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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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.

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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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RE11 Updates: Click for More

  By English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Update #1: Deadlines

The assignment titled “Self-Control” is now due October 19, 7:00 AM. You aren’t in class on Wednesday, which gives you some time to finish reading and draft a response. Photocopies of the post for this assignment (The Fatal Flying Guillotine) will be available in class on Tuesday. Here is a section of the prompt as it appears on Google Classroom:

Read the instructional post below carefully. Then you must work together and with Ms. Olson and me to write a response that deals with

(1) your close reading of this post;
(2) metacognitive analysis of HOW you read;
(3) your self-awareness with regard to your self-control; and
(4) the assiduousness and self-efficacy you believe it will take to master self-control.

The assignment titled “Gestalt Suite: Getting to Know You” is now due October 20, 11:59 PM. You have had the instructional post (Gestalt Suite: Getting to Know You) since October 8. Because of the particulars of the assignment, no photocopies have been made. Here is a sectIon of the prompt as it appears on Google Classroom:

As you make your way through these instructions, the explicit self-assessments, and the other data-gathering work in that post, you should be writing to make sense of what you discover. This is the metacognitive and reflective writing that comprises the upper-tier profiles. You can attach copies of this writing here on October 17. Otherwise, mark this assignment as done on October 17 — not before — to indicate that you have opted out of this part of the work.

Update #2: Grade Abatement Profile Scores

The deadline for the GAP assignment titled “GAP Score: Q1B” was pushed from Friday to Sunday night, October 15, 11:59 AM. As a result, it will take 3-4 days to process your evidence and self-assessments.

Continue to use the profiles, skills and traits, and other tools of learning and assessment on a daily basis. Here is a copy of the “Other Daily Resources” section on our homepage:

[expand title=”Click here when you need direction(s).”]

Three Steps to RepeatSemester CalendarClassroom Posters

[/expand]

Those documents are right below this direct link to a printable version of the profiles, skills, and traits themselves:

Grade Abatement Profiles with Universal Skills/Traits

If you know you haven’t internalized these ideas yet, now is the time. Ask for help, including here, in the comment section of this post.

Update #3: Interstitial Learning

Starting soon1, I am going to try to have a “word of the day” for us. The first word will be interstitial. Here is a link to the Wikipedia page for the word:

I use this term metaphorically, but you should pay attention to this section of that page: “Interstitial art [is] any work of art whose basic nature falls between, rather than within, the familiar boundaries of accepted genres or media.” As Piet Hein said, art is solving problems while we figure out the questions. That’s a Humanities makerspace.

Anyway, I call this classroom interstitial for exactly that reason: The instruction and discussion does not fit into the familiar boundaries of your learning. You must retrain yourself to access learning interstitially, or in the spaces between other structures and objects. You must also see that each bit of instruction, in or out of class, connects:

Habits and Habitats

The entire post is an explanation of what we’re doing, written as thoughtfully and clearly as I can make it. And while it all teaches you something, you could do worse than to focus solely on this section:

To recap, you can access the interstitial teaching of this course in many ways, at almost any hour, and almost anywhere. Because of that access, your default action in class can no longer be to read these posts. To help you with this choice, there is now a corner of our classroom where you can temporarily store your computer, phone, tablet, etc.

Moving on, you use the first few minutes of each class period to decide clearly and consciously how you will spend the time. If you keep your computer in front of you, it should only be so that you can create. Even leaving comments online gets away from the kinetic act of creation we need to embrace, because that’s a part of interstitial instruction. Think of it this way: You have access to Google and this website anywhere, but you only have access to this physical space once a day for 42 minutes.

It’s about using your time in class more consciously, not abandoning technology. Your default action is the one we need to question; for some of you, the class period might remain the best time to read a post and make sense of it. For most of us, however, the classroom should be a space of interaction, discussion, and creation.

To do that, you must read interstitially, in the moments in between other responsibilities and events. You can also think of this as good ol’ fashioned homework: the reading you need to do at home to prepare to write, think, and read further in class.

Well, this site tracks how many times each page is viewed. Here are the numbers for the week ending at approximately 11:30 AM on October 16:

They seem normal enough. It’s a little low, perhaps, because there are about 100 juniors who should be reading instruction on here regularly, and a quick look at the comments page suggests that some students are visiting pages many, many times. Those numbers should be much higher, if everyone is doing their homework throughout the week.

Now look carefully at this chart:

Just like you did with the first image, you had to click on that image in order to see it. Well, there’s something interesting about that: Every click on these pages is logged. When you’re given a link to the definition of a word you might not know, clicking on it is logged. If you load a separate essay that is required reading, that’s logged, too.

Over the last week, it certainly seems as if no one is clicking on these links. I can’t be sure if these data are 100% inclusive, since I don’t have access to the program that WordPress uses to collect them; it’s possible, therefore, that more students are doing what they’re required to do. But what can the percent margin of error really be? The conclusion is the same: You have to read more closely.

Maybe you don’t click on a link the first time through. That’s fine. When you load the instructional post again, you have another chance to read more deeply. That’s the requirement: To force yourself to slow down, click on links, connect information, and develop the hooks that Paul Graham talks about here:

To some extent it’s like learning history. When you first read history, it’s just a whirl of names and dates. Nothing seems to stick. But the 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. Once you remember that Normans conquered England in 1066, it will catch your attention when you hear that other Normans conquered southern Italy at about the same time. Which will make you wonder about Normandy, and take note when a third book mentions that Normans were not, like most of what is now called France, tribes that flowed in as the Roman empire collapsed, but Vikings (norman = north man) who arrived four centuries later in 911. Which makes it easier to remember that Dublin was also established by Vikings in the 840s. Etc, etc squared.

The more you read, the more you make connections between ideas, the more you learn. That’s how the site was built initially, and its the logic that drives every iteration of it.

If you aren’t currently one of the few students pushing into these instructional posts, interacting with the lessons, clicking on links, etc, you need to become one of those students immediately. Let me help you, too. It’s not as much of an adjustment as you’d think, and it’s going to pay off in every class and course and job in the future.

  1. This originally said “tomorrow,” which was wishful thinking on my part. Thursday is possible, but I want to do this the right way; it could be a week before we start this. ↩

5 Comments

Habits and Habitats

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

To quote Ken Robinson again, we have to start to think differently about human capacity. We have to think differently, as he says, about “the culture of our institutions, the habits of institution, and the habitats that they occupy.”

It’s very likely that you are only doing this kind of work once a day, in one classroom, with one teacher. But the same could be said for physical education, which looks and feels and is nothing like your other classes in classrooms. You have to embrace change and your own capacity to adapt to different environments. You will discover that you have some tardigrade capabilities.

“Indestructible tardigrades will live until the dying Sun boils Earth’s oceans”

Right now, you are studying self-control, because self-control is central to every choice you make in our course. You must monitor those choices and connect them to that reading; when you do, you will be able to be metacognitive about every choice.

If this is different for me, it’s a difference of degrees, not kind. I write to you to teach you how to write. I write to you to teach you how to read. I do it to freeze instruction and give you access to my instruction anytime, anywhere.

And when the feedback is more critical, I write because that criticism never applies to every student. The student who listens most attentively isn’t the student who needs the lecture about listening more attentively. The student who takes notes on this post isn’t the student who needs the reminder to read more carefully1,

My own metacognition might, therefore, lead me to intervene in the classroom as a whole to help us work together to make better choices. This post, with its sense of who is reading it, exists in part to guard more invested students against worry and the Forer effect — and this is a post that hopes that more invested students will recognize the Forer effect from their careful reading.

While we think differently about habits and habitats, we will make some changes to the class period.

First, some classes will have assigned seats for a little while. We have two triptych panels worth of data suggesting the need for assigned seats. Again, you are studying self-control; while you need the opportunity to practice it, you also need correction when you fail. New seats (and a bit of isolation) will build better habits.

Second, all classes are going to spend some time away from screens. There is now a corner in our classroom with space to store 30 chromebooks, tablets, etc.; next to that is a wall organizer that can hold 30 smartphones. At the start of every class, you must make the deliberate decision about where your tech goes. The screen is no longer your default, and I expect to see more and more of you removing the distraction by placing it in this corner.

If you want some context for this, please read my thoughts on shifting to interstitial teaching, this recent post about the physical classroom, or the note I left parents for Open House. You must sometimes be forced to balance the interstitial stuff with hands-on, creative, face-to-face learning. You have to put the screen down.

As I wrote to your parents, the difference between our interstitial classroom and a flipped classroom is that you still have the option in here to read the instructional posts during class time. It is designed to be an anytime, anywhere system. That does not mean, however, that you should read in class. In fact, that cannot be your default choice.

The most compelling reason to push you away from reading this website in class is that reading is an intensely individual act. It requires focus. Once you’ve finished a text, you can (and should) invite peers and teachers into the conversation, but the initial reading is about you and only you. What you learn is built on your experience with and understanding of that text.

As a result, if you choose in the first few minutes of class to read instructional posts, there must be a significant reason. You might have fallen behind, gotten overwhelmed by work in other classes, or lost the Internet at home. Otherwise, I know that each of you has access to a screen for this kind of interstitial reading, because the district gave you a computer. You can read these instructional posts in bursts, over lunch or in study hall or while waiting for the bus. 90% or more of you also have a smartphone, and these posts are designed for readability on those smaller screens. You do not need to read these posts in class.

Another point about your access to these instructional materials: You can always print copies of anything that is not already photocopied for you. We have our own classroom printer dedicated to that purpose. You can also print to the iLC, if you prefer to do that. You can print at home, if you have a printer there. And whenever I sense that it could be helpful to give you a paper copy of a post, I make a class set of copies. Your syllabus talks about moving toward a paperless classroom, but it’s a movement; we aren’t anywhere close to being paperless, and if we do get there, you will always have the option to print individual copies of anything.

To recap, you can access the interstitial teaching of this course in many ways, at almost any hour, and almost anywhere. Because of that access, your default action in class can no longer be to read these posts. To help you with this choice, there is now a corner of our classroom where you can temporarily store your computer, phone, tablet, etc.

Moving on, you use the first few minutes of each class period to decide clearly and consciously how you will spend the time. If you keep your computer in front of you, it should only be so that you can create. Even leaving comments online gets away from the kinetic act of creation we need to embrace, because that’s a part of interstitial instruction. Think of it this way: You have access to Google and this website anywhere, but you only have access to this physical space once a day for 42 minutes.

I’ll give you an example of how this might work, and then I’ll connect it to the grade abatement profiles used to assess your choices.

P2 is a class of 30 students. It’s big enough to feel crowded, even in a large classroom, so students tend begin the period loudly, sitting where they always sit, computers open in front of them.

Every P2 starts with morning announcements. That lasts a few minutes, and it gives us an external timer of sorts. Starting now, P2 can use the morning announcements as a backdrop for settling down to make deliberate decisions about how to move about the classroom and make better use of its resources. Among many other choices, these P2 students can store their computers and phones in that newly constructed corner. They can move the furniture around to facilitate small- or large-group discussion. A few might approach me to indicate that they really do need the time that day to catch up on interstitial reading; in that case, I might suggest they take a pass to the iLC to read in a quieter environment. Students might roll over the cart of Expo markers and erasers, readying themselves to use the whiteboard to brainstorm.

When those morning announcements end, P2 can launch into their work for the day, and their decisions will be more deliberate than they would otherwise be. Computers would be open only for students collaborating on writing or working individually on a response. Phones would be out to look up information or check directions or confirm something in a post. There would be movement and creative chaos, and pretty much every day would look and feel different.

That’s a makerspace, and you can’t opt out of its requirements. The fourth tier of profiles starts, in fact, with the idea that you complete every required assignment, which now includes the scenario I’ve just described. You cannot opt out of making better choices, and you cannot opt out of this focus on using screens less often in class and more often interstitially. The language of an 8 explicitly references the classroom environment; if you make more deliberate decisions about technology, you will improve that environment immediately.

On the other end of the assessment spectrum, the language of Tier 1 and Tier 2 explicitly references an inability or unwillingness to invest in the classroom environment. You can motivate yourself that way, at first, as necessary; if you force yourself to adapt to avoid punishment, you’ll sto;; experience some of the benefits of the change. Eventually, you’ll be making decisions for the right reasons. That, too, is the design of the course.

Ask questions about this below, and recognize that these comment sections exist to promote discussion interstitially. You can do something similar through Google+, the comment section of a Google Doc, a group text, etc.; all that matters is that it happens interstitially. In class, you need to push yourself away from the screen to engage your peers in person.

  1. In my more cynical and self-deprecating moments, I wonder why I preach to the choir if I hear only the same voices in a call and response. ↩

16 Comments

The Fatal Flying Guillotine

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

The opening to a seminal movie on education and learning environments.

Three Ways of Saying the Same Thing

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#1: The Erudite Way

The following article is about akrasia:

The Akrasia Effect: Why We Don’t Follow Through on What We Set Out to Do and What to Do About It

It’s lengthy, entertaining, well researched — and probably, when it is assigned like this, a good example of itself. In all likelihood, you won’t read this, even as I encourage you to read Clear’s essay and to think about how it tackles an idea so entrenched in human nature that it has a Greek term all to itself. In fact, it also has a Latin phrase describing it: Video meliora proboque deteriora sequor, which appears in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

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#2: The Multimedia Way

Here, from David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart, is an article on procrastination:

Procrastination

Procrastination might the most common example of akrasia, but you don’t need any Greek or Latin to understand what McRaney writes. He also gives us the image of “capable psychonauts,” or people who think about thinking, which is a helpful way to look at improving your learning.

You can also watch the book trailer for You Are Not So Smart, which animates the idea of fighting procrastination:

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#3: The Straightforward Way

And then there’s a much more accessible, straightforward, and funny version of this idea, which nevertheless comes with all the NSFW warnings you might expect if you are given an article published at Cracked:

From birth until the day you move out on your own, pretty much every facet of your life is controlled by someone else. Parents, teachers, babysitters, the secretive nameless guardian who taught you to kill from the quiet embrace of the shadows. There’s always someone looking over your shoulder to prevent you from [messing] up. “Don’t run in the house, you’ll get hurt.” “Don’t stab that guy, you’ll go to jail again.”

So from the time we’re old enough to rationalize, we’re trained that nothing is truly under our own control, and if we do happen to [mess] up, the most we have to fear is getting grounded, spanked, or yelled at. When you enter adulthood, that all changes literally overnight…

For the first time, you’ll be put into situations in which the only person you have to answer to is yourself. How will you react? Take away the teacher, and do you start slacking off? Take away mom and dad’s rules on junk food, and do you start eating at McDonald’s every day? Take away the police patrols, and do you strip naked and set houses on fire, cackling like a crazed hyena?

This is what we’re dealing with when we talk about things like addiction, teen pregnancy, and obesity (the type that’s not tied to a physical cause, of course). It’s an area in which the only person who is going to give you hell is your future self. Are you prepared for that? I wasn’t. Hell, I’m not sure I know anyone who was. Because keeping yourself in check when the temptation is there to just take the easy way out is excruciating. “Man, I don’t feel like cooking tonight. Maybe I’ll just order a pizza again.” Yes, others may voice their concerns about your choices (“Dude, you’re pushing 300 pounds, and you’ve eaten pizza every day for two months”), but nobody is going to step in and force you to get your [life] under control, unless it’s flat-out breaking the law.

That might be edited down for decorum in an instructional post1, but it remains the most straightforward version of this lesson: Self-control is difficult to learn, but the sooner you learn it, the more successful you will be.

As for the Flying Guillotines…

The title of this post and the pictures in the header are another example, like Dürer’s Rhinoceros, of using a unique metaphor or image to clarify an idea. There are enough clichés about self-control to fill a thousand posts, and you’re likely to hear most of them before you figure it out. We need something more motivating.

In this course, the failure to develop self-control has an exponential impact on your success. Unlocking the “second course” explained in this post is important, but right now, many of you need to think only in terms of avoiding penalties. There are guillotines flying through the air, and if you stand there, you will end up like this:

It’s the part right after this in the video that ought to concern us, metaphorically speaking.

You must work during the class period, and you must develop a feedback loop. That’s how you are evaluated, which you’ve seen in handouts and posters and a half-dozen other forms. It takes self-control to do this. If you don’t develop that self-control, you are going to lose your head.

Iterative note: There are a couple of interesting Medium essays from about two years ago that explore this same idea with some of the same metaphorical language. They are embedded below.

View at Medium.com

View at Medium.com

  1. Cracked is replete, by the way, with this kind of NSFW-but-insightful writing. Tread carefully, if you explore, but realize that The Onion is often just as profane, and The Onion was featured on an AP Language exam. This is the way rhetoric and argument look in the real world. ↩

38 Comments

Concrete and Abstract

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

This post has instructions on how we’ll begin our work on Tuesday. As an example of what we’ll be calling “abstract stuff,” here is a newly revised version of the profiles, skills, and traits we use every day:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F10%2FUpdate-GAP-Single-Sheet-BW-Printing.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

Copies will be made for you, although the changes are mostly cosmetic. Pay attention to the category headings for the skills and traits. There is a colorized version of this, too, but the embedded PDF above will behave better with the printers in our building.

Creative Clutter, Continued

Before we get to Tuesday’s plans, the expectation, as always, is that you’ve read every recent instructional posts. If you haven’t, do that immediately:

I promise that most of your confusion or frustration will disappear as soon you read those instructional texts. You have to read them, though — not just load them in a browser window or print a copy that sits in your backpack. As always, these are the instructions you need, and they are written so that engaging with them forces you to slow down, practice close reading and critical thinking, and develop the organization skills you need to make sense of complicated ideas.

One of those posts introduces a focus on the physical classroom, which we will begin to clutter creatively on Tuesday. We want to think differently about how we populate our space, starting with a shift away from “decorate” as the verb. That word comes from the same root that gives us decor and decorum, which is mostly about how we expect to find things. Our room is about breaking expectations in an innovative way.

This is prompted on my end by how you are using technology. Educational tech, including the device you’re using right now, can’t compromise our embrace of face-to-face discussion and more kinetic or kinesthetic 1 work.

To put it more directly: Yes, you need to put down the screens and talk to each other more. That’s true out in the real world, and it’s true in here. The computer or smartphone is an essential bit of technology — even curmudgeons have to accept that — but there must be a balance. That’s one of our two focuses this week2.

That brings us to a teacher-led, asynchronous, offline activity for Tuesday:

Those are the two rolling whiteboards in Room 210. You are going to work together across class periods to fill those boards with ideas, which will be photographed and flipped back to you at the end of the day on Wednesday. Any other notes you keep are up to you. Below is a quick overview of what to expect.

Concrete Stuff

These categories aren’t really about what you can touch versus what you can’t, although that’s pretty close. Instead, you should think of it as tools and technology versus semiotics and inspiration. On the concrete side, you are thinking first about how to populate our bookshelves with transformative literature, collections of poetry that teach us about being a human being, autodidactic texts, etymological dictionaries, and so on. You’re going to take over these bookshelves, build new ones, and then organize it all to encourage us to read more often and more closely — without the usual Skinner-box threats of a classroom. The other concrete considerations are manipulable materials like Legos and fidget toys.

Furniture | Checked off because we already have what we need. As tempting as it is to talk about comfy chairs and rugs, that stuff isn’t a priority. We have modular furniture, whiteboards, rolling carts, etc.

Technology | Similarly, we’re set here. It would be nice to have a dedicated desktop for Pareto Projects — one for musical composition, video editing, and so on — but that’s not a priority, either. You have your Chromebooks, your smartphones, a classroom printer, and a Chromebit-enabled TV screen.

Books | There are now multiple empty bookcases in our classroom. Again, your job is to fill them with books of all kinds, but especially with books that help us create meaning for ourselves. That means poetry, literature, essay collections, graphic novels, and so on. Look at what we already have, and remember the point of reading in a Humanities makerspace. My examples are an epic poem and some underground hip-hop.

Destressors | This category is what it sounds like: the stuff that will help you mitigate your stress while you work in this space. My example is Legos, which are used by many companies to promote creativity and fight stress. You’ll also see board games like Scrabble in the room already. In high school, we’re focused on fighting stress as much as promoting creativity, so think about both sides of the equation.

You can ask questions below about these categories whenever you like. It’s up to you to figure out how best to talk to each other over the course of the next few days, just like it’s up to you to figure out how to work together to start bringing this stuff into the room.

Abstract Stuff

The abstract stuff is where most of our work is going to take place. We need actionable inspiration on the walls. We need symbols surrounding us. We need the space to encourage the sort of introspection and collaboration and innovation that lives at the heart of our system.

One way to think about these abstract concepts is to see each option in terms of how it improves the learning environment. Use the language in the grade abatement profiles to motivate you: This is a chance to contribute to the learning environment so that your peers are galvanized, encouraged, supported, etc. It’s easy to explain why you think a book of William Blake’s poetry might help us experience the Humanities; it’s harder to explain how a mechanical Sisyphus improves our learning.

Protocols + Procedures | Taken care of already through the posters and handouts we have. There will be more of this stuff on the walls as we move forward, and any new iterations of course materials — for instance, of our writing process, which we will delve into in Q2 — will be posted, too. The Pinterest boards posted here have plenty of non-course examples.

Inspirations | These will primarily be posters or decals on the walls, but I would include certain kinds of artwork, too. It’s about drawing creative inspiration for your work. My example is a prominently displayed decal of a Latin expression: Verba volant, scripta manent. That is the philosophy of the course, so its inspirational efficacy is different from, e.g., a poster like this.

Symbols | Clutter in our classroom needs to have purpose behind it. We’re using metaphors and symbols to push back against traditional learning, which is why my examples are a statue of our favorite rhinoceros and this Lego Sisyphus. You need to think critically about the semiotics of our space.

Again, you can ask questions below about these categories whenever you like. It’s up to you to figure out how best to collaborate, and we’ll need that collaboration to procure or print or otherwise produce what we need.

  1. Kinetic refers to motion itself, while kinesthetic refers to your perception of that motion. It’s another example of the meta- level to our work. ↩

  2. The other is a gestalt suite of self-assessments that will be posted later. That’s one reason we need this focus on the kinetic/kinesthetic stuff: You’re going to be doing a lot of reading and answering questions online this week, and you need to balance that. ↩

12 Comments

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

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

The Rhinoceros Test

When I was developing grade abatement as a new kind of assessment, I used Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros as a metaphor1. It serves the same function as saying, “Don’t miss the forest for the trees,” and it echoes the elephant test. It’s also related to Occam’s razor, or the law of parsimony.

If none of those hyperlinks interest you enough to do some ramiform reading, the basic idea (in here) is this: Often the simplest or most straightforward GAP evidence is more important than everything else.

The need for in-class focus has been covered ad nauseam this year, in everything from posts to posters, so there’s no need to repeat that. The other simplest element of the course is completing assignments, but you’ve known to do your work since you were in kindergarten2. Lapses in either category might significantly lower your GAP score at the end of three weeks. You know that, too.

Here’s the new stuff: Starting now, if you are significantly off-task during class, or if you are missing significant work, I’ll update your GAP score before the end of the three-week assessment period. Keep an eye on Infinite Campus. If your score updates suddenly, that’s feedback. It’s a sign that you need to adjust immediately.

The logic here ought to be clear, but to make it clearer: A student earning a fourth-tier profile needs until the end of a cycle to produce evidence. It takes consistent reflection and metacognition, for instance, to fit just that single criterion for a 9. But a student who isn’t meeting the basic requirements of the course has already provided enough evidence for a much lower score. That’s Dürer’s rhinoceros: We’ve seen enough to know what profile fits.

Let’s see if this sort of immediate-ish feedback helps. If you trigger the threshold mechanic that knocks you down to a 70, for instance, you probably still have time to show growth and drag yourself out of the second tier. If missing work puts you in the 5+/5- range, you probably still have time to improve the ratio.

You can ask questions about this below. Meanwhile, I will hold onto the quixotic hope that this will all eventually be rendered moot3.

One more note: The use of metaphors and images like Dürer’s rhinoceros helps us avoid clichés, especially thought-terminating ones. When we study George Orwell’s writing, he’ll call them dying metaphors. Some clichés have power — a rose on Valentine’s Day is still nice — but you should try to find new images, analogies, metaphors, etc, whenever possible. Clichés don’t bring any vividness or clarity to ideas, however easily they come to us.

This and the lead image come from Little Einsteins, one of the shows our children keep on repeat.

  1. The first guide is here, alongside every Sisyphean High iteration up to this year. Dürer’s rhinoceros appears frequently, so it’s the mascot of grade abatement in the same way that the tardigrade is the mascot of interstitial teaching. Which means that we need mascot costumes of both, right? ↩

  2. Remember, though, that we’re about the process more than the product. Most of your formal assignments in Google Classroom are a reflection of that belief. You won’t often be penalized for struggling to finish an essay, for instance, but you must always try to finish. ↩

  3. Two words worth knowing: quixotic and moot. The former leads us to another metaphor for teaching and learning, since we sometimes tilt at windmills; the latter is one of those words with two accepted but contradictory meanings. ↩

23 Comments

Scripta Manent

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

Interstitial Options

In one of the instructional posts you have been asked to read1, you’ll find this Latin phrase: Verba volant, scripta manent. It is the idea that “spoken words fly away, [while] written words remain.” It’s important enough to the philosophy in here that we probably want it posted on the wall as part our burgeoning creative clutter.

Why? Well, we live in a hypertextual world, which means that we can communicate through the Internet in ways that were unimaginable even 20 years ago. The written word is more permanent, more accessible, and more immediate.

Face-to-face discussion, of course, remains as powerful as ever in a classroom environment. What we want to do is to expand that environment to include interstitial options, like this website and Google Classroom. I’ve tried to explain the evolution of it in this essay, which you are encouraged to read. Here’s what Neil Postman had to say about it, in what is probably another lock for the classroom wall:

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

I’m repeating a lot of what you’ve already been told, but that’s the point: The more often we write down our ideas, the more we are able to revisit and refine them. The more we think in writing, the clearer those thoughts become. It’s an act of iteration, and we need to experiment with tools that let us iterate and collaborate better.

Some of you are already using the comment section of this website to ask questions and engage with the material. That’s great. You’re also sharing documents through Google Drive and leaving comments on each other’s writing in Docs. That’s great, too. Your next stop is Google+ Communities, which were fairly successful last year:

Look at those online communities, make note of how students are interacting, and consider how we can adapt Google+ for this year. You can build your own Google+ Community that is as focused (e.g., on a single table in a single period) or as expansive (e.g., the entire junior class) as you want. I want you to find time over the next two or three weeks to experiment. Those of you who have already built a Community need to share your findings with others.

One way to share our thinking and bolster a community is to use this subreddit:

It hasn’t been utilized in more than a year, but I think it could be rebooted to be tremendously helpful in here. It exists outside the technical boundaries of the school, yet runs under the auspices of the course. It isn’t just an extension of Room 210. It’s a subreddit about carving meaning out of difficult circumstances and using language to transform ourselves and our surroundings. It’s about becoming better people by hacking our current habits and mindsets. It’s part of a makerspace, and that kind of work continues long after you graduate and see your BHS Google account deleted.

At least, it could exist in that capacity. You’ll see that some of the erstwhile moderators are graduates, and I’ll reach out to them to see about their interest in remaining part of the community. I’ll also invite you to think about becoming a mod yourself, if this idea takes off.

The first thing I’d like you to try to do with one or more of these interstitial options is to share your Pareto Project ideas with each other. These projects are a great example of makerspace work that doesn’t require a classroom to be successful. Note carefully that this is not a formal assignment; it’s directed mostly at the students who fit (or are hoping to fit) the highest profiles. This is another example of doing more than just what is required, and it’s absolutely the best kind of galvanizing, infrastructural work you should be doing.

Ask questions below about how to get started with Reddit, Google+, etc, and offer suggestions about what else might help us work together interstitially. One of you has suggested Discord, for instance, so I’m looking into that. What else might fit our makerspace?

  1. There’s no hyperlink, because you need to start making those connections on your own, at least eventually. Everything connects, and most things are reiterated again and again. If you can’t see the bigger picture, let me know, and I’ll help fill it in. ↩