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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Creative Clutter

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

If you haven’t already, take a look at the calendar uploaded and photocopied earlier this week:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2F2017-2018-Calendar-Updated.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

This is a static, PDF version. The updated Google Doc file is here and in the menu to the right of this page.

The calendar gives details on how we’ll spend the rest of the first semester, breaking it up by three-week GAP period. We’re in the middle of a gestalt unit, and the calendar itself teaches you a bit about what that means. On October 16, we’ll shift to an umwelt unit, which is also explained in a bit of teaching done by the calendar itself.

This post is about the umwelt panel of your Q1 triptych. More specifically, it is about the classroom proper — the physical space of Room 210.

Crowd-Sourced Creative Clutter

Here is a photo of a makerspace in Ann Arbor, Michigan:

Click for an article about the space and the spaces it has inspired.

We’re looking for that kind of creative clutter. That’s the phrase we are going to lean on, because it invokes the image of a STEM makerspace. We need the Humanities equivalent of a bin of robot parts, a deconstructed computer tower, a shelf of power tools, and so on.

First, we have to establish that this isn’t the same thing as a typical English classroom. There, you’ll find student work on the walls, posters about reading, bookshelves filled with literature, inspirational quotations, and so on. Which is all great! We should have some of those elements in our makerspace, too. But it’s much less about showcasing student work, which will be part of long-term projects that have an audience bigger than just us and the classroom. And it’s a little less about celebrating literature, because we want to embrace the full scope and sequence of the Humanities.

Instead, it’s about the creative tools and modular components of the Humanities that we can use to transform ourselves and the world around us. It’s about hacking personal and interpersonal system. It’s definitely about hacking the way we learn and how we assess that learning.

That’s why we started with full-sized posters of all the Sisyphean High materials. They aren’t just posters; they have bins beneath them filled with actionable handouts that help us navigate the space. They are visual checkpoints for staying on task and being productive:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B2HpaCWOlleySDNEZUlCWi0zQVE

We also have a bookshelf or two stacked with paper copies of the most important instructional posts, guides, and systems; a pair of whiteboards, which can be rolled around the room; moveable chairs and tables; and a Chromebit-enabled TV screen. It’s a good start.

What we need next are two categories of creative clutter:

  1. Actionable stuff that helps us make meaning in here
  2. Aesthetic stuff that helps us energize the environment

So we might order a copy of Ken Robinson’s TED Talk for the wall, and we might pull some Sisyphus-inspired symbolism from this video. I think an adaptation of Chad Fowler’s guide to empathy, which we’ll study in a few weeks, would make sense. We’ll certainly get the latest version of our writing system, bishop composition, on posters by the start of Q2.

Here are other possibilities:

We need to talk about how to use Pinterest for our learning, too. Consider making an account and talking to me about how to use it.

This push for creative clutter will be a formal-ish assignment soon, but you can start thinking about it now. What can we do with the space we have? What actionable stuff fits a makerspace as intended in here? Head back to the syllabus for some of the philosophy, and think about how the year has already been different for you. Then ask questions here, suggest ideas in the room, and find some time to brainstorm together about how to fill our space with creative clutter.

A Note on Motivation

Explicit in the language of the upper tier profile is the need to improve the learning environment. That includes, of course, all the collaborative work you do and the investment you make in the online and interstitial elements prepared for you. What this creative clutter concept offers is a way to improve the physical environment. The more you contribute to shaping that environment, the more evidence you have of improving that environment, which pushes you toward those top scores.

As always, I want to emphasize that there is nothing inherently wrong with motivating yourself extrinsically. You can do this because you want a higher grade. If that’s all that motivates you, it’s probably unsustainable; I think that we all need a balance, however, between doing things because they are inherently valuable and doing things because we will be rewarded. There is no ethical issue there.

In this case, for example, you will have evidence necessary for a higher profile if you contribute creative clutter to the classroom. That can motivate you just as much as the desire to make the classroom more galvanizing and comfortable for you and your peers. It can motivate you just as much as the desire to build something meaningful and unique.

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Pareto Project Guide (2017-2018)

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

Cover art to DJ Signify’s Sleep No More. The track featuring Sage Francis is here. It’s one of the two songs I’d give you as a precursor to these projects, and the one that underscores, in a dark and surreal and imagistic way, the idea of being anaesthetized; the other one is just about creating things and feeling pretty good about doing that.

Something Completely Different

Your predecessors spent the last six months of last year working on what we called Pareto Projects. It ended up showcasing the strengths of the classroom itself — the ability to iterate, refine, and evolve an idea; the sense to reboot when necessary; the openness to student feedback — but it also took a long time to find itself, pedagogically speaking. Search the site for “Pareto Project,” and you can see the long arc of it.

You get to start now, in September, with everything in one place. Here we go:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F09%2FPareto-Project-Guide-2017.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

That’s the only guide you need to launch your own project. We are going to try to keep it digital, since so much of it requires you to click links and take notes separately. Here is the always-updated Google Docs version:

That guide has also been placed in the resources section of Google Classroom, and you’ll have another copy of it with the first week’s assignment. That assignment is to hammer out your initial project idea using the resources in the guide, your peers, and your teachers — and not just me, by the way.

The formal assignments for this project will, like all formal assignments, be posted to Google Classroom. That will include sketching out your schedule, filling out a Google Form, making a copy of a blueprint and completing it, and a few more things. You have to read the guide to figure it out, and that will require you to work together and work diligently.

This is probably the best example you’ll find all year of how to unlock the real course. Let’s see what we can do.

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“What Do I Do Next?”

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

The menus of this website have been updated with a calendar1 and a section titled “Lost?” that should help you to organize yourself as we pick up speed in our studies. This post is about the question, “What do I do next?”

Three Steps to Repeat

You now have a poster of this in our room:

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

 

The handout version is formatted so that you can print a copy of it on a single sheet of paper. Something like 100 copies will always be available in Room 210, as well.

This document, in any form, is the answer to the question, “What do I do next?” If you finish a formal assignment, you move on to another step in this cycle. You write about what you’ve learned. You share your insights. You ask questions. You go back and read older instructional posts. You keep working.

Everything you do in here connects to something else. Usually, the connections are varied and significant. We are always trying to tap into the white matter of your brain — to make connections that help you internalize knowledge and inculcate skills and traits. Let’s say you don’t know what “inculcate” means, for instance. First, I would send you to Merriam-Webster to read the denotation of the word. Then I would send you here to read about how “inculcate” means to stamp something into the brain. The metaphor of an idea or belief being stamped repeatedly into your brain (the grey matter, this time) is more information to remember, but you’re more likely to recognize the word because of the extra connections made.

Paul Graham, author of the essay that will inform how we write essays all year, described it this way:

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.

You need hooks for this stuff, too.

Three Steps to Repeat: Annotated

That’s one of the most powerful aspects of flipping instruction and teaching you through these posts. It’s not just that I can write them on my day off, or that you can learn from them over long weekends, but that they explicitly work to make connections between all sorts of things for you. They all but force you to develop more hooks for new facts to stick onto.

Which is why you need to read this set of annotations:

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

 

We can stick to PDF versions for now, simply because they have more universality. Drive documents sometimes look awful in non-Google phones. The basics aren’t going to change much, anyway, which means this PDF is somewhat future-proof.

Read those annotations. They don’t just explain why we’re using a picture of Donkey Kong on a paradigm-shifting approach to assessment; they also give you links to learn about everything from the Dunning-Kruger effect to the tardigrade. And it all connects. You will almost feel your brain making those connections, if you take the time to look for them.

As always, ask questions here. I should have time to start answering interstitial comments and responses this weekend, now that most of the foundational work is done.

  1. Which has already been updated and rendered obsolete behind the scenes. I will post an updated version with an account of the rest of the year later this weekend. This is one reason we use Google so often: We need to be able to update documents and protocols and so on without having to print another 150+ copies or render another PDF to post online. It’s a process, right? ↩

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Above/Beyond: Data Analysis

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Onomatopoeia] Quiz: 9/19

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

You might also look at…

The Summer Reading Responses

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

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

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

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

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

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[Onomatopoeia] Quiz: 9/19

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

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

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

View at Medium.com

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ask questions about this below.

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

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Cutting the Stone

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

Triptychs and Collective Judgment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Googolplexes and Other Strings of Zeros

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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Summer Reading

  By English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

BHS Summer Reading

Your formal assignment starts with this form:

There is context at the top of the form itself, but it’s most important that you acknowledge this: There is no penalty for having failed to do the summer reading. There is also no reward for saying you did do it. This form is gathering data about your choices, and we will analyze and discuss those choices, good or bad, as we move forward.

That is not to say that your choices did not matter. They mattered very much. As a student assigned to read two of these books, your decisions tell us something about your relationship to reading and learning. It’s more useful to focus on that than to judge or praise you. What matters now is the meaning we can mine from your choices.

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

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

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

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

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

Ask questions about the assignment below. We will discuss your possible focuses for writing in class.

View at Medium.com

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Orientation in Four Parts

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

Part 1: The Occasional Bottomless Abyss

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

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

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

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

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

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

Part 2: The Syllabus

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

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

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

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

Part 3: Starting Up the Feedback Loop

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

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

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

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

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

Mongering and Congeries

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

Part 4: Clarity from Effort

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

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

Circadian Dynamics

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

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

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

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

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

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

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

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

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

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

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

Molecular Learning

Welcome to Room 210, and to Sisyphean High.

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

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

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

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