Category: English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in English 11 Regents for the 2016-2017 school year.

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Pareto Principalities

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

Cover art to DJ Signify’s Sleep No More. The track featuring Sage Francis is at the bottom of this post.

Pareto Recap

Your Pareto Project should now be underway. If you haven’t already, post your 120-character idea to the central Google Form. Edit your entry, too, if it needs clarity or revision. Then check out the master list of ideas on the last page of the guide, which is embedded again below. If you get to the end of the week without incident, your project and blueprint are good to go. Otherwise, we’ll work out an interrupted schedule together to strengthen the project and clarify the blueprint.

Watch this space for an update over the winter break. I will give you instructions about what to expect on January 3, when you will complete a writing response related to your Pareto progress.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FParetoProjectGuidev1.6.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

Really, Though: Mind the GAP

The new year is an opportunity to regroup and refocus. You’ve been given explicit instructions about ongoing work and upcoming work — here is the post for 11R; here it is for AP — and we just spent a significant amount of time setting up Round 1 of your Pareto Projects. As we enter 2017, you might also note that you are now in the calendar year when you will apply to college. If you haven’t been serious before, now is the time.

Our interstitial classroom will take care of your access to each other, to me, and to the materials of the course. We will centralize bishop composition after the break, using it to drive everything else we do, including exam-specific writing and reading work. Grade abatement will take care of how you are assessed.

On that last note:

  1. Consider the assignments issued to you through Google Classroom. Take an inventory of missing work, incomplete work, lates, etc. Remember that approved lates or incompletes are fine; everything else is not.
  2. Consider your use of class time. Take an inventory of how often you believe you have been on- or off-task. Then take a true inventory of your focus. How often am I likely to have noted that you are off-task?
  3. Consider your metacognitive and reflective work. Take an inventory of how much writing you’ve done and how many conversations you’ve had with me about your learning, your growth, your writing, etc.
  4. Consider your atelier or workshop efforts. That refers to the extent to which you’ve studied with me to become an expert and the extent to which you’ve taught others. Take an inventory of how demonstrably invested you’ve been in the academic and grade-abated success of your peers.

For some of you, that is going to be a sobering picture. You have lost focus, missed work, and neglected your responsibilities. That’s human nature, so you don’t need to self-flagellate… but you do need to get better at this. Load the expanded profiles alongside your notes on GAP logic:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FGradeAbatementProfilesFourTiersv2.2.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

More than a few of you need to approach 2017 as if you were clinging desperately to the edge of a Tier 3 profile, with the abyss of Tier 2 gazing up at you. Because you are. You are hanging on by your fingernails.

A Series of Tubes

The last post introduced the fourth step of the Pareto Project, and you’ve had nearly a week to flex your autodidactic muscles. You should have made some progress in answering these prompts from Step #4:

  1. Set up a Twitter account and profile.
  2. Set up a Medium account and profile.

We’ll now use Wednesday and Thursday to discuss Twitter, Medium, and your digital persona. That’s the first lesson: You need to curate a digital presence. When folks go looking for you in the future, they’ll use Google, and this is the start of your control over what they find. Colleges will want to see a student who maintained a Medium account, who wrote regularly and insightfully about different subjects, and they’ll want to see a student who engages online in a smart, responsible way. Finding nothing might be as bad as finding evidence of bad decisions.

That doesn’t mean that you manufacture a different version of yourself. You need to be authentic, but not unfiltered. For most of you, that means creating a professional Twitter account that you use to promote Medium essays you write, Instagram projects you create, podcasts you record, etc. You can carefully choose who you follow, what you post, and what your virtual space looks like.

Think of this like a digital résumé. The world you are entering won’t care about the grade you got on a test; it will care about your digital imprint and the impression that creates of you. Keep any personal social media private, and treat these new accounts as extensions of the work you do in our course. Build a better version of yourself.

Let’s talk, though, about what these social media accounts will do for us. Head back to that last post, look at what has been given to you as examples, and start a discussion with me and your peers. What are your concerns? What are your questions?

Meanwhile, a preview of the kind of poetry we’ll look at in January:

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Pareto Project: Day 4

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

Kandinsky’s Composition VIII. Click to see more of his work.

Step #4: Digital Presence

With today’s iteration, the complete guide to this Pareto Project has been rolled out to you, and you can now move at your own pace through the prefatory assignments and into the project itself. Start with version 1.6 of the guide:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FParetoProjectGuidev1.6.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

Step #4 asks you to set up Twitter and Medium accounts to use throughout this process. It also encourages you to think critically about the other sites you can use to develop and eventually share your work. Most of this will be done in class under our atelier model — i.e., under teacher or teacher-proxy supervision — but you can begin at any point.

For Medium, exploring the site is the key. You will eventually hope to have a curated set of writing like this:

View at Medium.com

That is Gina Arnold, a graduate of Brewster and the student who first suggested that our makerspace might be able to use Medium. She predicted its rise as a digital platform, and she continues to use it for academic and job purposes. Your planned updates, which are identified on the Pareto Project calendar, will be posted to your Medium account, which should emulate the professional tone Gina uses.

Otherwise, explore the site. You’ll find everything from national newspapers to online comics, and your voice will eventually join these ranks. (You can do the same sort of exploration on Twitter, but stick to Medium for now. The Twitterverse is a labyrinth that would panic Asterion.)

Step #5: The Work

Step #5 has you start the work of this project. So that you’ve seen it twice, here is the complete guide again:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FParetoProjectGuidev1.6.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

Notice that Step #5 gives you access to your peers’ concise ideas. Their projects are part of your environment for the rest of the year, and the more aware of each other you become, the better your own work will be. This is your “network of possible wanderings,” as Teresa Amabile once wrote in a discussion of creativity:

Expertise encompasses everything that a person knows and can do in the broad domain of his or her work. Take, for example, a scientist at a pharmaceutical company who is charged with developing a blood-clotting drug for hemophiliacs. Her expertise includes her basic talent for thinking scientifically as well as all the knowledge and technical abilities that she has in the fields of medicine, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. It doesn’t matter how she acquired this expertise, whether through formal education, practical experience, or interaction with other professionals. Regardless, her expertise constitutes what the Nobel laureate, economist, and psychologist Herb Simon calls her “network of possible wanderings,” the intellectual space that she uses to explore and solve problems. The larger this space, the better.

Creative thinking, as noted above, refers to how people approach problems and solutions—their capacity to put existing ideas together in new combinations. The skill itself depends quite a bit on personality as well as on how a person thinks and works. The pharmaceutical scientist, for example, will be more creative if her personality is such that she feels comfortable disagreeing with others—that is, if she naturally tries out solutions that depart from the status quo. Her creativity will be enhanced further if she habitually turns problems upside down and combines knowledge from seemingly disparate fields. For example, she might look to botany to help find solutions to the hemophilia problem, using lessons from the vascular systems of plants to spark insights about bleeding in humans.

Expand your expertise and experience, and this 20% really will contribute to the majority of your learning.

As always, ask questions below.

 

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Reading the Room

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

A Decision About 1984

In “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt offered a litmus test for reading:

I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me…

I don’t want you to feel that just because you start a book, you have to finish it. Give an author thirty or forty pages or so to get his story going. Then if you don’t like the characters and don’t care what happens to them, close the book, put it away, and get another. I don’t care whether the books are easy or hard, short or long, as long as you enjoy them.

The bolded sentences give us our approach to novels like 1984. You’ve had Orwell’s book for a month now, and the only real question is this: Have you given the story 30-40 pages? If not, that’s your assignment: to read far enough into 1984 to determine if you are going to keep reading or not.

We need to tweak Holt’s language a bit to make it more meaningful, of course. Waiting for an author “to get his story going” isn’t precise enough to be useful, and there are other reasons to continue a book beyond “lik[ing] the characters.” What matters is that you should be getting something out of 1984, and if you aren’t, you have the right to stop reading.

To make that decision, you need to invest in the attempt. You can’t begin a book expecting to hate it, nor should you bring your previous reading experiences to that particular table. Start clean. Recognize that many folks, including your teacher, think highly of the book you’ve been given. Go back to that post from November 18 and read what one of your predecessors wrote about the power of 1984. Then give Orwell a chance to hook you.

If you invest in the attempt, you can make a respectable decision to stop. Either way, you need to account for your decision, which brings us to what you do after giving Orwell at least 30-40 pages:

Write reflectively and metacognitively about your decision to continue 1984 or your decision to stop 1984. Explain your reasons as a result of earnest attempt to invest in the book’s world and characters. Justify the time you dedicated to reading the rest of the novel, or justify the choice to put it aside and look for other texts.

That is taken from the Google Classroom assignment, which gives you until Monday, December 19, to make this decision and account for it in writing. As always, the thinking that surrounds your decision is more important than the decision itself.

Some of you have are deep into 1984, and a few have already finished the novel. You can still answer the prompt above by reflecting on when you made the decision to keep reading. I also invite you to share your experience with your peers by posting on Google+. Would you recommend the book? What general reasons for reading it (or not) can you give?

Bookkeeping

You will eventually be asked to do something similar for the other three novels provided to you in mid-November. Start looking for the time it will take to give each author a chance, and invest in each novel to the same degree, at least initially.

We have a few copies of The Invisible Man on our bookshelf, a full class set of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but no hard copies of The Time Machine. You should attempt to read these novels online when possible:

These are shorter novels chosen as much for their length as the quality of the stories. Use that to your advantage.

Note: If you decide not to continue 1984, or if you have already finished it, return your copy as soon as possible. Another teacher is interested in teaching it, and I’d like to get them to her before Monday. You will check in your novel through the same Google Form used to check it out.

As always, ask questions about this process below.

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Pareto Project: Day 3

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

Kandinsky’s On White II. Click for more.

Step #3: Proposals

First, you should note that our original plans have shifted in light of your needs. That’s a good thing. I want to give you time to get your mind around this project. You will receive the complete guide according to this schedule:

  • Thursday, December 8: Introduction, Overview, and Step #1
  • Friday, December 9: Step #2
  • Tuesday, December 13: Step #3
  • Thursday, December 15: Step #4

Step #5 is a little gimmicky, since it will simply tell you to get to work. You’ll get it with Thursday’s update, and you’ll see what I mean. Let’s start today with the Pareto Project guide, updated with Step #3:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FPareto-Project-Day-3.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

The Blueprint

Step #2 is ongoing, remember, and you have updated directions for what to do by Wednesday. Step #3 is there for those of you ready to tackle it. For the sake of redundancy, a link to the blueprint is below. Remember to make your own copy.

There’s a metaphor here, I’m sure of it. (Click for the blueprint.)

Pay careful attention to the section of the guide for Step #3 that discusses how to share and refine these blueprint proposals. Make this as collaborative an effort as possible to cut down on delay.

As always, ask questions about this step here or in class. You’re closing in on winter break, and we’re likely to move on before then to talk about Santa Claus; before that, you need to be sure you know what to do for this project. More than perhaps any other skill or trait, this is a test of your organizational and autodidactic strength.

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Pareto Project: Days 1-2, Revisited

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

Kandinsky’s Improvisation 31 (Sea Battle). Click for more.

Assignment Specifics: Step #1 + Step #2

You have two current assignments on Google Classroom. Here are the particulars for Step #1, which is due by Monday at 5PM. Use class time to submit this work, since it requires only a small amount of writing:

Write a paragraph or two offering your insight into your upcoming schedule as it pertains to your Pareto Project ideas. Don’t overthink or overanalyze; focus on what you and I both need to know as you begin this Pareto Project.

Step #2 has a deadline of Wednesday afternoon, again at 5PM. Use the following directions for the already-posted assignment:

Write a reflective and insightful record of the “idea smithing” part of the project, including your thoughts on how the Google+ Community collaborated. Keep this to less than a page, unless you have pertinent analysis of that community to offer that requires more.

First, though, you must settle on an idea, share it with your classmates on Google+, and seek feedback there. Turn that digital space into an extension of and entrance into our physical classroom this week. The necessary links, which are posted alongside further instructions in our last post and the current iteration of the guide, are reprinted below:

Second, you must compress your idea into 120 characters or so and add it to the following Google Form, which must be completed by Wednesday afternoon at 5PM, when the rest of Step #2 will be checked in:

Those are the four assignments that you must complete this week. In list form:

  1. Write a short, explanatory response about your schedule and time as instructed in Step #1 of the Pareto Project guide.
  2. Share your ideas, critique the ideas of others, and otherwise collaborate online and in class.
  3. Write a reflective response about Step #2 of the Pareto Project guide.
  4. Submit your final project idea through the provided Google Form.

Step #3 is explained next.

Step #3: Due Monday, December 19

The calendar for this Pareto Project, which is always up-to-date on Google Drive, shows that the official proposal for your Round 1 Pareto Project is now due on Monday, December 19. This date is unlikely to change, because we need to lock in your projects before the winter holidays. The first required checkpoint is the day you return.

You will be given the updated guide with Steps 3-5 on Tuesday, December 13. That will allow some of you to move directly into Step #3, the proposal, while others will need the next two days to finish Step #2. Everyone will use the end of the week to set up digital portfolios and accounts, and to meet with me and peers about the proposals themselves.

If you have any questions about this, ask them in class or below.

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Pareto Project: Day 2

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

Kandinsky’s Black and Violet. Click for more.

Idea Smithing

Each time I update the site with more Pareto Project information, I’ll repost the entire guide to that point. You should skim over the previous pages, because there will be edits that clarify or expand on ideas. Today’s guide ends with Step #2, for instance, but it also adds a single sentence in Step #1:

You must also choose a project that fits your schedule; if you must limit your focus during Round 1, you’ll have a chance to be more ambitious when we start Round 2 in mid-March.

That clarifies Step #1 a little, and it lets me add further clarification here: You need a project that can be accomplished in the time you have, and the time you have differs from person to person and month to month. Are you going to be in the musical? You should account for that upcoming responsibility. Are you busy with winter sports? That gives you less time for a larger project. Do you have a lot of idle time each day? You can plan something more ambitious.

Let’s start talking about ideas by reading Step #2:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FPareto-Project-Day-2.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

Step #2 is called Idea Smithing, and that metaphor will help us: You need to craft an idea, and you probably need some heat and pressure to do it.

Measure Twice, Cut Once

We’ll open the discussion in class, using groups of whatever size you choose. That will be our chance to talk about the timing element of Step #1, too, including what you should hand in on Google Classroom for that assignment.

The written work of Step #2 begins when you visit Google+, using the links at the end of the current guide. You can also use these direct links:

This is where you should make your elevator pitch. Putting your idea in writing will do what writing always does, which is to render your thoughts so we can revisit them. Your peers will then offer critical feedback to help you refine, repurpose, or reject the idea. Then, on Monday, I’ll post a Google Form to collect everyone’s pitches, which will also give you a chance to see what students in the other courses are doing for these Pareto Projects.

Ask questions about Step #2 below, and remember: Don’t just think outside the box; break it down and build something new. Or, you know, this:

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Pareto Project: Day 1

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

Wassily Kandinsky’s Yellow, Red, Blue. Click for more of his art.

Paradigm Breaking

On Thursday, December 8, you start your Pareto Project. This is your chance to learn what you want to learn and create what you want to create. Under the aegis of grade abatement, and with my help and the help of your peers, you will design a twelve-week project that culminates in — well, in whatever you want it to culminate in. You aren’t just encouraged to think outside of the box; you should break down the box and turn it into something new.

You will receive the guide to this project in sections:

  • Thursday, December 8: Introduction, Overview, and Step #1
  • Friday, December 9: Step #2
  • Monday, December 12: Steps #3-#5

The staggered release of the guide means that you cannot jump ahead easily. You have time to explore each step of the process. You have time to read. You have time to ask questions.

You’ll see why this is so important when you load the three pages for Day 1:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F12%2FPareto-Project-Day-1.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

Those three pages are stacked with links and further explanations of all kinds, and that’s before you get to the first step. You need to slow down and spend your time more judiciously than you normally do.

Remember that I write to you in a way that also teaches you how to read. Unpacking the guide is its own lesson, so you must read carefully. You must take notes. Only then should you start to talk to your peers and teacher.

A copy of the calendar for this project has been photocopied for you. Let me know if a copy of the guide itself should be printed —and before you rush to say, “Yes, it should,” note that most of what you need is linked to within the guide. Printing might not have the efficacy you think it does, but we’ll talk about it.

This first excerpt has also been shared through Google Classroom, where you will eventually submit your work for Step #1.

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Academic Update: RE11

  By English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

The following updates cover current and upcoming course work and are written to help you organize your time as you begin your Pareto Project on Thursday, December 8. Read this information carefully. Then ask any clarifying questions in the comment section below.

Ongoing: Personal Journey Essay

It’s been a while, so you may need to jog your memory:

Journey Writing

The majority of you will not return to this, especially with more essays and a Pareto Project upcoming. Some of you, however, have continued to meet with me and/or work on your own toward a final draft. This minority will now be tasked with publishing their work on Medium. Then they will use our nascent atelier format — essentially a souped-up form of proxy feedback — to teach their peers how to use Medium when we get to that step of the Pareto Project.

If you are in the group that will continue to work on these essays, you will need to make that part of your Q2 plans. Schedule time to conference with me, share works-in-progress, collaborate outside of class, etc. There is no formal deadline, but you will need to have learned how to use Medium before you return from the winter recess, if you plan on helping folks with their first Pareto Project posts.

Regardless, everyone in the course will need to account for their choice to continue working on the essay or not. That reflective writing will not have a formal assignment issued; instead, you will need to have read this post closely enough to know that you must sit down for 15-20 minutes to answer the question, “What happened with that journey essay?”

Ongoing: Q2 Novels

For future reference, here is the list of Q2 novels embedded in an earlier post:

Remember that each of those is available, for free, online. We have some copies of Stevenson’s novel and one or two copies of The Invisible Man, but only 1984 is stocked.

You should continue to read these novels. Keep the original post in mind:

Quarter 2, Day 5 [Juniors]

Just as important is John Holt’s essay and his criteria for reading a novel: Give each one 20-30 pages, and if you don’t want to finish, just make sure that your decision is deliberate and based on the text, not a lack of time or a general dislike of reading. Account for that choice metacognitively.

One note: Please push 1984 up in your schedule, as another teacher needs 50 copies of it to teach it to her class, and we should accommodate her. This might give us an opportunity to partner juniors with sophomores who are reading the same book, too, which could be interesting.

Ongoing: Regular Metacognition

This is simply a reminder that you need to reflect and be metacognitive regularly. Spend 15-20 minutes at least once a week analyzing your choices, your progress, and your subsequent goals. This is the best way to develop the skills and traits you need for the future and to generate evidence for your grade abatement profile.

If you struggle to think of how to frame this regular reflection/metacognition, respond to these three basic questions:

  1. What have I accomplished?
  2. What have I learned?
  3. What’s next?

Answer #2 by referring specifically to the skills and traits of grade abatement (e.g., organization, amenability, assiduousness).

Upcoming: In-Class Activities

Meanwhile, there will be in-class activities that bring us together in a more traditional way. (Well, our version of traditional.) You will retain choice from period to period — you can spend the time in whatever way is most productive or effective — but certain days will be dedicated to an activity or focused lesson. The vast majority will be provided interstitially a few days in advance, so you’ll be able to plan accordingly. Some examples:

  • A divergent-thinking activity about capturing the Invisible Man from The Invisible Man
  • Poetry reading with Maya-Angelou-inspired hip-hop
  • Poetry reading with Bob-Dylan-inspired hip-hop
  • Dialectical discussion of topics from, e.g., The Pig that Wants to Be Eaten

For lack of a better way to phrase it, think of these as one-off lessons.

Upcoming: Formal Units

Once the Pareto Projects are in motion, we will return to more formal units. This needs to be mentioned, because it would be easy to forget that Pareto refers to only 20% of our work. You will need to plan your time around the reading, thinking, and writing that has characterized all of our learning this year, as we study specific ideas and answer specific essential questions.

The next unit, for instance, will build on the questions you’ve recently answered and the novels you are currently reading. We will learn about lying — how it works, how we learn to lie, the types of lies, and the nature of systemic/societal lies like the myth of Santa Claus. After that, we are likely to do a smaller unit on memory itself — how it works, how we construct collective memories, and how your individual memories function.

As always, you will need to watch this space and Google Classroom for instructional materials, assignments, and feedback.

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Provisional Answers: Analysis

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

Gibson is always good.

Pattern Analysis

Load the following:

That should show you the complete set of responses to the essential questions given to you in our last post. If it doesn’t work, let me know in the comments or in person, and I’ll see what I can do to flip a PDF of the responses.

Your assignment: Read your peers’ responses, identify patterns, and offer insight into the collective thinking for each question.

If we break that sentence down, you have three things to do:

  1. Read your peers’ responses.
  2. Identify patterns in those responses.
  3. Write down something insightful about those responses.

This kind of pattern analysis needs a lot of data to work well, and you’ll have it: more than 100 students will have given provisional answers to seven essential questions. The obvious problem? You have to read 700 responses.

Speed Reading

Actually, you don’t need to read 700 responses. First, there won’t be 700 responses; we’ll be using what we have at different points over the next few days. Second, you only need to read enough responses to identify a meaningful pattern. You are meant to skim your peers’ writing. This is also a time to practice your reading speed — how quickly you can push through a wall of text while still understanding what it says.

You should apply your regular metacognition to this speed-reading to see how your brain handles it. Note which questions generated responses that you find interesting, too. You should even start to see patterns in the writing itself — in the use of specifics, the development of ideas, the repetition of phrases, and so on.

If you have questions about how to approach the assignment, ask them below. Otherwise, bring your observations and insights to Google+ and group discussions in class.

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Questions and Answers

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)
From the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man.

From the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man, which is quite different from the novel.

Essential Questions

In education, the sort of question you’ll find below is often called essential. The Greeks called these discussions dialectics. In brief, they are the reason we read and think and write: to answer questions that matter. Or, at least, to start to answer them. I don’t think any of us ever find the truth Socrates sought.

But you have something like a foundation now. You know what is expected in a learning environment like this one1. So you can take a few days to work on a set of questions that relate to the reading for this quarter:

  1. To what extent can any of us trust our senses?
  2. To what extent can any of us trust our memories?
  3. How do ignorance, knowledge, and happiness interact for us2?
  4. To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
  5. In what ways are any of us ever alone?
  6. To what extent are people self-destructive?
  7. At what point and for what reasons should a group stop an individual from doing whatever he or she wants?

Define terms, seek examples, and, above all, talk to each other. Ask clarifying questions below in the comments. Use Google+ to anchor your in-class conversations and to continue conversations that require more thoughtfulness and precision. Share your observations and insights as often and widely as you can.

We will also add to these questions as we continue, shifting the language and focus as necessary. As you read and write, new questions will occur to you. This is Piet Hein’s idea: “Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.”

One more thing: While I will guide you through activities and lessons built around those four novels, they are not required. Strongly encouraged, yes, but not required. Nor will we drive our learning through prescribed readings. There are hundreds of other texts that tackle the same subjects, that lend themselves to the same discussions, and while these have many advantages, we must remember the lessons of Paul Graham and John Holt.

The point is that we’ll take all quarter for this, and that means you should read because the readings are interesting and edifying, not because some teacher told you to do it. Keep your eyes out for other texts, too; taking that sort of initiative can only help you in here. I’m thinking of introducing “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” for instance, because of its powerful connection to these ideas, and there are several short stories and poems that we could read together3.

Throughout all of this, work in writing as often as possible. Sketch out ideas, take notes, write metacognitive responses — whatever it takes to generate understanding and GAP evidence, since those are one and the same in this course. Look to Google Classroom for formal assignments, as always, and advocate for yourself when you feel lost.

Here are the readings again, as reminder and encouragement:

  1. Which is an atelier model, by the way — a specific kind of makerspace that centralizes creativity and expertise through the ripple effect of teaching others. We’ll talk more about it later this week. ↩

  2. I don’t like the phrasing of this, but I want to avoid the cliché: Would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable? It’s not a binary consideration like that. The idea is to consider what you know, how you know it, and whether you’d prefer not to know it. We’ll talk more in class. ↩

  3. I love “Funes, the Memorious,” if you want a beautifully strange story about memory. ↩