, and that is a fine benchmark for your growth over the next semester.

It’s well past time for lessons and lectures on self-control and honesty. It’s time for you to embrace the process.

We’ll keep meeting, as we did last week, to talk about you and your learning. Those meetings will continue past the day your GAP scores are finalized. In fact, I’ll need to take a day or two, while you do test prep and read 1984, to compile scores and post them.

The Sorites Paradox

Today’s analogy is the paradox of the heap:

You are always learning, and epiphanies are rare. A better metaphor is the heap: You will realize, one day, that you have become better and more skilled, and it will have happened slowly. You will be able to look back at an earlier version of yourself — at writings, journals, decisions, etc. — and see the obvious difference. But the more quotidian stuff will be less obvious, like someone adding grains of sand to a heap.

These GAP scores aren’t judgments, which is why our meetings aren’t about them. The scores mark the moments when we gather what you’ve done and look closely at it. We know the shape will change. It’s changing all the time. The process is what matters.

The questions for below, if you have the time to discuss them: At what version of yourself do you look, when you look back? Where does that non-heap version of you exist? The beginning of the year? Ninth grade? Earlier?

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Metaphorical Mixture

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

This is what I see in my own metaphorical mirror, of course, although I’m never quite sure which character I am.

The Metaphor Is the Message

“It’s human nature to conceive of abstract ideas through more immediate, concrete experiences,” goes the beginning of this Mental Floss article on the hidden etymologies of certain words. We use metaphors to make sense of the world around us, and the language of those metaphors shapes our thinking.

Certainly that’s a recurring idea in our study of truth, lies, and memory. It’s a theme in 1984, and you’ll actually grapple with the idea of “dying metaphors” when we study another bit of writing by the same author. For a moment, though, focus on “The Ways We Lie” and the emulation-through-analysis prompts you were given in this post:

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Remember that posts like that are written to teach you, not just to present you with assignments and deadlines. That post, for instance, forces you to read slowly and carefully, if you want to know what to read and what to write. It provides context and plenty of opportunities for enrichment.

Google Classroom, meanwhile, contains a much more linear and rote version of our work. You’ll still need to be organized, but it’s harder to get lost — in the sense of developing curiosity and self-awareness.

Regardless, you’ve now had three weeks to read Stephanie Ericsson’s essay, “The Ways We Lie,” which is third in your reading packet, and make your way through the ETA and essay prompts, which are in your writing packet. The essay prompt is built around the following quotation, and you’ll notice it has its fair share of metaphorical language:

Martin Buber once said, “The lie is the spirit committing treason against itself.” Our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish.

How much do we tolerate before we become sick and tired of being sick and tired? When will we stand up and declare our right to trust? When do we stop accepting that the real truth is in the fine print? Whose lips do we read this year when we vote for president? When will we stop being so reticent about making judgments? When do we stop turning over our personal power and responsibility to liars?

List out the metaphors in the first paragraph alone:

  • cultural cancer
  • shrouds
  • moral garbage
  • as water is to a fish

Your own essays are likely to use metaphors in a similar way. That will be one aspect of our in-class workshops over the next few weeks. Pay attention, as you embark on the writing process, to the metaphors you use. (I just used “embark,” for instance, because the metaphor of a journey or river fits our writing process.)

Back to the Looking Glass

That classification and division essay is one of many assignments you must complete over the next few weeks. You’ve been given a complete list through Google Classroom, but I will link to it and embed it again here:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F01%2FCYOA_-Q2C-Ongoing-Tasks-1.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

You have a predictive calendar covering every day for the rest of the year, too — load “What You Need Right Now” at the top of the home page — which is a reminder that you are also reading 1984, hacking high-stakes exams, and working on your Pareto Projects.

You are busy! That’s by design. And it gives us a chance to do what was always planned for the end of the semester.

What Was Always Planned for the End of the Semester

Each of you will meet with me, one at a time, to review your performance. We will go through your evidence from the most recent GAP panel, but that’s not all we will consider. If you are in a co-taught class, these performance reviews will include Ms. Olson, too.

First, you should recognize that this takes an ungodly amount of class time to do. We can afford to do it once, only once, and only because of the interstitial instructional and feedback model we use.

Second, the governing metaphor continues to be the mirror, specifically the looking-glass logic of Alice. Here is the metaphor in November:

A Looking-Glass Book

The final line of that instructional post is this: “You are what you do, and you must be honest about what that means.” We have returned to that need for collective clarity and personal honesty again and again, until the need bubbled over into a day of storytelling and lectures:

The Mirror

That image and link lead this site’s top-right menu now. Its lessons are more important than ever, especially the TL;DR of it: ​Stop shifting the blame in this course. Take responsibility for the choices you’ve made, or accept that your frustration and lack of learning is the choice you’ve made.

That’s the half-empty looking glass, to mix a couple of metaphors together. The half-full: Some of you remain a bit lost, and a conference will help. You need help fighting the dishonesty, cynicism, and selfishness that surround all of us — the “cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish,” as Ericsson puts it.

So I want you to think of Alice and her looking glass. What we do lies on the other side, and you pass through by stepping into your own reflection.You must confront who you are and what you’ve done. There is no other way through.

Once on the other side of the mirror, the environment changes and a lot of the old rules stop applying. That’s what I promised on the first day of school, and it will stay a promise on the last: There are two courses taught in Room 210, and one of them can change your life.

Before you cross that membrane, however, you have to look critically at the reflection in front of you. You have to confront the truth. And that means recognizing the dishonesty and cynicism that throw that truth into relief.

That’s why Ericsson’s metaphor is so powerful. We become numb to lies because the world, unfortunately, is filled with dishonesty. Reason is under attack all around us. You are encouraged, sometimes by people who ought to have your best interests at heart, to blame others and foster distrust. These people, your age and sometimes older, reorder reality. They spread that cultural cancer.

But there are no “alternative facts.” There is absolutely a point after which an uninformed opinion becomes an error of fact. There is right and wrong, truth and fiction, and we can separate the one from the other if we are careful.

Through the mirror, there is an invitation to do good. There is an invitation to dialectical discussion. There is empathy. There is an opportunity to guide your own learning in defiance of a 100 years of broken educational policy.

I can help you pass through that mirror to a place where you have complete control over what you learn and how much it helps you. If you’re already there, I can help you make sense of what that means. But you have to work for it. It can’t be handed to you; that’s another metaphor entirely.

Remember that you’ve already been invited to stop blaming others, to learn self-control, and to break out of the Skinner-box machinery of traditional education. The only difference between that approach and what we’ll start tomorrow is that the language (and metaphor) of invitation will shift to the language of requirement. We will meet, one at a time, for as long as it takes.

90% of you will walk away from that conference in a much better place. (I actually think it will be 100% of you, in defiance of Sturgeon’s Law, because you’d have to be as stubborn as a Flat Earther to stay cynical or misinformed afterward.) That brief loss of choice will ultimately give you more choice than ever.

Meanwhile, you will work on the learning that has been provided for you, interstitially, using the makerspace as necessary.

Ask questions about this — any of it, from metaphors to etymology to Alice in Wonderland to the structure of a conference — below.