Category: English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in English 10 Regents for the 2016-2017 school year.

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Process Over Product (10R)

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

Preschool Crafts ⇒ High School Writing

Read the following essay:


It will be photocopied for you, too. Follow these steps:

  1. Take notes, click on links, ask questions, etc.
  2. Talk to your peers about their notes, questions, etc.
  3. Share the essay or its ideas with other folks, and talk to them a bit about what they believe.
  4. Do the writing assigned below.

Empathy and Blame: Process Reflection

Melissa Dahl’s essay emphasizes process over product, which fits your ongoing essay work. You started with two videos on empathy and blame, respectively, and then were asked to find an approach to your essay that is unique, inventive, and interesting:

Empathy and Blame: Essay Approach

Most of you will not have gotten much further in the essay itself. That’s more than okay; it’s actually what we intended here. You need to embrace what Dahl talks about in her article, except that you would replace “preschool crafts” with “high school essay writing.” You are interested in the process of writing, not just the product.

Your assignment: Write a response that tells the story of your writing process, from the day you watched those videos up to today, including

  1. your use of time in class and at home;
  2. your collaboration with your peers;
  3. your collaboration with your teacher;
  4. your use of other resources, especially the interstitial classroom; and
  5. your overall sense of how the writing process has unfolded.

To figure out what you’ve learned through your writing, we must have a sense of the time and energy that went into creating your writing. In other words, you are writing an essay about your essay, or at least about the process of writing your essay. That’s where you will learn the most. Remember the quotation at the top of this website:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The most important thing you will learn here is something about how you write, and that reflective work begins before you’ve come close to finishing the essay itself.

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English 10: Pareto Project Update

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

Pareto Project Updates

This is the original guide we used to set up your Pareto Projects:

Click here to read the updated Google Doc.

When I built that guide, the goal was to split your projects into two rounds, which you can see in the original calendar. We also set “deliverable” deadlines, focusing on what you could create and present, in writing or in person, by certain dates.

A couple of months later, I’d like to shift the calendar for these projects. Here is the updated version, which you’ve seen in class and online already:

Course Calendar

Remember that our shift to a GAP score every three weeks shifted our specific lessons and assignments a little bit, and that also applies to your Pareto Projects. We will now take one Friday every three weeks to check in on your progress. On those days, you will be in the iLC, where you will be able to spread out and use those resources as you see fit.

Remember, too, that you have spent a considerable amount of time in this course working on organization. When we meet in the iLC on those designated Fridays, you are responsible for setting the agenda and being productive. You must bring your own device, for instance, since we will no longer have a class set of Chromebooks. You must plan in advance for anything else you’ll need.

To help get you in that frame of mind, we have reserved the iLC for every Friday in March. We need to explore that space and see what it offers us in terms of collaborative and innovative learning. That means that you should plan to bring everything you need directly to the iLC, not Room 210, on the following dates:

  • March 3 | Pareto Project Checkpoint
  • March 10 | GAP 3B Due
  • March 17
  • March 24 | Pareto Project Checkpoint
  • March 31 | GAP 3C Due

You will be able to choose to focus on anything course-related while we are in the iLC, but there are assignments and checkpoints associated with certain Fridays. It’s like everything else in here: There is tremendous freedom and a precise structure. You need both.

Pareto Project Deadlines

Your new deadline for these projects is June 2. On that date, you will finish your projects and begin talking to us about what’s next. You might present to your peers, publish an essay, launch a YouTube channel — we will figure out what fits your work at that time.

For the first Friday after our shift — March 3 — you need to assess the state of your project. Answer the following questions:

  1. To what extent have your project goals changed over the last two months?
  2. What have you accomplished?
  3. What have you learned?
  4. Finally, what’s your next step, and how are you using the iLC on Friday, March 3, to accomplish that next step?

#4 can be something you write now, on Thursday, in preparation for the iLC, or something you write over the weekend, looking back at your work on Friday. Write your answers in a Google Doc and attach it to the Google Classroom assignment that probably led you to this post.

Ask questions about this work or the Pareto Project overall in the comments below.

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RE10: Online + Offline Reflections

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

Organizing Your Device

Good news: You can sign out your district-issued Chromebooks this week. That opportunity opens up a number of other opportunities, especially in a class that embraces an Internet-driven, interstitial access to learning. We’ve always been fortunate enough to have a class set of Chromebooks, but now every student has access to a computer, which means we’ve leveled the playing field entirely. You all have access to a device. The choice of using a computer or other device is now yours.

Your first assignment from this post is to organize your personal device, which includes (but isn’t limited to) the following:

  • District-issued Chromebook
  • Personal laptop
  • Smartphone
  • Tablet

Make this device into a tool for learning. This is deeper than setting up Google Drive and Gmail, although you need your Google tech to be organized; the device itself should be organized, from what tabs open when you launch a browser to which sites you bookmark to how you arrange and access apps. You are leaning on all four kinds of organization outlined in this post:

Getting Things Done

The device you choose is a physical object, much like a folder or backpack. It will only work as well as your mental approach to it. And you will need to plan ahead in terms of schedule in order to maximize what you do in class, which remains the all-important 36th chamber of instruction.

Assignment: Organize your device for learning, and then:

  1. Take screenshots of that organization, including screenshots of your Internet browser, bookmarks, Google Drive folders, and Gmail setup. Include screenshots of your smartphone’s or tablet’s app arrangement, too, if you use one.
  2. Embed these screenshots in a Google Doc.
  3. Explain your organizational approach for each screenshot or set of screenshots.
  4. Attach that document to the appropriate Google Classroom assignment.

Printed Annotations

On Tuesday, February 28, you received a printed copy of this post:

Empathy and Blame: Essay Approach

The four quotations embedded in that post offer insight into how we approach essay writing. You’ve had time now to engage with the assignment online and offline, with the freedom to annotate and take notes as you see fit. That lets us talk about some of what separates your offline learning from your online learning. You need a mix of both, and you need to make choices that consider the efficacy of both.

Assignment: Write briefly but insightfully about what you did with the printed copy of the post and what you learned from the printed copy, answering some or all of these questions:

  1. To what extent did you annotate the printed copy of the quotations?
  2. What insight did that bring to the offline reading?
  3. Were these authors’ ideas clearer in some way when you read the printed copy?
  4. Do you feel the difference in terms of learning and engagement when you consider these quotations offline?

Attach a copy of your responses to the appropriate Google Classroom assignment.

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Empathy and Blame: Essay Approach

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

On Empathy and Blame

Using your notes from last week, we are going to begin writing an essay. The post above should be familiar to you, and you should have responses to the prompts at the end of it. Those responses will inform our next steps, which start with finding an approach.

In Google Classroom, you’ll find the first part of this assignment, which is to break down and analyze four quotations. Here is the first, which comes from Piet Hein:

Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.

That echoes the second quotation to analyze, which is from Paul Graham, whose “Age of the Essay” tells us what writing should do (emphasis mine):

To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.

Next, you should look closely at this selection from Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” which is about how she approaches essays and other writings:

It took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Before we get to the last quotation, let’s talk about the fact that you already have a subject for the essay you will be writing. You have watched videos on empathy and blame, and you’ve thought about how those ideas connect to you, your school, and your life. You know the topic, or at least the possible topics; now you need to determine how to approach the work

This is going to be your approach, which is the first element of any piece of effective writing. You need an interesting question to ask or a unique perspective to explore. Paul Graham compares this, in “The Age of the Essay,” to a river finding its way to the sea; Virginia Woolf compares it to a “shock” that drives her to “put the severed parts together.” That’s the last quotation for you to analyze before working on your own approach:

I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.

Each of these quotations offers you a way to look at how you approach your own essay. When you’ve finished that analysis, you can begin to write about your own approach. You aren’t quite writing the essay itself yet; instead, you are outlining and brainstorming and questioning things. Ask yourself:

  1. What question or questions will drive your process?
  2. What is your perspective on these subjects?
  3. What’s interesting or inventive or curious about your thinking right now?

Ask me questions and share any ideas you have below. Remember that Google Classroom has your formal assignments for the week.

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On Empathy and Blame

  By All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

In designing your lessons, I cling to this idea, from the GAP protocol you’ll need to review before Friday:

We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

The most important thing is always something about how you learn, and you learn what you put into practice. We need more “collateral learning” in our lives. Keep that in mind as you watch these next two videos and prepare to write a response.

Prompt #1: On Empathy

Prompt #2: On Blame

Your Response

Take the next 48 hours or so, in and out of class, to write a response to these videos. Use these three ideas to guide you:

  • These videos obviously connect to the skills and traits of this course. What do they add to your understanding? To what extent can you use these as part of our learning?
  • Last week, the entire building spent P1 looking at the idea of accountability, and the second video above especially connects to that lesson. How do these videos on empathy and blame tie into what you saw last week?
  • Your personal reaction matters as much as the course and the building. To what extent do these videos resonate with you? What will you take away from them to put into practice?

Write something that weaves those three focuses together, if you can. Consider your response an essay in the true sense of the word, and attach a copy of that response to the post in Google Classroom.

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Getting Things Done

  By All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

From the profile of an INTJ, or “Architect.” Click for the website by NERIS Analytics Limited, which includes a free test and explanation of these personality classifications.

 

Getting Things Done, Part 1

Load the following calendar in a separate tab or window:

That calendar will be plastered everywhere it can be this week. It organizes two major components of our course for the rest of the year:

  1. Grade Abatement | You will pause every three weeks to complete a Google Form, which will be used as it was in Q2 and Q1 to generate a GAP score for that three-week period. You’ll have three GAP scores by the end of the quarter. They will be averaged together for your quarterly grade.
  2. Pareto Projects | On the Fridays indicated, we’ll set aside the period for focused Pareto work, including as many trips to the iLC as we can manage. Ignore the previous calendar for now1.

Remind yourself that there is a protocol for grade abatement that will, if followed specifically, allow us to post a GAP score every three weeks. Load a copy of that protocol here, or through any of the half-dozen links on this site. There are always extra copies in the classroom, too.

That protocol, like every iteration of every element of this course, focuses on how skills connect and concatenate2. And like every iteration and element, it emphasizes one skill as the one on which the others depend:

This screenshot includes the surrounding page material from the document, because it lets me emphasize again the need to “explore, create, learn” in here. (It also reminds you that the document is nine pages long, which means you have nine pages of information that you should have internalized months ago.) That is our focus, but it’s the less-exciting work of organization that gets us into that maker mentality.

For the next few days, you are looking at the academic stuff you have on you. That word, stuff, comes from a root meaning “to equip,” and that’s the idea: You equip yourself every day in order to deal with school and the work it requires. Your assignment is to assess your organization of that stuff in four categories:

  1. Physical | Start by opening up your backpack or bag, any and all notebooks you keep for your classes, your vintage Trapper Keeper, etc. You could pour this stuff out onto a table, if you have the space, or just flip through. Then assess the extent to which you have a system in place. Can you find materials you need? How ordered is your physical stuff? What does it look like?
  2. Digital | At this point in an instructional post, you should have a number of tabs open. That’s the first half of this category: How do you keep track of what you’re looking at online? Do you have a system for organizing ramiform reading? The second half is Google-driven and requires you to assess your Google Drive, Google Classroom, and Gmail organization. Do you have a system of folders in Drive to keep your work clear and accessible? Do you use a system to sort through email?
  3. Schedule | This is probably an extension of the first two, but let’s see if it helps to separate it. Do you have your schedule organized? To what extent do you plan out your days and weeks, and what does that plan look like? The calendar I’ve made for you is an example of organizing your time in this fashion. What do you do with those teacher-provided documents?
  4. Mental | Again, this is an extension of the rest, but it will probably help to keep it separate for this exercise, because we can focus in on GAP skills and traits. How do you organize your approach in this course and in other courses? What do you prioritize in terms of those universal skills and traits? Refresh your memory as necessary through this link.

Write down your observations after talking them over with your peers and/or me. The obvious next step will be to revisit and refine your systems for organization, but for now, concentrate on what’s in front of you. You will be able to put a copy of your notes and writings on Google Classroom.

Getting Things Done, Part 2

As a possibly important sidebar, let’s talk about your personalities. There is a caveat a little further down, but we should start with an introduction to the concept we’ll be using and then jump right into the test:

Free personality test | 16Personalities

Free personality test – take it to find out why our readers say that this personality test is so accurate, “it’s a little bit creepy.” No registration required!

This isn’t required, but you’re probably going to be interested in taking that test, which will give you a four-letter designation and a detailed explanation of what those letters mean. First, though, you’ll want that caveat:

What’s the Forer effect?

Have you noticed that you’re the kind of person who, while inherently empathetic, is also marked by a strong streak of independent thinking? Or perhaps you’re more the type who is a little self-critical and insecure, but can defend yourself when needed? Maybe you’re a human being, with various thoughts and feelings that sometimes contradict.

When we’re talking about how you organize yourself in here, we’re really talking about you as a whole person. That’s the universality our work drives toward. A personality test, especially one as steeped in good research as this one, might be useful. But that Forer effect is a real and powerful phenomenon.

The idea is not that a personality test is inaccurate or useless. It’s that you must be metacognitively vigilant about anything a website tells you, especially when your goal is self-improvement. I have long thought of myself as an INTJ, for instance, but I see more and more of myself in the description of an INTP these days. Without taking the test again, I can read through the differences and apply that knowledge to myself. I believe those differences are crucial to my development as a teacher, which gives me a starting point for meaningful metacognitive discussion and writing.

Approach this Myers-Briggs diagnostic with the same understanding: It’s more about how you use the ideas to organize your self-analysis than it is about being judged by an Internet test. If you do take this test, discuss its efficacy here and elsewhere in our classroom. Be sure you read everything the site presents to you, keep that Forer effect in mind, and do some reflective writing.

From the profile of an INTP, or “Logician”

  1. It’ll stay on the front page until I can insure that we’re able to use the new calendar. Remember that this sort of thing is iterative, which means it needs to be as flexible as it is focused. ↩

  2. Look that word up. I’ve always liked it because it sounds like its definition — like links being clipped together. ↩

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Tilting at Windmills

  By All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Picasso’s take on Don Quixote.

Q2 GAP Feedback

TL;DR | The three most important elements of this course right now are these:

  1. Consistent, effective, respectful use of every class period
  2. Consistent, careful, annotated interaction with all interstitial instruction/feedback/etc
  3. Consistent, collaborative, goal-oriented feedback looping with the teacher or proxies

Assignment #1 | Pull out every adjective from that list. You should have an immediate and intuitive sense of what each adjective means, but you’ll want a more articulated definition, too. What, for instance, does effective use of every class period look like? What does respectful have to do with your use of class time?

Assignment #2 | The following document uses data from Q2 to illustrate these elements and give you direction as you move into Q3. You have a Google Classroom assignment built around this document (and the interstitial directions you are currently reading) to force you to start doing what’s required of you. Complete that Google Classroom assignment.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2FTier4LanguageandLogic.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

Maker Spaces

Where you sit in a makerspace is critical. Your use of space is critical, hence the term makerspace. Small shifts in our physical setup open up new perspectives — which is exactly what happened when I moved the de facto teacher desk to the middle of the room. Two days of observing you was enlightening1.

From today onward, all junior classes will be allowed to sit where they like, but they must recognize the need to improve their in-class focus, interstitial reading, and use of resources. There are six desktop PC stations in Room 210, for instance, any of which would work well as study corrals. Our round tables should be for discussion, most likely without Chromebooks, or with a shared Google Document as the focus. The U-shaped conference tables should be for a different sort of discussion, probably led by a student with some proxy or atelier feedback to share. The high tables should be regularly moving into new configurations that reflect each group’s goals.

If you are in one of the juniors classes in Room 210, your assignment is to make better use of the space. I will be observing your efforts and giving you feedback on your choices. You probably want to keep the criteria for a Tier 4 GAP score in mind, too, since this is a formal assignment, and you know that those aren’t just given through Google Classroom2.

Sophomores will have assigned seats, with some self-selected groups allowed to stay together. That class simply isn’t focused enough when given free reign over the classroom space. We will need to shift into more teacher-monitored group work, and individuals will need to sit where they can be held accountable for pretty much every choice.

I’m sharing these decision with everyone at once, by the way, because juniors can absolutely lose the ability to choose where to sit and what to do. There is a limit to this course’s patience, and after that limit, you must be forced to work. You’ll either develop these habits on your own or be forced to develop them. You probably know that the former is almost always more powerful and long-lasting than the latter.

  1. Terrifying? Depressing? I’m not sure what the word is there. ↩

  2. They aren’t always marked in metaphorical neon lights, either. The point of this interstitial reading, remember, is to force you to read slowly and carefully. ↩

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Second Perspectives: Q2 GAP

  By All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Click to see more of Felice Varini’s perspective-warping artwork.

Trompe-l’œil Learning

At the end of the first quarter, you were given this:

The process [of GAP scoring] should be individualized. Grade abatement stresses individual learning, and it would undermine our philosophy to treat the end of each quarter as a high-stakes event. It would turn us back toward the warping pressure of the old model of learning, and none of us — teacher absolutely included — benefits from the wearying push through 140 essays, reports, or conferences.

This is still a new idea to me, but it seems more and more important as it plays out in the classroom. We can’t be a course that focuses on final artifacts over process. The experimental model — the makerspace mentality we’re trying to embrace — values results, but it shouldn’t prioritize them. The push for risk-taking and integrity is undermined by any traditional teacher-as-judge-and-jury assessment.

As always, though, your ability to provide what Tony Wagner calls “collective human judgment informed by evidence” is dependent on how much you’ve invested in the course. Your independence and individuality depend on how closely you’ve read posts like this one. I’m running out of metaphors for this — cooking still seems apt, and vaccination is never more appropriate than during flu season — but, to use a metaphor to describe using metaphors, these windmills won’t tilt at themselves.

I’d like my role at the end of any GAP process to be simple: I’m there to put you in the exact spot that lets you see yourself clearly. I help you find clarity, especially when your learning starts to seem random and unconnected, like the spatial artwork of Felice Varini:

I’m there to shed light on the evidence you’ve accrued when it looks like a pile of trash, as in the mixed-media artwork of Tim Noble and Sue Webster:

The most important step is about perspective. Varini’s artwork only makes sense if you stand in exactly the right spot. Find that spot, and the random shapes snap together:

With a bit of light in the right spot, the pile of trash transforms into this:

You need to find the necessary perspective on your body of work. The picture might not always be positive or pretty — the hammer and axe in that silhouette are a little disconcerting — so it must always be clear. The end of a quarter should be a validation and a celebration, and then it should pass quickly. If you have struggled, it should be a moment of reflection that spurs greater effort and focus — and then that, too, should pass quickly.

Q(x) Assignment

Which brings us to your GAP assignment, to be completed efficiently and insightfully and in two stages:

  1. Google Form due before 7 AM on Wednesday, January 25
  2. Google Classroom assignment due before 7 AM on Friday, January 27

The early morning deadlines allow me to read your responses throughout the day, which speeds along the triage process. The form can be done in class or in 15-20 minutes at home on Tuesday, January 24, so that shouldn’t be a problem. You’ll have Wednesday and Thursday to figure out how to solve the second prompt, which is over on Google Classroom.

Start, of course, with the protocol given to you last quarter. Read it again (or for the first time, if you haven’t quite realized how essential that sort of guide is). Then read or re-read the massive update to Sisyphean High that was delineated back in November. The links are below:

  1. Grade Abatement Protocol | How to put together the evidence and understanding necessary for an accurate score.
  2. Mind the GAP: Sisyphean High 9.3.0 | An update on the course that covers pretty much everything.

Again, if you’ve done your work this year, you’ve already seen those. You internalized enough of them to have needed only the period on Monday to jostle your brain into the right position. These links are review. If you haven’t been keeping up with interstitial instruction, however, you don’t have a choice: You need to read it all now1.

When you’re ready, you can find your assignments over on Google Classroom. Remember:

  • Ask questions in the usual places.
  • Teach each other what you learn.
  • Fight the predictable, learned helplessness that comes with a difficult task.

Good luck. Let’s settle these scores, make something meaningful, and get back to our studies.

  1. Well, you do have a choice, I guess. You could choose to be frustrated and confused and misinformed. As much as that seems to be gaining in popularity around the country, I would advise against it. ↩

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What’s In a Name?

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

Click here for the post and podcast on names.

Overview

The skills and traits being tested and strengthened for the rest of the quarter are organization, assiduousness, and self-efficacy. You must keep multiple assignments in focus and to plan out your schedule in order to be successful. On Friday, we will pause to work on your Pareto Projects; on Thursday, we will return to your ETA essays.

Keep these assignments in mind. It will feel like a lot to juggle at first, but you will only get stronger in these universal skills and traits if you are forced to develop them.

Reading: Freakonomics, Chapters 5-6 and More

The focus of the work for today and tomorrow is an excerpt from Freakonomics, one of the more interesting and controversial non-fiction books available to us. You can learn more about its authors, Steven Levitt Stephen J. Dubner, at that Wikipedia link. You can learn even more by exploring their website, which is also embedded below.

We are reading two chapters: Chapter 5, “What Makes a Perfect Parent?” and Chapter 6, “Perfect Parenting, Part II: Or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?” The photocopied packet also includes the epilogue (“Two Paths to Harvard”) and the “Bonus Matter.” The epilogue is to the entire book, but it serves perfectly as a capstone to Chapters 5-6.

You began reading on Monday, January 9, and will continue to read over the weekend and into next week. The two photocopied chapters are most important; after that, you should explore the Freakonomics website for other interesting articles, especially those about parenting, raising children, and naming. The image at the top of this post links to a podcast that you should listen to, for instance, before you load the website proper:

Because Levitt and Dubner have published so many follow-up articles, studies, and books, you are almost guaranteed to find more to read on the subject of parenting and raising children. If you need help finding more to read, however, this should be your follow-up:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/freakonomics-goes-to-school-and-teaches-us-the-right-way-to-bribe-kids/258672/

Start with the podcast on names, though. It’s available here or through the image at the top of this post.

Your Reading Assignment

Take notes that track what you find interesting, what you want to discuss, what sparks your curiosity, etc. You can write on the photocopies, in a notebook, or online through Google Drive. As you write, you should discuss what you read with your group. (If you need a reminder about what these new groups look like — and why you are in them — revisit this post.)

For now, that’s all you must do: Read carefully, take notes of some kind, and look for what’s most interesting to you. A more formal assignment will appear next week, when you will be tested on your internalization of the text, your understanding of its ideas, and your ability to monitor your reading.

This is also a unit designed to test your attentiveness to this kind of flipped instruction — the posts, links, etc, that teach you what to do before you work directly with your teachers. If you’ve gotten this far, you should click below to load a strange and often hilarious website that relates to our reading:

 

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New Groups

  By All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

TL;DR: Let me know if these new groups create any serious interpersonal problems, and then expect to use them in class.

The Stuff of Growth

Back in September, we watched Ken Robinson’s speech on education. You can revisit our discussion through the first part of this corner of Sisyphean High, but we’re talking today about his idea that collaboration is the stuff of growth and that most great learning happens in groups.

The complication arises from how you form those groups, and through the end of 2016, you had almost total control over your collaborative setup. A few class periods were rowdy or unfocused enough to force assigned seats, but never for more than a day or two.

The shift we’re about to make is not an indication that you failed, individually or collectively, to work well in your self-selected groups. Some of you proved Ken Robinson right every day. Instead, this is a deliberate effort to change the classroom space, which has begun to stagnate in recent weeks. You sit in the same places and work with the same folks, and you’ll all benefit from a test your ability to collaborate outside of your circle of friends.

UPDATE, 1/11 | Your groups have been adjusted. You can access the new copies through Google Classroom. Look for the update from January 10, which has a PDF attached. These updated groups are smaller and should prevent the interpersonal problems that were brought to my attention.

If you have any more concerns, juniors should look to the metacognitive and reflective writing outlined in this more recent post. Sophomores can bring their concerns directly to me or Mr. Looby. The goal is to improve, using the resources of the room as effectively and efficiently as possible. Remember:

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