Category: AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in AP English Language & Composition for the 2018-2019 school year.

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Pareto Projects: 12/10/18–12/21/18

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

The Schedule

Presentation and non-presentation schedules are saved in this Google Drive folder:

You can also load the documents individually:

The Projects

Most student projects will be showcased through this Google Site:

For now, it contains projects, testimonials, etc., from previous years. As new projects come in, that site (and this one) will be redesigned to showcase what students have created.

The Background

The background and FAQ post for these projects are available below.

The Pareto Project: Complete Guide

Pareto Project: FAQ

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Bird Sings Why the Caged I Know

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Diction, Poetry, and Hip-Hop

This lesson follows our work with Francine Prose’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” which is embedded here:

ETA: Prose’s “Caged Bird”

In her essay, Prose has a few things to say about Maya Angelou. We will now look at one of Angelou’s most famous poems, pairing it with a hip-hop song it inspired:

The usual assignment for this pair of texts is a tone and diction analysis — a breakdown of word choice and how it contributes to the meaning of the overall piece. You might be asked to use this list, for instance, or to search through Google for any of the dozens of other lists available.

But we’re meant to be a makerspace. You should pay attention to word choice, but only because that’s what you do naturally when you read poetry or hear a song. Your assignment needs to be more creative, so: Use your analysis of these texts to create something meaningful. Emulate the poetry, search up other songs by Atmosphere and respond to them, have a circled discussion with a small group — just make it meaningful.

The song needs to be heard, of course, so:

On a side note (sub-tangent?), the comments on that video are, as you might expect, fascinating. Many years ago, I collected some of them for the first version of this lesson, and they ran the gamut from insightful:

It seems to me that this song is a response to Maya Angelou’s poem “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Maya Angelou is a world-renowned African American poet, and her poem is a moving portrayal of the beauty of freedom. This song expresses the animosity and frustration of people who are NOT YET free, to whom the free bird is insulting and offensive. It might not be the author’s personal view, but it captures an important viewpoint that definitely exists in our culture.

To, well, less insightful:

no joke, i think hes talking about the reptillians/winged serpents/lizards(lizzies)/draconians which are from the planet in the Alpha Draconi star system of the Orion Constellation and created by the their parent race The Carians.

That first quoted comment mistakes the title of Angelou’s poem, “Caged Bird,” for the title of her memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” I’ve made that mistake, too. It’s such a common mistake that it lets me link to a Snopes article on the Mandela Effect, which is really about confabulation and the faulty state of our memories1.

As for the second quoted comment: I appreciate the effort to clarify that the lizards can also be called “lizzies,” although I’d like to know if that is a term of endearment or just a sign of informality.

There are many other comments posted under that Atmosphere song. YouTube remains, as always, an endless documentary on the state of American consciousness. Here is a variation on that theme from 2008, which is so far in the past now that it’s a little disconcerting: Michael Agger’s attempt to classify and divide more than 58,000 comments on a clip of a baby laughing.

Use the space below to talk to me about this work.

  1. One of the problems we can tackle in a Humanities makerspace is the problem of memory. We might look at this nonfiction article, this Borges short story, Joan Didion’s essay on keeping a notebook, even another Atmosphere song — four perspectives on memory that open us up to exactly the kind of discussion and writing that asks and answers important questions. ↩

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ETA: Prose’s “Caged Bird”

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Overview of the Concept

In 1946, George Orwell noted that

an effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.

Later in the same essay, he summarizes this idea: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” This is true. We must focus on that, but we can also focus on a feedback loop that builds strength in thinking through strength in writing. We can listen to Orwell but invoke Neil Postman:

Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

We also pay attention to Paul Graham and his theory that essay-writing in school focuses on literary analysis through “a series of historical accidents,” with the end result that most school essays are “now three steps removed from real work.” Even non-literary assignments lose authenticity in the pursuit of academic emulation.

The path forward has you read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate those strategies in your work, not just to produce the sort of analysis that a cursory search of Google would reveal. It’s the difference between applied and theoretical science, and the difference between blowing up the kitchen and learning how to tell a good joke:

View at Medium.com

So we arrive at emulation-through-analysis (ETA) work, which is designed to teach you how to answer analytical questions while you answer them. You should define new terms, look up new concepts, and enlist the feedback mechanisms of the space to help you. Getting the right answer is a goal; understanding how to use the strategy or technique is the goal. And the substructure is, as always, made of the universal skills of grade abatement, especially these:

Keep those universal skills and traits handy. You must know how to create in order to create. A makerspace requires granular expertise before experimentation and iteration will yield results. Otherwise, it’s just a sandbox.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” by Francine Prose

Start with the essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” by Francine Prose, which is available to BHS students here:

It will also be photocopied and posted to Google Classroom as part of any formalized in-class and interstitial work. The following questions, all drawn from that textbook chapter, allow us to do the kind of analysis necessary to implement the most effective writing strategies.

Before you answer these questions, know two things:

First, In addition to the usual feedback, I will give you a set of instructional responses to these questions. They are teaching responses, written as much to explain the concept, question, etc., as to give you the “correct” answer. This key will let you test your collegiality and critical thinking, but it will most directly test these skills and traits:

Second, you must answer these prompts by combing a sense of creativity (e.g., discussing your love/hate for literature, imagining what schools might do to encourage reading) with a granular understanding of Prose’s expert effectiveness (e.g., learning how to appeal to ethos as she does). We’ll always move from questions on rhetoric and style into emulative responses, personal essays, even rhetorical analysis essays — all writing that requires both to be effective and enjoyable.

Ask questions, make observations, and engage the assignment in the comment section below.

Questions on Rhetoric and Style

  1. Discuss three appeals to ethos in this essay. What different roles, or personae, does Prose use to establish her ethos?
  2. Prose’s opening paragraph includes such words as appalled, dismal, and dreariness – all with negative connotations. Why does she start out with such strong language? Does she risk putting off readers who do not share her views? Why or why not? What other examples of strongly emotional language do you find in the essay?
  3. Prose makes several key assumptions about the role and impact of reading literary works in high school. What are they?
  4. What appeals does she make to logos?
  5. Prose cites many different novels and plays. Does she assume her audience is familiar with some of them? All of them? Explain why it matters whether the audience knows the works.
  6. According to Prose, “To hold up [I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings] as a paradigm of memoir, of thought – of literature – is akin to inviting doctors convicted of malpractice to instruct our medical students” (para. 13). Do you agree with this analogy? Explain your answer. What other examples of figurative language can you find in this essay?
  7. Toward the end of the essay (paras. 35, 39, and 43), Prose uses a series of rhetorical questions. What is her purpose in piling one rhetorical question on top of the other?
  8. Would Prose have strengthened her argument by including interviews with a few high school students or teachers? Why or why not?
  9. According to Prose, why are American high school students learning to loathe literature? Try to find at least four or five reasons.
  10. Does she propose a solution or recommendations to change this situation? If she does not offer a solution, is her argument weakened? Explain your answer.
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Pre-GAP Triage: November 5, 2018

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Space Explainers

Note for the week of November 5: The scoring panels, as always, refer to the calendar for the year.

For Q1A of 2018, students were given a set of exhaustive notes on their progress. For Q1B, they were again given notes on collective and individual progress in English 10, English 11, or AP English.

Those same students will read this post on November 5. Q1C ends on Friday, November 9. Current progress and provisional GAP scores, correct as of November 5, are the end of this instructional post.

This is triage, and it is designed not just to help students, but to give them clarity and agency.

Why a Spreadsheet

I want to explain why I am taking such pains to create a spreadsheet instead of using Infinite Campus. As always, this is in addition to the many kinds of feedback we use regularly.

First, a spreadsheet requires each student to do a little more work to see what is missing, what is insufficient, etc., which shakes off the fog of habit. Infinite Campus is part of a routine. Feedback outside of that routine is likely to be processed more mindfully.

Second, this shows each student the entire class. The notes are anonymous, so it’s about the collective learning environment. Every student has a role to play in what kind of classroom we have.

Third, this kind of spreadsheet is somewhere in between scores on individual assignments and narratives. I believe Alfie Kohn is right that “posting grades online is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.” It is also inevitable. We are looking for the line between that toxic salience and a sustainable feedback model.

When I find time, I will rewrite this old clarification of grade abatement, because most of it is prescient about what ends up mattering most1. Look at this section:

The crux of grade abatement is the idea that we can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments. There are a number of points to address, however, before we delve into how that works:

  1. Grades aren’t necessarily toxic. The presence of grades does not preclude effective teaching and learning. In fact, the case can be made that grades are useful, that they motivate students, that they provide valuable data, and so on. It also doesn’t do us any good to demonize grades. All we need to do is acknowledge that…

  2. Grades do warp learning. Grades change the learning environment. Kohn covers a lot of the research worth studying — research into student engagement, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and so on — but anyone with experience in a classroom knows what grades do. As soon as numbers are introduced, the student’s relationship to the material changes. That’s why the quotation at the start of Kohn’s essay rings so true: When the student, Claire, says, “I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing… Suddenly all the joy was taken away,” we hear our own students. And that’s because…

  3. While grades aren’t necessarily toxic, they are vectors for toxicity. Think of them as clouds of mosquitoes in a malaria-ravaged country. Grades can — and often do — lead to gamesmanship, cheating, hyper-competitiveness, disengagement, and almost every other enemy of authentic learning. Students scrap and fight over a hundredth of a point. They define their self-worth in numbers. They’re afraid to take risks. Grades spread this negativity from assignment to assignment and quarter to quarter. Unfortunately…

  4. Whatever we believe, grades are unavoidable. It isn’t possible to abolish grades in a public high school. You might as well try exterminating every mosquito in the world. What we can change is the extent to which grades affect learning in our classrooms. We can’t change the entire system, but we can remove grades from most steps in the learning process, chip away at a student’s extrinsic motivations, and build a self-powered kind of learning.

Grades are vectors for toxicity. They spread the habits that hurt authentic learning. That’s the key distinction I keep forgetting: A number itself does nothing until it’s tied to a GPA, the threat of failing, the shadow of college acceptance, and so on.

These spreadsheet numbers are simple. They convey only the most basic kind of feedback about work — again, because more meaningful feedback is given in other ways. But some students truly need to be shown that they aren’t handing in work. Telling them isn’t enough. Showing them in person isn’t enough. Even a GAP score isn’t enough. They need to see a zero next to an assignment.

What This Means

We have to recognize that institutionalized students are motivated by certain symbols. These spreadsheets weaponize that through a simple set of annotations and some conditional formatting added to Google Sheets2.

Any student work that has the potential to receive feedback gets a 0, 1, or 2. Other work (e.g., bringing in donations for a charity drive, submitting a form) gets checked in for completion only. That’s a stripped-down version of this:

Take that, which is clear enough, and strip it down further, and it’s just 0, 1, or 2. The conditional formatting added to the Google Sheet automatically converts those three choices to a color. A student doing an adequate or better job sees green, as in, “Keep going.” A student not doing work sees a zero in red — probably the two most powerful symbols of error or failure in school.

The zero is not factored into an average in any mathematical way. It indicates only that an assignment wasn’t completed. Some students need the zero in a red box to begin to process and adjust to the reality that they didn’t do the work.

The vexing part of this is that no student should be that unaware when an assignment doesn’t get handed in. The deadline comes and goes. My co-teachers and I give feedback to other, adjacent students. The work is discussed. We use a dozen different techniques to differentiate and reiterate and redirect. Yet we know it is necessary to indicate, again, that the work is missing or insufficient.

What this kind of spreadsheet really does, therefore, is this: It pushes students to take couple of extra steps to engage with numbers that aren’t vectors for traditional toxicity, and it uses red, yellow, and green colors to trigger something basic.

Note: Functionally Missing

Some students hand in work that is so insufficient that it is functionally missing. It’s barely there. There’s no there there. The work isn’t missing, but that’s another reason to avoid traditional grades: That area of student quasi-compliance has to be investigated with more nuance. Yes, there was an effort to hand something in, but it doesn’t matter when that something is a non-starter for feedback.

As an example, I’ll use an assignment given to juniors. The prompt asked for a response to a lengthy article. Students were given the article ahead of time, and then they were given a day to write — 40 minutes or so in class, plus the rest of the day and night to finish, as necessary.

The instructions called this response an essay. It didn’t have to be five paragraphs or feature a thesis, but it had to be developed. It was the foundation of in-class work and further reading.

Here’s a “finished” response with significant composition errors (“perposley,” run-on sentence, etc.) and no development:

Humans are addicted to procrastination you can stop hesitating to work by making work the only thing to do like perpoisley be bored like the author of the hunchback of notre dame he locked away all of his clothes and wore a sackcloth so he can stay home and finish his books. Moral of the story it is more important to start work than to get it done.

That’s not an essay, no matter what definition of the word we want to use. In the spreadsheets below (which include this assignment), that response is a 1. This is coded as a 0:

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout.
This quote means that Procrastination never fails to beat someone

It’s functionally missing. There is no feedback to give.

Note: In-Class Focus

In-class focus is the first and most important step to successful learning. Spreadsheets like the one below can be used to indicate how focused students have been. In the past, some have argued that they were only off-task for a moment, or that it only looked like they were off-task, or that they finished the work, or some other excuse. But this misses the point.

I am not looking to catch students off-task. Neither are any co-teachers in the makerspace with me. We are looking to help students who are focused. We are looking to help them with their work. We are giving them feedback and redirection. We are building posts and projects and lessons. That takes our focus and attention. We aren’t watching the room for mistakes.

If a student is off-task often enough or significantly enough during a GAP panel for it to affect a profile, it’s a serious lapse. These are students who are doing homework for other classes without permission, who are on social media repeatedly, who are gossiping and chatting. It’s well past the point of semantics, debate, and appeal.

It’s also critical for students not to elide how often they’re told to get back on task. This isn’t a gotcha environment. Any teacher in this space is constantly and kindly pointing out the serious repercussions of not doing work. We’re here to help you to focus, hence entire units built as triage for exactly that purpose.

Therefore, a student with a 0 or a 1 for in-class focus on a spreadsheet has been told, again and again, that they are off task, individually and generally, with opportunities to improve. They have continued not to meet the most basic expectations of the space, despite this feedback. The 0 or 1 is designed to deliver a sort of limbic shock: Yes, you need to work harder.

Provisional GAP Scores and Assignment Data: November 5, 2018

Sorted by student number:

  1. The scoring scales are wrong, and the skill/trait criteria are less precise than they are now. It’s the philosophical stuff that remains useful. That’s the problem with a one-man show, at least as far as writing the guides goes: I’m running to stand still. ↩

  2. In this post from a previous year, the feedback is much lengthier, but it teaches a tremendous amount by being so lengthy. Over time, these old posts become connective threads: links that can be used for the truly motivated and invested students to deepen their learning. The practical work, like the implementation of a spreadsheet, can be more straightforward, as a result. ↩

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AP English GAP 1B: Added Value

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Our class period on Tuesday, October 16, asked you to choose between

  1. responding to the morning’s assembly;
  2. reading (again) a post about the end of the writing process;
  3. applying that post to your essay on education;
  4. helping a peer decode and respond to a college application prompt; or
  5. workshopping any or all of that with me.

You even got the seemingly-extemporaneous-but-actually-planned idea of looking into collective nouns and their origins. All that, plus a mention of PaperRater, a site that will give us another way to generate feedback — certainly relevant to our course, since you were also reminded on Tuesday to read (again) the instructional post on how feedback works in our space.

That makes at least eight possible focuses for a 40-minute period. Some options were obviously and explicitly tied into your grade abatement profiles, which take shape tomorrow, but every option would have contributed to your learning to some extent. You know this. You know that every choice counts and that your use of class time is essential to your success — and your grade, if it helps you to think in those terms.

Most of you responded to this freedom well, and I think you are starting to see what is possible in a makerspace. Some of you, on the other hand, made questionable choices. And in a space like ours, at your level, we don’t want to leave anyone behind. Your success is a shared success.

We are going to shift gears slightly next week and slow down this particular vehicle1 in order to focus on the concept of akrasia next week. This will keep us in our study of education. Before that brief unit, you need to reflect on Tuesday’s choices and every other choice you’ve made this month.

For some of you, this will validate your approach. It will illuminate the explicit link between insightful reflection and metacognition and a GAP score of 8 or 9 — which becomes that coveted 95 or 100, if it helps you to think in those terms.

For others, this will raise a lower score by honing your amenability and self-awareness. You will write about you approach this course and what you might do differently to find more success — and to improve your grade, if it helps you, again, to think in those terms.

Your Task

Look up the word provisional. Then look online at the provisional GAP scores posted for Q1B. They will be posted to Infinite Campus after this instructional post goes live.

The GAP report assignment for Q1B is also on Google Classroom. Head there next, load the form, and complete it. You have permission to do this a day early.

Finally, write about your provisional profile, unpacking the language into an honest and insightful essay. Delve into your choices over the last few weeks. Think about your use of this space. Contextualize your actions and reactions.

Do this, because you should always do this, and because doing this will raise that provisional score. What you are seeing, in those scores, is the profile that fits all current evidence. Today and tomorrow, you are adding to that evidence. Your efforts will change the profile you fit. And that gets to one of the most important elements of this kind of assessment: When you work hard, you are always moving forward, and your movement is about growth, aggregate success, and added value. You build toward a profile.

You can ask questions about this opportunity in the comment section below. You will also benefit from reading this:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros

  1. Which is either a Rube Goldberg machine or a siege engine or a strange combination of both. ↩

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Essay Prompt: On Education

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Your summer reading included the opening chapters of The Language of Composition, a textbook written specifically for our AP course. Chapter 5 tackles the issue of education, starting with this essential question: “To what extent do our schools serve the goals of a true education?”

In September, you were asked to respond briefly that question. Now, you are asked to develop that answer into an essay.

So the assignment, as an imperative, is: Write an essay that answers the essential question, “To what extent do our schools serve the goals of a true education?”

How you define “essay” is, for the moment, up to you. We will adjust our understanding of the term through exam-based practice essays and a close reading of “The Age of the Essay,” by Paul Graham, which you are welcome to read ahead of time:

An essay, in this case, is a means of framing our exploration of the essential question. It puts your thoughts into writing, invites dialectical discussion, reveals your important biases, and so on. You should submit a copy of your essay through Google Classroom, where you’ll find a copy of this prompt alongside a copy of Chapter 5.

Ask questions about this process in the comment section below. Treat these comments as a chance to engage me in direct instruction, clarification, redirection, etc., while you look for chances to help your peers, too. Questions are usually better than mere observations, although they both have value.

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Q1A Data: General Feedback

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

The Basics: Q1A

Below are simplified spreadsheets cobbled together for your benefit. You need your student number to find your row. In each column, there is a zero (0), one (1), or two (2). This is feedback about the most basic requirements of the assignment or, in the case of in-class focus, the class itself. 2 indicates anything sufficient, consistent, complete, etc., and above. Anything other than a 2 is cause for concern.

Again, this is basic, did-you-do-your-work feedback. Authentic and meaningful feedback is explained in a post you’ve already been assigned. There are plenty of other explanations of how feedback functions in a makerspace. The data in these spreadsheets serves a different purpose. Two notes before we get to that:

  1. First, these notations ignore late work entirely. If you got any of this done before Monday morning around 8 AM, it went into this chart. Anything after 8 AM on October 1 is not indicated here.
  2. Second, these notations don’t include the first revision assignment, nor do they reflect my observations of your use of feedback.

Here are the spreadsheets:

What Should You Do Next?

It’s pretty straightforward: Help yourself, and then help your peers.

To help yourself, find an hour over the next week to enter this conversation online:

Ongoing Discussion: Dunning-Kruger Effects and Imposter Syndromes

To help your peers, find an hour over the next week to enter this conversation:

Ongoing Discussion: Herd Immunity

If you’re interested in doing a little more to help your peers, you should skim this document:

That is a copy of every self-assessment response for the first GAP panel. I’ve removed any identifying information beyond the class period. Since the language is universal, there is a lot of insight to be gained, regardless of age, level, course, etc., provided you read with empathy.

Otherwise, remember what we’ve already reviewed in class as our goals for the week. Here are pictures of the whiteboards in our classroom:

My goal is to give every student the vocabulary to talk about themselves, to advocate for themselves, to analyze themselves, etc., regardless of context. This course will give you that vocabulary, slowly but surely, if you invest in it. It’s the language of all learning. It’s not esoteric jargon. Remember that it connects explicitly to the district’s Strategic Coherence Plan:

That plan is based on everything we know about what colleges and careers demand. These are the skill and traits you need to be successful. Every time you receive feedback, you need to look for a way to hone those skills and traits.

But this is probably the most important takeaway: There’s nothing unusual about what we do in here. We read books, write essays, discuss essential questions, and reflect on our progress. Whether you’re focused on helping yourself or helping others1, that progress starts with an honest reckoning with what you’ve done.

Ask questions about the spreadsheets below.

  1. There shouldn’t be any stigma attached to helping yourself, because that’s how you find the knowledge and understanding to help others. It starts with you. If it becomes selfish or competitive, we can always deal more directly with that. ↩

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Organization: Getting Things Done

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

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

 

Getting Things Done, Part 1

The school year, regardless of course or level, comes down to two elements:

The GAP Process

The Pareto Project: Complete Guide

The GAP process governs our units of study, whether you are an AP student practicing for the exam in May or a tenth grader reading a novel in November. Grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits govern our learning. You receive three profile scores per quarter.

Your personal or community-based projects will be the focus of most Fridays. You’ll be in charge of how you spend that time. Each course will have a calendar that indicates when these projects will be presented and shared, too.

These two elements require you to be organized, and organization is one of the universal skills and traits you need. Load the grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits, and notice that the foundation of your learning is organization. The rest of the components concatenate1, but they can’t be linked together without organization:

This screenshot is from one of the older iterations of grade abatement, and I’m using it to highlight the header:

Above all else:
Explore, create, learn

“Explore, create, learn.” That really is the focus of our work, and when you’re immersed in self-directed writing or putting time into your Pareto Project, it’ll be exciting work. But it’s the much-less-exciting work of organization that gets us into that maker mentality.

You are reading this post because you need to organize the academic stuff you have on you. That word, stuff, comes from a root meaning “to equip,” and that’s the idea: You equip yourself every day in order to deal with school and the work it requires. You gear up.

So you need a frank assessment of how you do that. You need to assess your organization. Divide that assessment into these four categories, and then use our in-class discussions and workshops to improve each one.

① Physical Organization

Start by opening up your backpack or bag, any and all notebooks you keep for your classes, your vintage Trapper Keeper, etc., and then pouring that stuff out onto a table. (That can be a metaphorical act, of course.) Then assess the extent to which you have a system in place. Can you find materials you need? How ordered is your physical stuff? What does it all look like?

② Digital Organization

You probably have a number of tabs open right now, as you read this instructional post. Start there: How do you keep track of what you’re reading and studying online? Do you have a system for organizing those tabs? Then consider specifically your use of Google, especially Google Drive, Google Classroom, and Gmail. Do you have a system of folders in Drive to keep your work clear and accessible? Do you use a system to sort through email? How do you keep track of assignments, announcements, and instructional posts?

③ Schedule Organization

Your schedule overlaps with the first two, but it has been helpful in the past to separate it. Consider specifically your use of a calendar or planner. Do you use the calendar provided for this course? If so, to what extent? If not, how do you organize your days and weeks? How do you keep up with your responsibilities?

④ Mental Organization

This category overlaps with the rest, too, but it helps to isolate it. It is, in essence, about the grade abatement profiles, skills, and traits that direct all of your learning:

The GAP Process

To what extent do you understand the universal skills and traits at the heart of this process? How do you organize your work in here around those skills and traits? Do you use the profiles to map out your work during each GAP triptych panel? What does that learning map look like?

⑤ All Together

Your goal is to find the room for improvement in each one of these organizational categories. To do that, you need accurate self-assessment and observation, discussion with your peers and teachers, and concrete plans for improvement.

If this post is assigned formally, you will be given further directions. You don’t need them, though. You need to test your improvements. You’ll know if they work by putting them into practice.

Getting Things Done, Part 2

As a possibly important sidebar, let’s talk about your personalities. Your self-awareness and sense of self-efficacy are tied to that amorphous idea of “personality,” and you can gain some important insights through simple, online tests.

Start with an introduction to the concept we’ll be using, and then jump right into the test itself:

This isn’t required, of course, but you’re likely to be interested enough in the concept to take the test. It will give you a four-letter code and a detailed explanation of what those letters mean. Once you have the code, either before or while you are reading the explanations, make sure you know what the Forer effect is:

No online test dictates who you are. Understanding the Forer effect is one way to ward off taking these things too seriously. These sorts of tests can help, though, and here is why: When we’re talking about how you organize yourself in here, we’re really talking about you as a whole person. A personality test, especially one as steeped in good research as this one, might be useful, if you are cautious and remember how powerful the Forer effect is.

The idea is not that a personality test is inaccurate or useless. It’s that you must be metacognitively vigilant about anything a website tells you, especially when your goal is self-improvement. I have long thought of myself as an INTJ, for instance, but I see more and more of myself in the description of an INTP these days. I don’t need to take the test itself again; I can read through the differences and apply that knowledge to myself. Since I believe those differences are crucial to my development as a teacher, I have a starting point for meaningful metacognitive discussion and writing.

It’s the same for you. You want a sense of yourself as a whole person:

This kind of self-assessment is organizational because it can generate forward momentum. It can improve the efficacy of other elements of your approach to learning. If you take this online test — or any others; here’s a much lengthier one called the IPIP-NEO that some students have said taught them about themselves — be sure you read all the context and explanation the site provides, keep the warning of the Forer effect in mind, and then do some reflective and metacognitive writing and discussion.

From the profile of an INTP, or “Logician”

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

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Convergent and Divergent Exercises

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Screenshot from the full RSA Animate poster. Click for the whole thing.

In Ken Robinson’s TED Talk on education, he gives this definition of divergent thinking1:

Divergent thinking isn’t the same thing as creativity. I define creativity as the process of having original ideas that have value. Divergent thinking isn’t a synonym; it’s an essential capacity for creativity. It’s the ability to see lots of possible answers to a question, lots of possible ways of interpreting a question, to think laterally, to think not just in linear or convergent ways, to see multiple answers, not one…

There are tests for this. One cod example would be, “How many uses can you think of for a paper clip?” Most people might be able to come up with ten or fifteen. People who are good at this might come up with two hundred. And they do that by saying, “Well, could the paper clip be two hundred feet tall and made out of foam rubber?”

Our makerspace treats reading and writing as acts that require divergent thinking. Literature is, as this video puts it, “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” something we “prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing.” Writing, as probably best expressed by Paul Graham, is our tool for discovering truth and investigating what’s interesting about ourselves and the world around us. Our reading and writing makes up the vast majority of the divergent work we do.

The other kind of thinking that matters (in our classroom and in life) is convergent thinking, which is about finding the right answer to a problem that has only one or two right answers. You’ll find that some of the problems we attempt to solve, whether they come up in class or elsewhere, have a limited set of solutions. There might be a fairly strict set of boundaries, and it’s within those boundaries that you must think creatively and divergently. It’s also within the necessary step of metacognition that you must think creatively and divergently.

The Exercises: Ordeals and Ditloids

This is a two-day exercise in divergent and convergent thinking. It is also a two-day exercise in the following:

  1. Reading flipped instruction in preparation for in-class work
  2. Collaborating effectively during the class period
  3. Analyzing an activity metacognitively
  4. Using the resources of the Internet effectively

The last one is interesting. You could use Google (or Bing, bless its heart) to find the solutions to each of these exercises. You could find a dozen more examples of this kind of exercise, and for each of those, you could find the answers.

That’s entirely by design. At some point, you will always need to rely on someone to give you feedback — to help you when you’re stuck, to verify a correct answer, etc. — and the Internet is usually the proxy for that someone. That device you have gives you access to nearly limitless information, including the responses of any other teacher or student who has done this work.

That makes the divergent question metacognitive: When and why do you look for help? How much time do you give yourself to be frustrated? What are the best solutions to managing these resources, including your peers? How do you process this kind of exercise?

The assignment that will be posted to Google Classroom is straightforward: Submit a copy of some of that metacognitive writing. This is evidence of the most important GAP criteria, of course, but it also helps build the habit of always unpacking your experiences. You should always take a bit of time to reflect on what you’ve learned and to be metacognitive about your choices. As Neil Postman wrote, “[T]he most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns.”

You can do these exercises in any order. That, too, is part of the divergent decision-making process.

The first exercise: “Ordeal by Cheque”

The first exercise is about deductive reasoning. You must piece together a narrative from nothing but a series of scanned checks:

Crue’s story was first published in 1932 in Vanity Fair. It’s interesting that this edition comes from a teaching textbook, since that underscores how many answers you’re going to find online when you get to that step.

You’ll have a hard copy of these pages, and that’s actually where the deductive reasoning will begin. You will be strongly encouraged not to head online until you’ve worked collaboratively, with deductive tools like whiteboards and markers, on a solution. What can you accomplish with just your collaborative reasoning ability?

You won’t be satisfied with just telling the story to each other as you work. You’ll need to write it down. When you search online for other theories, you’ll find fully developed narratives. You’ll want your own for comparison.

The second exercise: 24 Hours in a Day

The second exercise is a ditloid, which is a type of word puzzle that relies on deductive reasoning. From a set of abbreviations, you must determine what common phrase or idiom fits. These exercises are commonly associated with Mensa, the high-IQ society, which I mention only to tell you that IQ scores are overrated in education. You can find many examples of ditloids on a wide variety of subjects. Here is one:

Again, the divergent questions are metacognitive in nature: Will you wait to look up the answers? Will you tackle these alone, or in groups? What are you learning about how you solve problems like these? At what point does your pattern recognition stall or speed up?

 

Use the comment section here to ask questions about the metacognitive component of this work, to share insights into what you and your peers have accomplished, or to post links to the answers you’ve found online. You can even share other ditloids or atypical narratives that were inspired by Crue’s “Ordeal,” if you find them.

Remember, too, that this is part of most student’s introduction to our makerspace, which means you might find yourself interacting well outside of your normal peer group — and that’s a very good thing.

  1. Note: The language has been edited a bit for readability. ↩

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On Going “Paperless”

  By All Classes (2018-2019), AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

https://media.giphy.com/media/3o7buaXbhWCIvbY6cg/giphy.gif

Papercraft Sisyphus by Karakuri Workshop. Available for purchase here.

Makerspaces, Paper, and the Reading Process

The following quotation informs a lot of what we do, especially through the sentence I’ve bolded:

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

~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

We’re as interested in metacognition as critical thinking. We’re as interested in why we do what we do as our actual actions. Explanatory posts like this are part of that philosophy. It’s also why we preface everything we read — every novel, essay, poem, etc. — with these:

The first link is to a post that contains the rest of the material. The Lifehacker article and video invite us to discuss how literature helps us; the excerpt from John Holt’s book invites us to discuss how to teach reading; the textbook chapter offers some practical advice for reading; and the instructional post ties it together with a look at types of reading, types of readers, and how it all connects to 21st-century skills.

Fittingly, these prefatory texts also let us talk about why we are a “paperless” classroom. The operative word, paperless, is in quotation marks because it isn’t a strict rule: The intention is to lessen the amount of paper we use and to make much more deliberate use of that resource, not to eliminate paper entirely.

For instance, we need printed copies of Holt’s essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” because we’ll use it to practice close reading. That is once again about how we learn — the kinesthetic aspect of annotating and interacting — as much as the subject matter. With only a few exceptions, this is also true of all of our central essays, short stories, novels, etc., because of the need to practice close reading.

The video on the importance of literature can’t be printed, of course. The Lifehacker post introducing it could be printed, but there isn’t much benefit to that; watching the video is a screen-dependent activity, and even annotation would start with what we see online.

The idea of going paperless helps us most with instructional posts, like the organizational one for the reading process and, more critically, the post on adopting a new approach to reading. Printing either of those would require you to go back online to click links and fill in the required contextual information while reading. That isn’t to say that there’s no point in printing. I almost always need a printed copy of what I read to mark up. That’s the habit I’ve developed. Anyone who benefits from a physical copy should print whatever they want to print. As a rule for the general student, however, printing an instructional post is unnecessary. These are interstitial and interactive posts.

It would be like printing the New York Times article included in “Well, Why Read?” That article has a half-dozen necessary hyperlinks. You’ll get the central idea of the article, of course, and be able to respond to it just fine; but you will be missing critical information, and you will have created a series of extra steps. You’ll have to go back online to click on those links. That can be done, but it needs to be done deliberately, not as our default.

As another example, consider the course syllabi. As of 2018, instead of a paper document, each syllabus is an interstitial and interactive post that invites students to revisit its ideas throughout the first few weeks and even months of the course. Printing those syllabi would require us either to strip out a lot of important information, print dozens of extra pages from those hyperlinks, or require students to go online, anyway, to click on related links and videos and so on.

The most important reason to go paperless is to allow us to update documents quickly and easily. Changes to a calendar, for instance, can create confusion if there is a printed version out there already, which is what happened in the first few weeks of 2018. I printed the calendars for all students to give them something to put in their notebooks. Less than 24 hours later, an opportunity arose that required us to begin our first novel in 10th grade two weeks early. My co-teacher and I shifted a couple of units around, but that printed calendar was made immediately irrelevant.

A paperless approach encourages students to keep their own calendars. It encourages planners and digital to-do lists and all sorts of other techniques for personalized organization. That independence is a necessary step, too.

Another example of the need to keep online content flexible takes us back to that post on the reading process:

The Reading Process

That is meant to be used repeatedly in the future, but its first posted iteration was on September 18. I made photocopies then to help students transition to paperless instruction. By September 20, I saw the need to add an entire section to the post — the third section, “What to Read,” which details the value of Medium’s curated reading lists and the power of the network of sites in Gizmodo Media Group. That was a quick edit online; it would take a few days to reprint updated copies.

Going paperless has been a journey of sorts for me, and I would invite anyone interested in that to read here:

View at Medium.com

This is the way of the world, and it isn’t a step backward. There’s no need for a dire jeremiad. Online and offline reading create a balance, if we approach both metacognitively and purposefully. Nothing will ever replace the feeling and experience of flipping through a novel, and there isn’t anything quite like printing out an essay and interacting with it; the world now talks to itself, however, in interstitial and online ways. Students have to learn to engage with that world.

And, of course, it’s a process. I’ve been working toward a “paperless” classroom for years now, and I still have entire bookcases filled with handouts. I find a half-dozen copies left behind every day by students. I recycle reams of the stuff every quarter. The hope is that the need for a bit of conservation continues to dovetail with the 21st-century skills we know matter most. If that remains true, going paperless – or “paperless,“ with liberal use of air quotes – is a necessity.