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The Most Important Skill

By Mr. Eure 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.

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.
Watch and Wonder | Do this during a study hall or lunch period, since they offer the easiest (and least awkward) opportunities.
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.”
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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Habits and Habitats

By Mr. Eure 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.

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. ↩

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The Fatal Flying Guillotine

By Mr. Eure 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

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. ↩

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Concrete and Abstract

By Mr. Eure 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.

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. ↩
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. ↩

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Dürer’s Rhinoceros

By Mr. Eure 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.

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? ↩
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. ↩
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. ↩

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Scripta Manent

By Mr. Eure 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?

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. ↩

36 Comments

Creative Clutter

By Mr. Eure 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:

Actionable stuff that helps us make meaning in here
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.

8 Comments

Pareto Project Guide (2017-2018)

By Mr. Eure 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:

Pareto Project: Guide v3.1

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.

4 Comments

“What Do I Do Next?”

By Mr. Eure 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.

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? ↩

22 Comments

Above/Beyond: Data Analysis

By Mr. Eure 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.