NOTE TO CURRENT STUDENTS (9/14/18): We won’t be starting these projects until October 1, but I need the post online for organizational purposes. Set it aside until it’s necessary.
Cover art to DJ Signify’s Sleep No More. Listen to “Kiddie Litter,” featuring Sage Francis, here. That song underscores, in a dark and surreal and imagistic way, the idea of being anaesthetized. Compare it to “Take Me Home,” by Brother Ali, which is a song about creating things and feeling pretty good about doing that.
Something Completely Different
This project is built on the “Genius Hour” framework, which you can read about here. It continues to evolve, showcasing the strengths of the classroom makerspace: the willingness to iterate, refine, and evolve an idea; the sense to reboot that idea when necessary; the openness to feedback of all kinds. Search this site for “Pareto Project,” and you can see the long arc of it.
The best place to start, however, is with testimonials and student work:
That showcases what is possible through these projects. And for each student, it will be projects, plural — one personal, one community-based, with the flexibility to expand and contract those projects as necessary.
Use the PDF if you have any formatting issues with the Google Docs version. When you open the document, you should notice the many hyperlinks, which indicate that this is designed to be read online, interstitially, with an opportunity to ask questions and research answers at your own pace. You can (and probably should) print individual pages, however, to help you workshop some of the steps.
This project is probably the best example of what a Humanities makerspace produces, because it frames the project with metacognitive writing and collaborative experimentation. It’s a prime example of how to unlock the real course. Take advantage of it.
Note: With some time and a lot of coffee, I hope to get a fully converted version of the guide online as an interactive post. This will be updated when and if that happens.
An interesting thing about the word syllabus is that it comes from a misreading of Latin. That doesn’t change its meaning now, but it does let us think more critically about what a syllabus actually does, not just what we expect it to do.
This syllabus is an overview of our course. It includes the grading policy, homework policy, etc., but it is also an example itself of how instruction works — flipped so that you can access it at your own pace, with plenty of opportunities to ask questions and receive feedback.
Note: You can download a copy of this post for printing or digital annotation by using the PDF and printer options at the bottom of the page. Look for these on all instructional materials:
This Advanced Placement course focuses on developing maturity and complexity in reading, thinking, and writing, with special emphasis on collaborative learning, reflection, and metacognition. Students read, analyze, and emulate primarily nonfiction prose; the writing and reading processes are taught, however, through all modes of discourse. Scaffolded onto this is continual, portfolio-driven self-analysis. Each student will be required to take the AP examination in May. In June, the students will write the NYS Regents Examination, which they must pass in order to graduate.
You don’t need to read the entire document, but some of the specifics might help to clear up confusion. That excerpt, from page 11 of the PDF, matches up with what you’d do in any English course. But Language and Composition is meant to be paired with Literature and Composition. On page 12:
We will still study literature, starting with your summer reading memoirs, but this is the College Board course in rhetoric, argument, and civic discourse. See the section on “Required Reading” for more.
You should also peruse the following two pages to see how the district’s Strategic Coherence Plan corresponds exactly to our course:
You can expect more rigorous metacognitive work as a precursor to what you’ll need next year, whether you will be a senior or in your first year of college1. We will continue to hone empathy as the most crucial skill for collaboration and the skill most sought by colleges and careers.
I am your best resource through all of this. To help, I’ve developed a nontraditional space — one in which I will act as a “guide on the side,” not a “sage on the stage.” Here is a discussion of how all stakeholders can take advantage of that resource:
To see an example of what this space produces, and to read testimonials from former students and other stakeholders, visit the following Google Site:
The Makerspace
This classroom is a makerspace. For a quick look at what that means, watch this clip:
That scene from Apollo 13 shows the traditional makerspace experience: A group of like-minded and similarly trained folks confront a real-world problem, gather all the tools and resources they need, and then collaborate on a solution.
This reenactment of a historical scene has NASA engineers pour out a box of mechanical components. Using their expertise, they reimagine how the components can be used. As in most makerspaces, the components are physical — gears, electronics, plastic, and so on. The components can even be as small as DNA:
Trying to hack DNA to create cow-less milk requires the same general kind of makerspace thinking that it takes to save a bunch of stranded astronauts. Both examples fit the usual acronym attached to a makerspace: STEAM, or Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math.
English doesn’t often get a seat at the table, because its components are more abstract. Literature and writing don’t always evoke the same modular, experimental sensibility, and even an AP course in rhetoric and argument has “English” attached to it. We can change that, however, by answering two questions:
What important, real-world problems are we solving in an English classroom?
What components and tools do we need to solve those problems?
Well, the problems you face as a student are the problems all of us face, which are the problems that the Humanities exist to solve: What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to coexist in a society? What are my beliefs? How do I want to live my life?
There is also a framing study of education and learning, which is part of the metacognitive framework of English: What does it mean to be educated? What is the purpose of school? How does each of us learn best, and what are the most important skills and traits for our futures?
Like any makerspace, we will experiment to try to solve those problems and answer these questions. We’ll think outside the box. Sometimes we’ll dismantle the box and build a better one. Our tools and components are a set of universal skills and traits, the other human beings working beside us, and the literature and nonfiction that best teaches us how to be human.
Grading Policy
This course uses grade abatement, which is a profile-based system using a set of universal skills and traits. Here is a printable handout:
Copies of this and other assessment tools are available throughout the classroom. That includes this walkthrough of how each evidence-gathering and analytical process works:
Every three weeks, you will collaborate with your teachers to determine which profile fits the work you’ve done during those three weeks. This is a consistent, fair, and objective process. It rewards growth and collaboration much more than performative skill.
Here is a calendar that indicates (among other things) the exact date of each profile:
Make a copy of the calendar for your own use.
We are looking to self-report on Fridays, if possible, to avoid giving you work over the weekend — and to give me the weekend to do an initial run-through of your self-assessments. Note that these are 15-day evidentiary panels, three per quarter, which is enough to give us a triptych metaphor. Because of scheduled vacation days, the first semester fluctuates more; by Q3, each panel has exactly 15 scheduled class meetings2
These twelve profile scores have also been set up in advance in Infinite Campus.
Pareto Projects
That provisional calendar also shows you the shape of our year together, including the opportunity to do a one-of-a-kind project:
Right now, the plan is to start the first projects in October. We will go over the process then. For now, you are free to read about our version of a Genius Hour project. Your first one will be personal in nature, like last year’s projects; the second, which will start in February, will be community-based.
Homework and Classwork Policy
The homework policy is built into the grading policy, specifically into the thresholds that separate upper- and lower-tier profiles from each other. Read them carefully. The penalty for failing to complete homework is significant.
Google Classroom is the central hub for required assignments. It tracks completion, including time and date stamps for submitted and edited work. We will also familiarize you with Turnitin.com, Google Forms, and other mechanisms for sharing and evaluating work.
Classwork and homework are part of what’s called interstitial learning, which is best understood through practice. It allows you to work when you work best, with one exception: You must use class time effectively. This is outlined here:
This is the usual give-and-take of a classroom: The two most basic requirements of this course, in-class focus and feedback, are also the two keys that unlock the best performance and strongest growth — as well as the highest scores. What observable habits and behavioral patterns do you create over time?
When you are uncertain about what to do in class or at home, ask for help. You can also read this annotated step-by-step guide, which is available in class, online, and as one of our classroom posters:
Your AP exam is on Wednesday, May 16. It will be one of the last exams you take, if you have more than one, and toward the end of the school year, regardless. We will spend a good amount of time honing your ability to do well on this test, both in terms of the skills and knowledge it requires and your ability to grind through the Sisyphean difficulties of school.
While you are reading about this course and classroom, read this:
Ignore (obviously) the teacher-specific stuff. This is the test you’ll take, and we’re lucky that it’s a good test — one that requires the same universal skills and traits you need in every walk of life. Even the vestigial elements have some merit.
Be sure to read the testimonials for this course, if you have any doubt that you will be given all the tools you need to be successful:
The AP exam is important, and you’ll be as ready as your effort allows you to be. But you’ll benefit in many other ways, of course.
Juniors also take the New York State Regents in English in June. We will not practice the tasks on the English Regents until after the AP exam in May, because the Regents based their Common Core exam also exactly on the AP exam for Language and Composition. You can read more about the structure of the exam here:
The single essay is identical to the synthesis essay on the AP exam
There are reading passages and questions like your AP exam
There is a short analysis prompt exactly like the rhetorical analysis prompt on the AP exam
Because of the Regents Exam, juniors do not sit for a final exam in English during exam week.
Senior Talks
Any senior taking Language and Composition will (obviously) not take the Regents Exam again. You will, however, complete and present a senior talk as part of your final exam. This will be distributed and reviewed later in the school year.
Required Materials
Bring your district-issued Chromebook or another Internet-ready device every day. Bring paper and a pen or pencil. Keep our current novel, nonfiction, writing prompt, etc., organized and with you at all times.
Otherwise, we’ll determine together what you need to be most successful. The onus is on you to start that process, and not just because we are an English makerspace. At this point in your academic career, you need to individualize a system that helps you accomplish your goals.
We are also going to try to be as paperless as possible this year. We need to be able to edit some documents in real time and to collaborate in a more 21st-century way. You need access to the hyperlinks and connections that make up the bulk of all contemporary writing and reading.
You will still have the ability to print any materials you want printed. Think of it as responsive printing: If you need a copy of something, then you’ll get it. It’s up to you to determine that need, though, and usually to take care of it. We have a printer connected to the desktops in Room 210 for this purpose.
We will obviously print essays and other texts that we annotate together. Not everything can be done on a computer, and that’s not the point; the point is to minimize our paper use and strengthen your digital skills.
Writing Requirements
One of your goals this year is to create writing that expresses who you are before you apply for college and/or a career. You will organize yourself through Google Drive, publish through Medium and other online platforms, and document your growth in different ways.
That’s a powerful digital footprint — the kind of thing an admissions board or prospective employer will see when they search for you online. The world wants you to have a digital presence. This course will help you build it.
The writing itself will be driven by a universal rubric and collaborative writing process. The steps are carefully constructed to help you develop your own style while learning how to answer any prompt you are given.
Part of grade abatement is an approach to writing that gives feedback without scores or points on the writing itself. This is to encourage risk-taking, revision, and metacognition.
Reading Requirements
You need to develop a reading habit. Your success, now and in the future, increases the more you read discerningly and actively. Read a little of everything, and read whenever you can. Emulate Malcolm X, who wrote, “I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity.”
One way to encourage this habit is through posts like this. All instruction will be flipped online, with class time reserved for face-to-face discussion and small-group collaboration. The more we balance and preface that in-class work with the written word, the stronger both parts of your learning will be.
The beauty of the devices we all have is that they give us access to limitless text — they put us, at all times, close to compelling essays, powerful short stories, beautiful poetry, even the best books. If you learn to read for yourself, not just because you are in school, you will have a lifelong habit.
And if reading for yourself seems clichéd, reject that seeming cliché. Embrace the truth of it, which is that reading makes you a better person. This works for literature as well as the essays you will strive to emulate. It’s the simplest shortcut:
Summer reading will be our first look at how literature, including nonfiction, affects us. While we will follow the College Board’s requirements and move away from literature as the driving force of instruction after that, we will still refer to the importance of empathy and life experience in what we read.
Course Orientation
We are now at the end of the course syllabus. While you continue our in-class writing and reading, use your homework time to continue here:
That orientation post will acclimate you more quickly to this style of learning than anything else at this stage. Take your time, read carefully, and ask questions. The deeper you dive, the more quickly you will feel comfortable.
You can post any of your questions so far in the comment section below. You can also send an email or schedule a time during the school day to meet.
Or traveling, or starting a career — this is universal preparation for how to think, to read, and to write. No path you take will be judged, as long as you take that path with a clear and critical purpose. ↩
The shape of the year is interesting. Class time — face-to-face time — matters most, and the first two quarters have lots of starts and stops. You can (and will) learn interstitially — you have to learn interstitially in this day and age — and you can augment your learning online. You can’t replace face-to-face work. So it’s interesting that the first two quarters are desultory: long weekends, days off in the middle of the week, plenty of fire drills, etc., plus distractions like Spirit Week, college applications (for seniors), and the inevitable influx of bad weather. The second semester is pretty solid, though, with plenty of time to build momentum and shake off the effects of the desultory start of the year. Spring break is predictable. The rest of our schedules lines up in 15-day blocks of time. ↩
By the time you graduate from high school, you will have spent around 2,340 days in public education — about a third of your life up to that point, depending on how the hours are calculated. You might remember how it started:
You’ve been doing this for a while, though, and are close to the end of the experience. You’re used to those systemic problems. The first day of school, with its flurry of handouts and icebreakers and generally miasmic exhaustion1 is familiar to you.
This course requires you to pay attention from the opening bell. We need to look at education — at your education — from a fresh perspective. Start with this video, which animates a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson:
That video was the initial inspiration for what you will experience this year in our classroom. That’s the philosophical crux, to give you another word worth knowing.
Part 2: The Syllabus
You’ll notice that this post addresses all of you, whether you are enrolled in AP Language or English 10. Each class period is separated on Google Classroom, which we’ll cover momentarily, and your instructional posts will obviously be separate; this digital space is shared, however, in the same way our physical space is shared.
This is by design. All English Language Arts courses address the same universal skills and traits, whether you study memoirs, poetry, or contemporary nonfiction. There is a lot to gain from observing what your peers do, hearing their questions, exchanging ideas, etc, so this website expands your ability to do that.
The physical space is known as a makerspace. Load your course syllabus to learn more about what that means for you. Find your course on this website, or follow the links posted on Google Classroom. You’ll find that the syllabus hits some of the notes you’d expect to hear, but the tune is different. Pay attention to those differences.
Part 3: Starting Up the Feedback Loop
As the syllabus tells you — as every instructional text will tell you, repeatedly — running a makerspace does not mean you’re without deadlines, homework, feedback, etc. Far from it. That’s why Google Classroom is indispensable to us: It gives you formal assignments, due dates, and requirements, all neatly linked to instructional posts.
You have already been invited to your course. If you did not receive the invitation sent on September 1, use the appropriate code below:
English 10
P2 English 10: bdd493u
P7 English 10: sf21ta4
English 11
P3 English 11: btrb0t3
AP English Language & Comp.
P5 AP English Lang: kojome
P9 AP English Lang: mc747z7
Assignments and updates will appear in the stream. When you’re ready, that’s where you’ll also find the first writing assignment of the year, which will deal with summer reading.
Feedback works differently in a makerspace. Read about this here:
That post is essential reading, if you want to be successful in here. Again, this sort of flipped instruction also helps you develop as a reader. It scrapes off some of your summer atrophy, too.
Part 4: Clarity from Effort
As you complete your first assignments, you will experience firsthand what the typical day in here looks like. You will see what each part of the classroom does and learn more about how assessment works.
In other words, you learn by doing in here. You also learn by reading lots and lots of teacher-written posts. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, for instance, you could read this essay:
This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background and notes are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with the 40 minutes or so we have together2. We might circle up some days; we might talk in groups or meet individually; we might take practice tests or take a shot at timed writing. There is enormous freedom to do what is needed, and you will direct most of the lessons yourself.
Your job, then, is to know what you are doing each day and to waste no time in doing it. That is the most important part of this course, so it gets a rare bolded font: When we are together in our classroom, you must be ready to work.
The interstitial/online elements are there to support this (and to make the Sisyphean grind of high school a little more manageable). Grade abatement is there to free you and empower you. Still, technology is only a tool. There is no replacement for the learning that occurs through discussion and collaboration when you share a learning environment with someone.
This essay explains more about how crucial our face-to-face work is:
(It also lets me continue to reference Wu-Tang and Grindhouse kung-fu movies.)
If nothing else, I want you to be able to answer these two questions each and every day:
What are you working on?
What help do you need?
If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do, and most of that work will be easier with help. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know. I’ll redirect you. During the first few weeks of school, for instance, you might need time to go over the syllabus. You might need help setting up your Google account. You might want help with your first writing assignment.
You face no risk right now, so ask questions and try things out. The more you experiment and the harder you work over these first few weeks, the easier you will find it to begin generating evidence for your grade abatement profiles — a concept that will be second nature to you soon enough.
We’ll end this first post3 with an essay on what it means to take risks like this:
Welcome to Room 210, and to Sisyphean High. Good luck.
That word, miasmic, is a really good one for far too many school-related situations. I first encountered it in this review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was part of a unit on horror movies and censorship years ago. It’s a particularly smart look at horror cinema, but it’s the use of language that made it worth teaching in the classroom. ↩
The essays haven’t been updated to reflect any changes to our bell schedule, mostly in an effort not to lose the Wu-Tang allusions. ↩
Which is longer than most future posts will be. This one needs to be as dense as possible, because this is the overview of the year. You need a few dozen chances to realize the most important truth: This course is different, and only by leaning into those differences will you be successful. ↩
