2017-2018 – Page 4 – Sisyphean High

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Metaphorical Mixture

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

This is what I see in my own metaphorical mirror, of course, although I’m never quite sure which character I am.

The Metaphor Is the Message

“It’s human nature to conceive of abstract ideas through more immediate, concrete experiences,” goes the beginning of this Mental Floss article on the hidden etymologies of certain words. We use metaphors to make sense of the world around us, and the language of those metaphors shapes our thinking.

Certainly that’s a recurring idea in our study of truth, lies, and memory. It’s a theme in 1984, and you’ll actually grapple with the idea of “dying metaphors” when we study another bit of writing by the same author. For a moment, though, focus on “The Ways We Lie” and the emulation-through-analysis prompts you were given in this post:

Exit, Pursued by a Bear

Remember that posts like that are written to teach you, not just to present you with assignments and deadlines. That post, for instance, forces you to read slowly and carefully, if you want to know what to read and what to write. It provides context and plenty of opportunities for enrichment.

Google Classroom, meanwhile, contains a much more linear and rote version of our work. You’ll still need to be organized, but it’s harder to get lost — in the sense of developing curiosity and self-awareness.

Regardless, you’ve now had three weeks to read Stephanie Ericsson’s essay, “The Ways We Lie,” which is third in your reading packet, and make your way through the ETA and essay prompts, which are in your writing packet. The essay prompt is built around the following quotation, and you’ll notice it has its fair share of metaphorical language:

Martin Buber once said, “The lie is the spirit committing treason against itself.” Our acceptance of lies becomes a cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish.

How much do we tolerate before we become sick and tired of being sick and tired? When will we stand up and declare our right to trust? When do we stop accepting that the real truth is in the fine print? Whose lips do we read this year when we vote for president? When will we stop being so reticent about making judgments? When do we stop turning over our personal power and responsibility to liars?

List out the metaphors in the first paragraph alone:

cultural cancer
shrouds
moral garbage
as water is to a fish

Your own essays are likely to use metaphors in a similar way. That will be one aspect of our in-class workshops over the next few weeks. Pay attention, as you embark on the writing process, to the metaphors you use. (I just used “embark,” for instance, because the metaphor of a journey or river fits our writing process.)

Back to the Looking Glass

That classification and division essay is one of many assignments you must complete over the next few weeks. You’ve been given a complete list through Google Classroom, but I will link to it and embed it again here:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F01%2FCYOA_-Q2C-Ongoing-Tasks-1.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

You have a predictive calendar covering every day for the rest of the year, too — load “What You Need Right Now” at the top of the home page — which is a reminder that you are also reading 1984, hacking high-stakes exams, and working on your Pareto Projects.

You are busy! That’s by design. And it gives us a chance to do what was always planned for the end of the semester.

What Was Always Planned for the End of the Semester

Each of you will meet with me, one at a time, to review your performance. We will go through your evidence from the most recent GAP panel, but that’s not all we will consider. If you are in a co-taught class, these performance reviews will include Ms. Olson, too.

First, you should recognize that this takes an ungodly amount of class time to do. We can afford to do it once, only once, and only because of the interstitial instructional and feedback model we use.

Second, the governing metaphor continues to be the mirror, specifically the looking-glass logic of Alice. Here is the metaphor in November:

A Looking-Glass Book

The final line of that instructional post is this: “You are what you do, and you must be honest about what that means.” We have returned to that need for collective clarity and personal honesty again and again, until the need bubbled over into a day of storytelling and lectures:

The Mirror

That image and link lead this site’s top-right menu now. Its lessons are more important than ever, especially the TL;DR of it: Stop shifting the blame in this course. Take responsibility for the choices you’ve made, or accept that your frustration and lack of learning is the choice you’ve made.

That’s the half-empty looking glass, to mix a couple of metaphors together. The half-full: Some of you remain a bit lost, and a conference will help. You need help fighting the dishonesty, cynicism, and selfishness that surround all of us — the “cultural cancer that eventually shrouds and reorders reality until moral garbage becomes as invisible to us as water is to a fish,” as Ericsson puts it.

So I want you to think of Alice and her looking glass. What we do lies on the other side, and you pass through by stepping into your own reflection.You must confront who you are and what you’ve done. There is no other way through.

Once on the other side of the mirror, the environment changes and a lot of the old rules stop applying. That’s what I promised on the first day of school, and it will stay a promise on the last: There are two courses taught in Room 210, and one of them can change your life.

Before you cross that membrane, however, you have to look critically at the reflection in front of you. You have to confront the truth. And that means recognizing the dishonesty and cynicism that throw that truth into relief.

That’s why Ericsson’s metaphor is so powerful. We become numb to lies because the world, unfortunately, is filled with dishonesty. Reason is under attack all around us. You are encouraged, sometimes by people who ought to have your best interests at heart, to blame others and foster distrust. These people, your age and sometimes older, reorder reality. They spread that cultural cancer.

But there are no “alternative facts.” There is absolutely a point after which an uninformed opinion becomes an error of fact. There is right and wrong, truth and fiction, and we can separate the one from the other if we are careful.

Through the mirror, there is an invitation to do good. There is an invitation to dialectical discussion. There is empathy. There is an opportunity to guide your own learning in defiance of a 100 years of broken educational policy.

I can help you pass through that mirror to a place where you have complete control over what you learn and how much it helps you. If you’re already there, I can help you make sense of what that means. But you have to work for it. It can’t be handed to you; that’s another metaphor entirely.

Remember that you’ve already been invited to stop blaming others, to learn self-control, and to break out of the Skinner-box machinery of traditional education. The only difference between that approach and what we’ll start tomorrow is that the language (and metaphor) of invitation will shift to the language of requirement. We will meet, one at a time, for as long as it takes.

90% of you will walk away from that conference in a much better place. (I actually think it will be 100% of you, in defiance of Sturgeon’s Law, because you’d have to be as stubborn as a Flat Earther to stay cynical or misinformed afterward.) That brief loss of choice will ultimately give you more choice than ever.

Meanwhile, you will work on the learning that has been provided for you, interstitially, using the makerspace as necessary.

Ask questions about this — any of it, from metaphors to etymology to Alice in Wonderland to the structure of a conference — below.

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Engines That Could

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

I don’t know if we should trust that clown.

Strategic Coherence

One of the first texts given to students each year is Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on educational paradigms. It introduces one of the animating beliefs of this makerspace, which is that traditional education does not prepare students for the world they will join after high school. That world demands a different kind of intelligence, and it’s a far cry from the “model of the mind” that Robinson criticizes.

Watch the whole thing periodically to remind yourself why we’re here.

For most students, what the “world” demands is less pressing than what it will take to get into college and/or start a career, which is why we need to look specifically at what colleges and careers value. That list always starts with empathy, but it also always includes the rest of the nontraditional skills and traits we centralize in this course.

Two of those skill and traits are self-awareness and self-efficacy, which we loop together like so:

Student learning depends on an understanding of why we do what we do. As that post on empathy and college readiness notes, we need an answer to the question, “When am I ever going to have to use this?”

That’s what we have here. These explicit connections to college-, career-, and world-relevance break the strange geometry of traditional education. We’re after a sense of purpose.

Part of that is our focus on metacognition and reflection. Tracking the arc of learning over time grants us self-efficacy, and that applies to all stakeholders: My teaching takes shape through the same rigorous metacognition and reflection required of students, and Brewster, as a district, has always reflected on its progress.

Which brings us to the BCSD Strategic Coherence Plan:

This Strategic Coherence Plan has been available to the public for a while, but January 11 saw the formal release through that post. This is, in part, because of an upcoming event: On January 24, 2018, the Tri-State Consortium¹ will visit the district for three days to evaluate the SCP.

I want us to help Brewster’s Tri-State efforts by showcasing the extent to which our Humanities makerspace fits the Strategic Coherence Plan. Through the support of district- and building-level administration, we’ve been able to develop a unique and uniquely nontraditional learning environment, and it aligns perfectly with the SCP:

Load a PDF explaing how by clicking here.

Our particular innovations beyond the SCP are just that: innovations particular to our classroom. We have a unique assessment model, grade abatement, based on growth in universal skills and traits; an interstitial model of instruction that improves on the flipped classroom; and makerspace-inspired assignments that reframe the important work of the Humanities.

Students in this course can speak specifically to the district’s vision. It’s why feedback and advocacy are essential. The district values that perspective as much as I do, and a sense of how this SCP is enacted on the frontlines will help to shape what happens next.

That’s something to keep in mind as you complete this Google Form, which you can also access through Google Classroom or the version embedded below:

Loading…

Fill that form out as completely as you can, paying attention to the framing assignment below and on Google Classroom.

First, recognize this as an opportunity for self-awareness and self-efficacy. It requires the most critical kind of reflection and metacognition, which is why it’s being folded into our work week.

There is also an extrinsic motivation: This form will generate evidence for the top tiers of grade abatement, including the use of “inquiry-based tools and structures” in an attempt to “demonstrably improve the learning environment.” See the fourth tier’s specific language:

This is also an opportunity to “do more than just what is required,” since no one is required to respond. For those of you take advantage of this opportunity, we will set aside time in class over the next few days to reflect and be metacognitive. That will let us finish by the end of the next GAP panel (which is this Friday, January 19) and leave time for organizing and submitting the responses to administration and the Tri-State Consortium.

Look over the questions first, and try to write your responses separately from the form itself. You can answer as many or as few as you like, submit responses at different times, and edit your answers. Like everything else in here, this is about looped feedback and shared understanding.

Ask any questions about this below.

Learn more about this organization here. I’ve been involved as a team member for eight years now, and many of the innovations of this course started with Tri-State. I first heard of Alfie Kohn’s essay on de-grading through one of their study groups, for instance. ↩

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Know Your Enemy: High-Stakes Tests

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

Read John Gardner’s Grendel, if you have a bit of time and an interest in philosophy and good literature.

Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism

At the bottom of the universal skills and traits of learning is this pair:

You cannot learn without organization, and the one true goal of education is the capacity to teach ourselves, which is the second word and “state of mind” there:

The most interesting thing about the quick definition provided by Google is the term “automath,” which uses the Greek root for “to learn” to give us a label for a new kind of learning. Polymath is another fun word that uses the same root.

But this post isn’t just about teaching yourself. It’s about students fighting a common enemy through convergent and divergent problem-solving. To defeat that enemy, we need both.

As a quick review:

Click for way more background than you need.

While Google and Wikipedia tells us that “most tasks in school and on standardized multiple-choice tests” do not require significant creativity, that’s actually not a helpful claim, because it devalues the importance of convergent thinking. You need precision and creativity equally to be successful.

Start, though, with what our common enemy is: standardized tests. Any standardized test, in fact, from Regents to APs to GREs. So we’re in agreement:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/04/19/34-problems-with-standardized-tests/?utm_term=.62103cdd0253

Valerie Strauss is thorough and insightful in all of her articles and essays on education, so it’s not much of a surprise that she hits 34 on this list without much difficulty. Standardized tests are just that damaging to educational systems.

Alas, we can’t get rid of them. We also can’t pretend that they reveal nothing about your learning. Even poorly designed tests teach us something about your assiduousness and self-efficacy. Well designed ones showcase critical thinking, close reading, and effective communication, among many other desirable skills and traits.

Standardized tests are still monstrous, though. They are the Grendel to your Beowulf, and you have to proceed with that in mind.

Your Assignments

You will work together to accomplish two tasks:

Learn everything about the test: what it looks like, how much time it takes, the types of passages most often used, the skills tested, the font of the directions, etc.
Reverse-engineer a personal plan of attack that will earn you as many points as possible when it comes time to perform.

The first one requires convergent thinking. Standardized tests pass through so many committees and focus groups that there will always be an overview, guide, and set of sample tests to study.

The second one requires divergent thinking. Your goal is to do as well as possible, which requires a keen understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, and resources.

You’ll make a decision about how much to invest in these tasks, and it’s always worth noting at the outset that you and you alone answer for that sort of decision. You can lead a horse to water, they say, but you can’t do much if the horse eats a bunch of rocks and drowns itself.

Most of you will start with a profile of the test you face. All that takes is a link to the right website, time, and the help of a teacher who has been around high-stakes tests long enough to know how to fight them. That’s me.

Below are the tests that juniors take in English Language Arts in New York State. All juniors take the Regents Exam in ELA (Common Core). Some take the College Board’s AP Exam in English Language & Composition.

Scroll down, load the website(s), and memorize the format and expectations of the test(s). Formal assignments about this will be given through Google Classroom, including ways to check your internalization of this information.

(In other words, we’ll use quizzes and tests to see what you’ve memorized and what you know. No grades, of course, but plenty of data and evidence.)

The Regents Exam in English Language Arts (Common Core)

Note: I want to believe that New York State is also interested in the etymology of “mathematics,” and that they are using it here to reference learning, not because no one checked the site’s code. Let me have that belief, please.

The AP English Language & Composition Exam

Note: The College Board uses more precise weapons to evaluate you than New York State does, but that has a lot to do with the size of the war chest. It’s also why New York State is aping AP exams as it adopts Common Core. The ELA Regents, for instance, took a lot of inspiration from the Language & Composition exam. That’s helpful for juniors taking both: You’re fighting similar monsters, at least. Grendel and Grendel’s mother, maybe?

Convergence: Test Profile

Those are the links you need for the convergent piece, regardless of course and level. The divergent work of hacking systems and figuring out how to do well will happen in class, over time, as part of our makerspace.

Organize your approach, your note-taking, and how you memorize this information. It is not enough to “present” it. You aren’t handing in a copy of something we could all look up on Google with 40 minutes and a bit of direction. You must know this.

Whenever we begin this work together in class, we’ll talk much more about what it entails. Use the space here to ask questions and get clarity outside of the face-to-face work.

Read on for some of the philosophy and background, if you’re interested in those things.

Philosophy and Background

The pairing of organization and autodidacticism started a long time ago, with a focus on how much work it takes to develop a system for both:

View at Medium.com

The unintentional insight of the first two paragraphs ended up moving the burden of learning from the teacher and his Skinner box of punishments and rewards to the student: If every assignment strengthens and demonstrates the skills and traits we care about, after all, then formative feedback is all that counts.

In terms of gamesmanship, the idea is that these tests have a logic that can be learned, weaponized, and beaten:

View at Medium.com

Read that for the “Too Many Cooks” reference, at the very least.

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Exit, Pursued by a Bear

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

Image from nosoonersaid by way of Act III, Scene 3 of The Winter’s Tale, which is famous for one of the strangest stage directions of all time. (The link to the original source for the image no longer works, unfortunately.)

Snow Days and Elder Gods

For most of us, this is an encouraging sight:

Those are all potential delays, early dismissals, or cancellations in the next week or so. That’s good news, because we all retain at least part of our childhood excitement over snow days. It always feels like a gift from whatever deity we believe in.

Which is Cthulhu, naturally.

As we grapple with snow days, we’ll see that this course is built to withstand pretty much any disruption. That’s why instruction is flipped, feedback is revolutionized, assessment is shifted, and so on. It’s also why a post like this one exists: to set up the foreseeable future in a permanent, archived place.

Bookmark this page. If you have questions about anything we’re doing for the rest of January, the answer’s likely to be here.

The Essential Questions

It’s always worth reminding you, the stakeholders in all this, that this is a Humanities makerspace. It’s the first of its kind. See the syllabus again for the questions we ask and the problems we solve:

RE11/AP11 Syllabus: 2017-2018 | https://goo.gl/GNZ9K5

That syllabus lists the essential questions we might ask and attempt to answer through collaboration and experimentation. The biggest ones persist through every other unit of study:

Click for the entire syllabus.

That’s a screenshot of a document distributed and posted in early September, in case there’s any doubt about how long ago this was set up for students. Everything we do is about those questions. They really are universal: What does it mean to live a good life? How can we co-exist differently? What is the purpose of school?

Even our course calendar, which is always available on the side of this site, provides students an explicit maker focus:

That’s a screenshot of the current “unit,” which is really just the three weeks carved out for GAP purposes. During that time, we are tackling issues of truth, lies, and memory, just as we did in December. We are prioritizing the skill of close reading, especially of literature, and writing several emulative essays. We’re also beginning prep for the exams students will take at the end of the year.

That’s why stakeholders have two calendars right now, with this one added on December 11:

It’s separated by course level. The second calendar takes the focus on makerspace innovation and essential questions and pitches it in terms of daily focus. There is a day set aside every week or two just for sustained, silent reading, and plenty of time scheduled for test prep. At the end of every week, we’ll return to students’ Pareto Projects, which we launched at the beginning of the year:

Pareto Project Guide (2017-2018)

Crossing the Rubicon

Part of that focus on what students do in class — a focus that has been in place since the beginning, but is now controlled more — is a new approach to how your decisions are monitored and tracked. Think of it as a nod to Big Brother, since we’re reading about him.

There are several documents that cover this revamped approach to student accountability. They were all distributed in class and online on December 10:

That’s a screenshot of the Google Classroom feed for one of the AP classes, in case there are any doubts. The posts for the other three class periods are identical, except for the remaining schedule, which is course-specific.

We went over these ideas in class on December 11, 2017, in one of the rare lectures students have had to sit through in Room 210. Here are direct links to the documents themselves:

They are all very, very important. If you had to choose one to focus on here at the start of 2018, however, I’d pick Crossing the Rubicon.

Infinite Campus Update: Cross[ed] the Rubicon

The guide to stakeholder involvement talks extensively about how to keep up with student progress. Google Classroom tracks the writing process, metacognitive and reflective writing, and most other evidence of student learning. This website contains instruction, general feedback, and all course materials and guides. The GAP scores entered into Infinite Campus every three weeks or so convey a nuanced, specific profile of each student (provided we line up that number with the profiles, skills and traits, and course basics).

I think it’s worth revisiting the why behind this, especially as it related to the Skinner-box logic of student motivation in most places. For now, though, we’re talking about a change that was made over the break to how we use Infinite Campus. I’m going to quote Alfie Kohn again, before I explain that change, and ask you to think about his wisdom:

It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006). In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.

Nothing is more disheartening than students spamming F5 on Infinite Campus, waiting for a number to tell them whether they’ve been punished or rewarded. Grade abatement solves this by removing the immediacy from the number, and by transforming what the number means: from a cryptic calculation to a clear, holistic, forgiving, student-centered profile.

Grade abatement eliminates the unpredictability of feedback, too, since there are hard-coded dates for student self-assessment and “collective human judgment informed by evidence,” as Tony Wagner puts it. It can take anywhere from a day to a month to get assignments scored and entered in a traditional classroom; in here, the process is everything, and we can evaluate that process whenever we need to.

And I say all that because there is now an “assignment” in Infinite Campus, next to the GAP score:

That’s what it looks like on my end. To a student, it will appear only if there is a number entered into the scoring column.

Like everything else, this “assignment” is a lesson unto itself. Students have to be able to read closely and think critically. By looking carefully, you’ll see that it isn’t part of score calculations, which means it isn’t part of a final average. The number of “total points” is irregular. And it’s got a strange name: “Crossed the Rubicon.”

For Stakeholders: What the “Rubicon” NUMBER in Infinite Campus MEANS

This is the number of times that a student met the criteria outlined in this document on in-class focus. Instead of sending emails, printing documents, etc, and relying on students to convey that information to other stakeholders, this weaponizes the worst parts of online gradebooks: Here is a clear, unavoidable number that tells all of us how often a student failed to meet the basic requirements of the classroom.

The total “points” available reflects the total number of days that our calendar indicates we will meet during that GAP cycle. For the last part of Q2, we are supposed to meet 13 times, hence the 13 for total “points” available. In December, there were only ten days considered.

If a student has nothing here, she did her job every day. I’m not putting a zero down, because zeros are the most charged and toxic numbers in education. All the explanation in the world can’t prevent a zero from triggering panic and anxiety in most students.

If there is a number there when we do our GAP scoring, that’s how many class periods featured one of these:

doing homework for another class
playing games
sending text messages
watching videos
sleeping
rappelling down the side of the building and escaping into the woods
gossiping
complaining
gazing too long into the abyss
checking social media accounts

That’s a partial and partially ironic list. The serious piece of this is that focus and self-control are the mainstays in any real success in any walk of life. I’m not writing down a student who is distracted for a moment; I’m tracking students who are clearly not meeting the basic requirements of focus and self-control.

If this is too close to the Skinner-box logic we carefully avoid everywhere else in this makerspace, there won’t be “Rubicon” numbers online in Q3. Let’s see how the rest of January goes.

New Seats: Starting Positions

Another shift for the new year is that all students have assigned seats. I’ve printed labels, placed them at tables, and covered it all in packing tape to protect from the spillage of high school students. These seats won’t change unless we get new students (which has already happened since I began typing this post, naturally).

Students are going to see immediately that these seats are clustered together, away from the whiteboards, charging stations, PC bank, and other creative elements of the makerspace. The goal has always been to make better use of the space, so much so that it was an explicit assignment in Q1:

Concrete and Abstract

So we have to think of these seats as starting positions, not desks. Students sit in them at the start of class, and then they let the bell do its Pavlovian job: They get up, reconfigure their groups and workspaces, and use this room to get things done. When the second bell rings, they put the seats and furniture back where it was when they started.

To address the students directly¹: You are responsible for the space now. If you don’t put the furniture and seats back where they belong, that reflects poorly on your self-awareness and collegiality. If you don’t make good, conscious decisions about how to reconfigure the room from day to day, that reflects poorly on your critical thinking and self-efficacy.

Readings: January, 2018

The only exception to the modular chaos I’m describing in that previous section is the sustained, silent reading scheduled from time to time in every class. On those days, the focus is on individual reading, and student choice is limited.

Below is the packet that we are using throughout January, 2018:

Truth, Lies, & Memory: Packet 1

It contains an excerpt from 1984 and three essays. Here is a direct link to the full text of Orwell’s novel:

1984: Complete Novel

All of our work will use these pieces. Additional reading, especially when it’s exam-driven, will be delivered through Google Classroom. When we launch a new set of essential questions — or expand on our study of truth, lies, and memory — the reading will look like this, too: a piece of traditional literature attached to essays and short fiction.

As always, the primary focus is on how we learn, not the products we hang on the fridge. It’s not important that you finish 1984, for instance, although I sincerely hope you do. It’s important that you track your interactions with the novel². I’d strongly suggest a weekly appointment with a journal of sorts — something in which you reflect on your reading, think about your choices, and draw some insight.

Writings: January, 2018

That’s one type of writing you should be doing: reflective, metacognitive responses to what you’re reading and discussing in class. Essays will continue to be process-driven exercises built on whatever we’re reading. Here, for instance, is what you were working on before break:

The first prompt there is derived from the Regents Exam, which all juniors have to take; the second prompts you to write the kind of essay Paul Graham encourages. That’s why your assignment before break was to submit evidence of the process of writing the second response, not necessarily a finished copy. Real writing is ongoing, when it has to be, and often unfinished.

We’ll continue to balance test-based necessity against authentic writing in this way. You’ll also spend part of this month learning how to publish your writing online, which will let you generate a portfolio of work for the future.

Formal assignments, as always, will be posted to Google Classroom. The next writing prompt will ask for classification and division, a style of essay you’ll see in “The Ways We Lie,” which is part of the reading. There will be emulation-through-analysis exercises, too, to get you going.

We might be able to start that tomorrow, but it also might take a few days to shake off the holiday atrophy and remember how to use Room 210. That’s the benefit of the calendar you now have: The middle of every week is makerspace-driven, which means you are solving problems and creating meaning and generally trying to learn as much as you can. It might be very predictable, if we’re in the midst of a novel or essay, or it might change individually from day to day.

That freedom should prompt some regular reflection and metacognition, too. The students who get the most out of this class are the ones who learn how to use its freedom most effectively, and that takes self-awareness and self-monitoring.

It’s a lifelong skill, too. Why do you think I write so often? It isn’t just to flip instruction and give us more time together in class. This is how I refine the course so it works better for students: by reflecting and being metacognitive about what we do. You need the same habit of mind.

Interstitial Discussion

Use this online space to talk to me about what you’re thinking and what you need. Use Google+ or some other online tool to work interstitially with each other³. Try to reserve class time for face-to-face interactions, like workshopping an essay or discussing what you’re reading.

Play the part until it isn’t a part anymore. You have about six months left in here, which is just enough time to build a better version of yourself before you head off to the next stage. Remember, though, that whatever choices you make each day are yours. This course is a mirror, and blame is just a way to hide from what it shows you. You’d do well to remember that:

Read this again, as necessary, to remind yourself what is at stake.

This is being written with the idea that other stakeholders should start to monitor what I’m teaching, because it really does take a village to do this thing. That was part of the reason to flip instruction and take the massive time required to write all this down: to let parents, counselors, principals, etc., be part of a Humanities makerspace. ↩
Now I’m back to addressing students directly. They really are the reason we’re here, so it’s hard not to address them. ↩
I think we are going to find time to look at our course’s erstwhile subreddit, for instance. We may have a mod or two lined up to bring it back to life. We’ll see. ↩

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Regents Prep: Rubicon+

By Mr. Eure English Regents Prep (2017-2018)

Current Assignments

We’ve spent the last month working carefully in class on the June ’17 ELA Regents Exam. As we head into the winter break, you should revisit this post, and then you should focus on these assignments:

Typed Revision of Part 2 of June ’17 Exam | Instructions are on Google Classroom.
Text-Based Analysis (Part 3 of June ’17 Exam) | Instructions are on Google Classroom.

You must complete both of these assignments before January 2, unless you and I work out an alternative deadline. See below for penalty information.

Rubicon: Pass/Fail

The point of no return is sometimes called “crossing the Rubicon.” This course is now, as you know, pass/fail. Your Rubicon is the moment when you cross into failure for the quarter. Here is a direct link to the assessment profiles we are using:

Pass/Fail GAP Scoring | https://goo.gl/gpXRTZ

This is normally an obvious determination that uses Occam’s logic or the duck test. Starting now, however, every time you break the rules of the classroom, including the requirement to focus on coursework at all times, those failures will be recorded and shared with parents, counselors, administrations, etc., in order to help you assume responsibility as you prepare for the exam.

You will be tracked on my end through a form that looks like this:

I select the date, choose a name from a dropdown menu, and note the unacceptable behavior. Examples include:

doing homework for another class
playing games
sending text messages
watching videos
sleeping
gossiping
checking social media accounts
wandering the hallways

There will be contemporaneous notes for your progress, and those notes can be given to any stakeholder, from parents to counselors, in order to help you. Separate notes are kept for missing assignments, incomplete work, and so on.

If you have questions, ask them in class. You may also comment below and/or send an email.

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The Edge of the City

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

Below are instructional writings for you all to read. Photocopies will be distributed in class. The images are from the manga Blame!, which is set in the literalized feeling of public education.

The Mirror and the Mountain

Short URL: https://goo.gl/iHxeYo

TL;DR — Stop shifting the blame in this course. Take responsibility for the choices you’ve made, or accept that your frustration and lack of learning is the choice you’ve made.

Crossing the Rubicon

Short URL: https://goo.gl/Eoodje

TL;DR — Every time you break the rules of the classroom, including the requirement to focus on course work at all times, those failures will be recorded and shared with parents, counselors, administrations, etc., from now until the end of the school year.

Remaining Calendars

RE11 Short URL: https://goo.gl/EtFTCR

AP11 Short URL: https://goo.gl/KpwJoF

This course calendar frames each day for the rest of the year. Don’t forget the other one.

Quick Guide to Stakeholder Involvement

Short URL: https://goo.gl/Ax3ufq

This expands the original document to include students, who actually are stakeholders in their education.

…

If you have questions or comments about the documents in this post, post those below.

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GAP Framework: Within Reason

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

Within Reason

The scoring panel for the first part of Q2 ends tomorrow, December 1. You’ve been given specific criteria for a GAP score of 7 or higher, which we’ll review in a moment. Start with the profiles in full:

Click to embiggen.

The fourth tier is all about feedback, which you know is one of the two most important elements of success. This time, you were instructed to have evidence of your interstitial work, specifically in two categories:

Notes on instructional posts
Evidence of online contributions

These requirements are clarified below.

① Notes on instructional posts

The first instructional post for this scoring panel is “The Age of the Essay,” which was published on November 5. The most recent is “Well, Why Read?” which was published on November 29. Those posts, plus the many given in between, are responsive and multifaceted learning opportunities. You should have taken notes on them as you would on any academic reading assignment.

You had a checkpoint assignment on Google Classroom on November 27 that asked you to submit copies of these notes. Three more posts were created for you after that:

Within reason, you should have notes on these, too. The key phrase there, though? Within reason. You do not need hours of notes on every instructional post. The most recent ones make this explicit. You need to engage with each post, learn what you can from it, and determine how it helps you meet your learning goals.

There are dozens of possible approaches to this. What matters is that you have a habit of mind — that you are aware of every post, that you read every post, that you learn from every post. And that you ask questions.

② Evidence of online contributions

I won’t recap the many posts explaining why you should practice online discussion. It’s a requirement. You have to try it, much like you’d have to try to talk in an in-class discussion, if that was required.

In this course, the easiest way to ask questions and seek feedback, from me and from your peers, is to leave comments online:

Interstitial Discussion

This practices your communication and writing skills, your collegiality and amenability, your organization, and much more. It makes you think in writing, and it freezes your discussion for later reference. Within reason, you should have at least one contribution to these posts.

Again, the key phrase: within reason. You absolutely should invest in this site, because it’s the surest way to get feedback from peers and me in the context of instruction, but there are other ways to contribute interstitially. Here are a few:

Collaborating and leaving comments on peer work in Google Docs
Holding discussions through Google Communities
Having focused group chats (e.g., through text messages) about course work

If you continue your collaborative learning in a writing-driven way outside of our 40+ minutes together, that’s interstitial learning.

Note: I think it’s fair to have a discussion about whether or not taking notes on those instructional posts counts as interstitial evidence. It probably does. That teaching is designed, like this post that you’re reading now, to be consumed interstitially; notes on this kind of teaching are, therefore, interstitial. The issue is the lack of audience and potential collaboration. But any student reading this, now, who has chosen to work individually and interstitially probably has enough evidence there to elide the discussion/collaboration requirement.

On RE/AP Differences

One more thing: This is cross-posted to both junior courses, Regents and AP, in order to illustrate the universality of what we do. I also want to describe, in this public place, one of the key differences between a college-level course and a non-college-level course.

The language of the profiles for grade abatement is the same, and the basic course of study for a junior is the same (e.g., you all take the same Regents Exam in June). But the expectations differ. There are measurable increases in reading and writing assignments for AP students (plus the Lovecraftian AP exam in May), but the real difference is what’s expected.

The superlative language of a GAP 9, for instance, indicates different expectations. What qualifies as “strongest” or “best” in each course is different. Even a word like “precocious” takes on special meaning: In a college-level curriculum, the definition’s indication of “early development” operates in a different context.

How does this play out in GAP scoring? Within reason, a student in AP, in addition to completing the more numerous formal assignments, would take more notes on more instructional posts. She would contribute more often, and in more ways, to online discussions. You are still looking at a key phrase, though: within reason. Do not put crushing pressure on yourself in an AP class, and do not believe you can’t do more than what’s required in a Regents class.

GAP Scoring: Q2A

Find the GAP assignment on Google Classroom. Attach copies of any evidence that is required to justify your assumed profile. Include copies of evidence you’ve already submitted. Add links to shared folders as a comment there, on Google Classroom, if necessary. Then complete the Google Form included with the assignment.

When you complete the GAP report, which is in the usual format, be honest about your success over the last 3-4 weeks. Remember that growth requires honesty, and that each panel resets your evidence. From December 4 to December 22, you build another profile. You have another shot at the best kind of learning and the highest kind of reward.

In addition to the GAP report, you are strongly encouraged to complete a self-assessment spider graph, basing your plotted points on your work in each skill and trait over the last 3-4 weeks. You’ll need these handouts, in this order:

You’ve seen most of them before, but not in this order or with this particular formatting and purpose. Look over the skills and traits, as always, to remind yourself what they entail; look over the quick scoring guidelines for a 0-9 self-assessment; and then fill in a hard copy of that spider graph with what you think your wheel of evidence looks like.

In case the Google Drawing of the spider graph doesn’t work, here’s a JPG version that you can print. You’ll have photocopies of all this on Friday, December 1.

Ask questions below.

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Möbius Strips and Other Jazz

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

Möbius Strips

I want you to understand how important feedback is, and how important it is that it loops — me to you, you to me. In fact, a better metaphor might be a Möbius strip:

That’s cool by itself, but it also lets me link to this article, which is worth your time.

Our work has a kind of non-orientability. It lacks a “surface normal” element. In other words, there is a twist to it¹.

There is a quotation at the top of our course website that helps my perspective:

The content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning.
The most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns.

I return to this frequently in planning your lessons, hoping to rebalance the process and product portions of our work. When we focus on process, we’re really focusing on feedback — how you communicate with me, and how I communicate with you.

Some of the more insightful comments left on recent instructional posts address this. (Here is a thread I entered that touches on goals and goal-setting.) I also received a half-dozen emails about it, many of them wondering how to navigate work without terminal deadlines. The short answer is to collaborate on student-generated deadlines, or to use the GAP protocol to set periodic endpoints, but this is all a distinct and dislocating shift for students.

It’s a shift for me, too. I have had to learn to think in writing, to prioritize individual feedback, and to be flexible in a way I never anticipated. Some deadlines and markers can’t be (or shouldn’t be) changed, like the ones baked into the GAP process; almost everything else, however, should have an element of mutability built-in. It’s like jazz, in a way: You have to be able to improvise, but there are boundaries. There are keys and tempos and other musicians sharing the space.

Certainly jazz is more complicated than that. So is process-focused learning. Metaphors and analogies help us figure out what to do with the time we’ve been given — and how to cultivate perspectives we didn’t have before. That’s why it’s important to write to you like this, in a way that opens up ramiform learning. Having mentioned jazz, I would invite you to lose an hour reading this essay on Thelonious Monk, which includes lines like this: “We love Dizzy, but Monk’s multi-dimensional mystery tugs more insistently at our consciousness than Dizzy’s sophisticated, sun-drenched delight. The ineffable allure of shadows.”

Back to the English part of the Humanities: If you look, you’ll see that the course calendar has you writing an essay right now. That essay was meant to teach you the skill of synthesis alongside a universal writing process, which would be based on Paul Graham’s advice in “The Age of the Essay.” You had several weeks’ worth of lessons building toward that.

You weren’t ready, though, when we returned from the Thanksgiving holiday. A pair of instructional posts (In the Spaces in Between, Antediluvian Discussion), posted a week apart, explore that reality, but it matters most that it is reality: You weren’t ready.

It seems like capitulation — surrender — to say it doesn’t matter that you weren’t prepared. So let’s not say that. It matters. GAP scoring holds you accountable for your choices, doesn’t it? What would we gain by pushing into an essay many of you aren’t prepared to write?

The answer is to shift the writing focus to next week, when you’ll begin 1984 and a packet of texts of all kinds on the subjects of memory, truth, and lies. This week is better spent on process.

This is a chance to validate your feedback to me, too. In RE11, your feedback helped your teachers identify the need for guided annotation and metacognition, so we’ll spend the end of our week doing that. In AP11, your feedback identified the need for guided help with these ETA questions. We’ll work radially and by proxy to glean what we can from those essays.

How to Read This Post

This kind of post is instructional. I’d like to unpack it for you, this time, to show you exactly what it teaches you. The central feedback — some version of, “Let’s be flexible about our work, and let’s talk about it more” — is surrounded by opportunities to learn about all this:

That list isn’t random. There are metaphors and deeper insights into our work. It’s also part and parcel of the course to want to learn more about things you didn’t know before — to become a polymath-in-training. These are interesting subjects. Reading about them is going to hone your close reading, critical thinking, etc., and maybe open you up to a new passion.

But not one that breaks the rules of geometry. We haven’t fallen into the non-Euclidean nightmare of Lovecraft, for instance, although I might have to revise that statement before 2017 ends. ↩

29 Comments

Antediluvian Discussion

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

The word of the day is antediluvian.

Interstitial Discussion: Another Update

Let’s talk, once again, about how we talk to and work with each other. First, comments.

Comments are grouped, archived, and emailed to me by this website. They appear by post and comment thread. Below is a screenshot of the inbox dedicated to this process. It was taken Monday, November 27, around 6AM. I cleared the previous batch before going to sleep at 9PM on November 26¹.

Comments are also recorded on the website. The dedicated page for this, which was created on October 1, sorts them by time. Below is a screenshot of some of the comments left on November 26 (or in the midnight hours of November 27). If the inbox I maintain helps sort GAP evidence, this website page helps you sort opportunities to collaborate and to discuss.

The most recent post on how and why this interstitial approach works is here: In the Spaces in Between. It was published on November 20. Previously, you had posts that directly instructed you on using these resources, including The Ironic Use of TL;DR and The Aft Agley Gang, which were both published on October 30; Habits and Habitats, from October 20; Scripta Manent, from September 28; a post answering the question, “What Do I Do Next?” on September 22; and these two posts that opened the year. There are many more.

You’ve been told to use these interstitial resources. You’ve been shown why it matters. The work was never optional². We absolutely need to figure out why it’s not being done.

Riders in the Storm

Comments are just one part of the interstitial classroom. They extend in-class discussion and allow you to think in writing, which gives you another angle on the instruction, feedback, and formal assignments that comprise the rest of the interstitial work we do.

The calendar offers an example of why this matters. Between the Thanksgiving holiday, last Wednesday’s assembly, several lockout and fire drills, teacher meetings, and the occasional illness, we haven’t had much time together in class. That inconsistency will continue in December with snow, which will give us the weird and muted joy of cancellations, delays, and early dismissals. Individually, you will miss time for sickness.

Without this website and a shared focus on interstitial instruction and learning, that fractured a schedule makes learning unsustainable. You lose the momentum necessary for productive reading and writing. Your academic muscles atrophy. You forget what you were up to, back when you had class, and often shrug your way past that feeling.

Or you try to use the survival skills you’ve learned elsewhere to make up that lost ground. You rush through work at the last second. You skip steps, copy answers, make excuses. That’s why there has been a flood of activity today. We are all creatures of habit, and here, again, that creature is a rat trapped in a Skinner box.

What happens is this³: You load Google Classroom, see an assignment, and spam the switch that looks like it will give a reward. If the assignment asks you to copy your notes and submit them, you might have to create those notes. If it asks you to copy ongoing work and submit it, you might have to churn out whatever you can during the class period. Reminded that you must contribute online, you might add several comments to different posts without reading much of what your peers have written.

There is limited efficacy in that. The sudden influx of comments really is too great for any kind of close, careful reading; instead of the ebb and flow of a digital conversation, there is a deluge. Your peers can’t monitor a thread when there are dozens of them appearing at once. I can’t provide ongoing feedback, because your contributions aren’t ongoing.

Similarly, when you try to take a week’s worth of notes in a single period, that deluge drowns any real learning. The work manages to be perfunctory and overwhelming at the same time⁴. You are rushing to fulfill a checklist, and that’s not how this kind of learning happens.

This sort of perfunctory and sometimes panicky approach also prevents you from recognizing comments that open up discussion, like this one:

That was one of the few comments left before the flood today. It is also a post driven by in-class feedback from me; the question is an attempt to galvanize others to apply Graham’s logic to an unrelated (but interesting) discussion. It would have helped you practice how to write succinctly and how to sign up for follow-up comments. Instead, it sat there for a week, unnoticed and unremarked.

The Chain

Of course, students who rush through assignments are still doing the assignments. That’s something. There are folks reading this who need to admit to greater need, and there are folks not reading this at all — or not reading it until it has been pushed on you by a teacher, either digitally or through printed copies⁵.

To take notes on this instructional post, all of you should answer one or both of the following questions about what most motivates you.

Do you want a good grade?

Start looking at your desire for a good grade more closely, then. You aren’t entitled to anything, and in here, your performance is all that matters. What you do is all that matters. And that includes when you do it.

If you want to do well, you mean that you’d like a 90 or higher. That requires you to keep up with instructional posts just as much as formal assignments and central texts. That fourth tier of profiles requires you to be metacognitive and reflective, to do those things consistently and insightfully, and to contribute meaningfully to the class as a result of your introspective work. You have to do that over time.

You might be able to justify a GAP score of 6 or 7 without a regular habit of reading, taking notes, and responding to materials. You might be able to meet the criteria by rushing at the last second, since that last-second work still teaches you more than you’d learn by doing nothing (and there are students doing nothing, as always). It’s unlikely, however, that your last-second work is brilliant enough to make up for your lack of assiduousness, organization, self-awareness, amenability, and self-efficacy.

If you want a good grade, you have to work interstitially.

Do you want to future-proof your skills?

In this question, “future-proof” means to give yourself the skills and knowledge to get into college and/or a career, to make the most of your relationships, and to thrive in whatever future you find. I can’t imagine anyone saying they don’t want that sort of strength, but it might be that you don’t see how reading this long post or leaving a comment gets you there.

Which is when I remind you that we’ve gone over the skills and traits of this course, including their connection to the skills and traits employers and colleges want. We’ve done it so often that it’s almost redundant to link to individual posts, as every post covers this. Here’s the one on empathy, for example. You’ve seen me emphasize self-control repeatedly (and through strangely violent metaphors). If you take the time to read Paul Graham’s essay, you’ll see how important writing is to any career, to say nothing of its importance to understanding yourself and your life. We started the year with the importance of reading, especially as it relates to empathy.

The only way to build these skills and traits is to chain them together, one link at a time, with an eye toward overall progress. You can’t fake your way into a good writing process. You can’t take shortcuts to empathy. You can’t sustain an insincere focus on collegiality for very long, and you won’t be productive while you try.

These posts get at the need for regular practice. They link to readings that emphasize other skills and traits. When you contribute interstitially to discussions, you get to practice organization, collegiality, and amenability. You can use the ramiform resources here to practice autodidactic and individualized instruction. You are always encouraged to lean into the kind of feedback that makes the most sense.

Desultory or perfunctory work barely creates the appearance of progress. It will feel like busywork, because you aren’t building anything; you’re rushing to get credit for what you haven’t been doing all along.

If you want to future-proof your skills, then, you have to work interstitially.

This is not really the place to discuss the work you do late at night, but it’s at least worth a footnote. You know, because it is your lived experience, that work done late at night is work done less effectively. Even if you are a nocturnal kind of person, you don’t get to be that kind of person while you attend school. You get to wake up and attend classes at 7:45 in the morning. We need to figure out how to budget your time and work with foresight for a number of reasons; that your work suffers late at night is one of them. ↩
In the sense that the option not to do it carries penalties. You can always choose to ignore instruction, avoid feedback, neglect assignments, etc., if you’re willing to accept the repercussions. ↩
It should always be repeated that this is not true for everyone. It’s rarely true for the kind of student who reads footnotes. It’s true for enough students, however, that those of you reading this footnote should ask yourself a question: Which peers can you direct to this feedback, because you know they need it? You are stronger together, as the logic goes, and ought to think of how to help each other. ↩
That word, perfunctory, is a helpful word to internalize. It means to go through the motions — to do something without much effort and reflection. Another helpful word is desultory, which indicates a lack of planning or logical connection. The etymology of desultory provides an interesting image, too, that might help you realize how important consistent habits of mind are. You can’t keep jumping from horse to horse. You’ll break something. ↩
But we will avoid printed copies as much as possible. It’s a surrender to your lack of planning, when it happens by default. If you want a printed copy, you should print one; that’s why we have a printer in our classroom, which is a unique resource. Central texts that require direct annotation will be printed. This kind of post? That should be a decision you make as part of your own learning process. ↩

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In the Spaces in Between

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

Background, Always

Writing is more important than ever In a hypertextual world where the Internet is part of all academic work and part of the work of most jobs. You should learn how to navigate information online, and you should learn how to interact with that information. You should learn how to think in writing with more clarity and cogency and alacrity than the typical person in the comment section of the typical article.

That is one of the purposes of this course website — the one you are currently reading. It affords you a risk-free opportunity to interact with information and ask questions of the person posting that information. You are familiar with the question, “When am I ever going to have to use this?” When it comes to the way you interact with this website, the answer is, “Pretty much every day for the rest of your life.”

In terms of that Future You we so often discuss, you should learn to think in writing and interact with online writing. In terms of this course, you must think in writing, and you must do so in a public space. You must write in response to instruction. You must write reflectively and metacognitively, and you must know the difference between the two. You must ask questions, when you have them; and when you don’t, you must ask yourself why not. You must share information and insight with peers. You must ask for feedback. You must teach each other.

You can do all of this by returning repeatedly to the instructional posts until you’ve exhausted their ability to teach you something. You can only do this, however, if you take notes on those posts. That is not a new requirement. This was the second assignment of the entire year for all students:

Your second assignment is to learn how we can [upend the traditional feedback model entirely] — how, why, and to what extent. First, though, you should recognize that all of this is intended to teach you slowly and over time. You must interact with these instructional posts and documents like you would if assigned annotations. If you let them teach you, you won’t just learn how to do the next assignment; you’ll learn why this all matters, how to be curious about a great many things, how to write, etc.

You must, therefore, recognize that these instructional posts and documents are written explicitly to teach you. They define new vocabulary, link to related readings, and clarify ideas. They are usually structured as a lecture would be, but they are made difficult enough to require effort to parse and process. They deliberately and explicitly demonstrate style that you can emulate in your own writing. In other words, just interacting with these instructional pieces will help you get better at reading, thinking, and writing.

Did you take notes on that instructional post? More critically, did you read that instructional post?

Scripta Manent, Always

You have seen this before:

Verba volant, scripta manent.

“Spoken words fly away, written words remain.” It was the subject of an instructional post from September 28. You should revisit that post, if it has faded from memory, but it would be more useful to revisit the notes you took on it.

On October 16, you were given feedback on your progress:

You should revisit the appropriate post, if it has faded from memory, but it would be more useful to revisit the notes you took on that post, especially on the section titled “Update #3: Interstitial Learning.”

Of course, many of you will not have notes on these posts, nor on any of the other posts you’ve been given over the past three months. That is the issue in front of you today: You must take notes on what you read, beginning with instructional posts. You should use those notes to populate the comment section of posts with observations, insights, questions, and feedback. This is thinking in writing — using the written word to refine and revisit our thoughts, especially as we consider more difficult subject matter and assignments.

For the rest of this week, through Thanksgiving and into the weekend, you must attempt to use the interstitial classroom more effectively. Your primary focus should be the Q&A posts given to you last week. Take notes on any instruction. Answer all prompts in writing. Then extend your observations, insights, questions, feedback, etc., into the comment sections of the posts.

Before you get those Q&A posts, you should revisit/create your notes on Dürer’s Rhinoceros, especially the idea that “[o]ften the simplest or most straightforward GAP evidence is more important than everything else.” Starting with the triptych panel that ends on December 1, a grade abatement profile of 7 requires notes on all instructional posts. Grade abatement profiles of 8 or 9 require evidence of interstitial impact —e.g., meaningful contributions online, especially in the comment sections of instructional posts.

Before you ask: This does not mean that you must leave comments to get an 8 or 9. Not exactly. The interstitial system was set up months ago, however, to encourage you to think about feedback differently, including the habits and habitats you have for learning. You’ve had enough time.

There should always be more activity online for this course. There should always be questions, comments, discussions, etc., because you all want to do well. Whether you define “well” as a high profile or genuinely collaborative growth, this site should be part of the process.

This week, it’s required. All juniors have been given this post, and it needs to become a hub for discussion and feedback:

Q&A: “The Age of the Essay”

AP students have, in addition, this post:

ETA Q&A+: “Alligators” Optional Reading

As an individual, you are responsible for your succinct — succinct! — contributions, plus the way you respond to questions and insights shared by your peers. As a group, you are responsible for the shape of the comment sections themselves. It is, again, about herd immunity: Protecting the group by strengthening as many individuals as possible.

Simulating Rock Bottom, Always

You should take notes on this instructional post, just as you would on any others. What kind of comments can you leave, though? Well, they could be clarifying questions, or observations about the course, or details from your own experience with interstitial learning. But I’ll make it simpler:

https://betterhumans.coach.me/how-to-break-bad-habits-by-simulating-rock-bottom-8e46b5acb027

Respond to that article by connecting it to the universal skills and traits of this course, especially the lifelong need for self-control. Talk about it here, in the comments. Notice that the skills you are practicing — thinking in writing, responding to what’s written online, responding to essays, collaborating, thinking critically, being self-aware, and on and on — are on display here.

(Notice, too, that to see the responses to this article, or to respond yourself, you would need to join Medium, which means a literal premium has been placed on the ability to interact with writers in the real world. It costs money to join the conversation. That, too, is interesting.)