Image from nosoonersaid by way of Act III, Scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale, which is famous for one of the strangest stage directions of all time. (The link to the original source for the image no longer works, unfortunately.)
Snow Days and Elder Gods
For most of us, this is an encouraging sight:
Those are all potential delays, early dismissals, or cancellations in the next week or so. That’s good news, because we all retain at least part of our childhood excitement over snow days. It always feels like a gift from whatever deity we believe in.
Which is Cthulhu, naturally.
As we grapple with snow days, we’ll see that this course is built to withstand pretty much any disruption. That’s why instruction is flipped, feedback is revolutionized, assessment is shifted, and so on. It’s also why a post like this one exists: to set up the foreseeable future in a permanent, archived place.
Bookmark this page. If you have questions about anything we’re doing for the rest of January, the answer’s likely to be here.
The Essential Questions
It’s always worth reminding you, the stakeholders in all this, that this is a Humanities makerspace. It’s the first of its kind. See the syllabus again for the questions we ask and the problems we solve:
That syllabus lists the essential questions we might ask and attempt to answer through collaboration and experimentation. The biggest ones persist through every other unit of study:
Click for the entire syllabus.
That’s a screenshot of a document distributed and posted in early September, in case there’s any doubt about how long ago this was set up for students. Everything we do is about those questions. They really are universal: What does it mean to live a good life? How can we co-exist differently? What is the purpose of school?
Even our course calendar, which is always available on the side of this site, provides students an explicit maker focus:
That’s a screenshot of the current “unit,” which is really just the three weeks carved out for GAP purposes. During that time, we are tackling issues of truth, lies, and memory, just as we did in December. We are prioritizing the skill of close reading, especially of literature, and writing several emulative essays. We’re also beginning prep for the exams students will take at the end of the year.
That’s why stakeholders have two calendars right now, with this one added on December 11:
It’s separated by course level. The second calendar takes the focus on makerspace innovation and essential questions and pitches it in terms of daily focus. There is a day set aside every week or two just for sustained, silent reading, and plenty of time scheduled for test prep. At the end of every week, we’ll return to students’ Pareto Projects, which we launched at the beginning of the year:
Pareto Project Guide (2017-2018)
Crossing the Rubicon
Part of that focus on what students do in class — a focus that has been in place since the beginning, but is now controlled more — is a new approach to how your decisions are monitored and tracked. Think of it as a nod to Big Brother, since we’re reading about him.
There are several documents that cover this revamped approach to student accountability. They were all distributed in class and online on December 10:
That’s a screenshot of the Google Classroom feed for one of the AP classes, in case there are any doubts. The posts for the other three class periods are identical, except for the remaining schedule, which is course-specific.
We went over these ideas in class on December 11, 2017, in one of the rare lectures students have had to sit through in Room 210. Here are direct links to the documents themselves:
They are all very, very important. If you had to choose one to focus on here at the start of 2018, however, I’d pick Crossing the Rubicon.
Infinite Campus Update: Cross[ed] the Rubicon
The guide to stakeholder involvement talks extensively about how to keep up with student progress. Google Classroom tracks the writing process, metacognitive and reflective writing, and most other evidence of student learning. This website contains instruction, general feedback, and all course materials and guides. The GAP scores entered into Infinite Campus every three weeks or so convey a nuanced, specific profile of each student (provided we line up that number with the profiles, skills and traits, and course basics).
I think it’s worth revisiting the why behind this, especially as it related to the Skinner-box logic of student motivation in most places. For now, though, we’re talking about a change that was made over the break to how we use Infinite Campus. I’m going to quote Alfie Kohn again, before I explain that change, and ask you to think about his wisdom:
It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006). In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.
Nothing is more disheartening than students spamming F5 on Infinite Campus, waiting for a number to tell them whether they’ve been punished or rewarded. Grade abatement solves this by removing the immediacy from the number, and by transforming what the number means: from a cryptic calculation to a clear, holistic, forgiving, student-centered profile.
Grade abatement eliminates the unpredictability of feedback, too, since there are hard-coded dates for student self-assessment and “collective human judgment informed by evidence,” as Tony Wagner puts it. It can take anywhere from a day to a month to get assignments scored and entered in a traditional classroom; in here, the process is everything, and we can evaluate that process whenever we need to.
And I say all that because there is now an “assignment” in Infinite Campus, next to the GAP score:
That’s what it looks like on my end. To a student, it will appear only if there is a number entered into the scoring column.
Like everything else, this “assignment” is a lesson unto itself. Students have to be able to read closely and think critically. By looking carefully, you’ll see that it isn’t part of score calculations, which means it isn’t part of a final average. The number of “total points” is irregular. And it’s got a strange name: “Crossed the Rubicon.”
For Stakeholders: What the “Rubicon” NUMBER in Infinite Campus MEANS
This is the number of times that a student met the criteria outlined in this document on in-class focus. Instead of sending emails, printing documents, etc, and relying on students to convey that information to other stakeholders, this weaponizes the worst parts of online gradebooks: Here is a clear, unavoidable number that tells all of us how often a student failed to meet the basic requirements of the classroom.
The total “points” available reflects the total number of days that our calendar indicates we will meet during that GAP cycle. For the last part of Q2, we are supposed to meet 13 times, hence the 13 for total “points” available. In December, there were only ten days considered.
If a student has nothing here, she did her job every day. I’m not putting a zero down, because zeros are the most charged and toxic numbers in education. All the explanation in the world can’t prevent a zero from triggering panic and anxiety in most students.
If there is a number there when we do our GAP scoring, that’s how many class periods featured one of these:
- doing homework for another class
- playing games
- sending text messages
- watching videos
- sleeping
- rappelling down the side of the building and escaping into the woods
- gossiping
- complaining
- gazing too long into the abyss
- checking social media accounts
That’s a partial and partially ironic list. The serious piece of this is that focus and self-control are the mainstays in any real success in any walk of life. I’m not writing down a student who is distracted for a moment; I’m tracking students who are clearly not meeting the basic requirements of focus and self-control.
If this is too close to the Skinner-box logic we carefully avoid everywhere else in this makerspace, there won’t be “Rubicon” numbers online in Q3. Let’s see how the rest of January goes.
New Seats: Starting Positions
Another shift for the new year is that all students have assigned seats. I’ve printed labels, placed them at tables, and covered it all in packing tape to protect from the spillage of high school students. These seats won’t change unless we get new students (which has already happened since I began typing this post, naturally).
Students are going to see immediately that these seats are clustered together, away from the whiteboards, charging stations, PC bank, and other creative elements of the makerspace. The goal has always been to make better use of the space, so much so that it was an explicit assignment in Q1:
Concrete and Abstract
So we have to think of these seats as starting positions, not desks. Students sit in them at the start of class, and then they let the bell do its Pavlovian job: They get up, reconfigure their groups and workspaces, and use this room to get things done. When the second bell rings, they put the seats and furniture back where it was when they started.
To address the students directly1: You are responsible for the space now. If you don’t put the furniture and seats back where they belong, that reflects poorly on your self-awareness and collegiality. If you don’t make good, conscious decisions about how to reconfigure the room from day to day, that reflects poorly on your critical thinking and self-efficacy.
Readings: January, 2018
The only exception to the modular chaos I’m describing in that previous section is the sustained, silent reading scheduled from time to time in every class. On those days, the focus is on individual reading, and student choice is limited.
Below is the packet that we are using throughout January, 2018:
It contains an excerpt from 1984 and three essays. Here is a direct link to the full text of Orwell’s novel:
All of our work will use these pieces. Additional reading, especially when it’s exam-driven, will be delivered through Google Classroom. When we launch a new set of essential questions — or expand on our study of truth, lies, and memory — the reading will look like this, too: a piece of traditional literature attached to essays and short fiction.
As always, the primary focus is on how we learn, not the products we hang on the fridge. It’s not important that you finish 1984, for instance, although I sincerely hope you do. It’s important that you track your interactions with the novel2. I’d strongly suggest a weekly appointment with a journal of sorts — something in which you reflect on your reading, think about your choices, and draw some insight.
Writings: January, 2018
That’s one type of writing you should be doing: reflective, metacognitive responses to what you’re reading and discussing in class. Essays will continue to be process-driven exercises built on whatever we’re reading. Here, for instance, is what you were working on before break:
The first prompt there is derived from the Regents Exam, which all juniors have to take; the second prompts you to write the kind of essay Paul Graham encourages. That’s why your assignment before break was to submit evidence of the process of writing the second response, not necessarily a finished copy. Real writing is ongoing, when it has to be, and often unfinished.
We’ll continue to balance test-based necessity against authentic writing in this way. You’ll also spend part of this month learning how to publish your writing online, which will let you generate a portfolio of work for the future.
Formal assignments, as always, will be posted to Google Classroom. The next writing prompt will ask for classification and division, a style of essay you’ll see in “The Ways We Lie,” which is part of the reading. There will be emulation-through-analysis exercises, too, to get you going.
We might be able to start that tomorrow, but it also might take a few days to shake off the holiday atrophy and remember how to use Room 210. That’s the benefit of the calendar you now have: The middle of every week is makerspace-driven, which means you are solving problems and creating meaning and generally trying to learn as much as you can. It might be very predictable, if we’re in the midst of a novel or essay, or it might change individually from day to day.
That freedom should prompt some regular reflection and metacognition, too. The students who get the most out of this class are the ones who learn how to use its freedom most effectively, and that takes self-awareness and self-monitoring.
It’s a lifelong skill, too. Why do you think I write so often? It isn’t just to flip instruction and give us more time together in class. This is how I refine the course so it works better for students: by reflecting and being metacognitive about what we do. You need the same habit of mind.
Interstitial Discussion
Use this online space to talk to me about what you’re thinking and what you need. Use Google+ or some other online tool to work interstitially with each other3. Try to reserve class time for face-to-face interactions, like workshopping an essay or discussing what you’re reading.
Play the part until it isn’t a part anymore. You have about six months left in here, which is just enough time to build a better version of yourself before you head off to the next stage. Remember, though, that whatever choices you make each day are yours. This course is a mirror, and blame is just a way to hide from what it shows you. You’d do well to remember that:
Read this again, as necessary, to remind yourself what is at stake.
