Category: English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in English 10 Regents for the 2018-2019 school year.

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Makerspace Reading Calendar: 2018-2019

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

Here is a printable Google Doc with this information: https://tinyurl.com/ycep9emy

Background: Instructional Posts

These are embedded, in order, after the list.

  • The Reading Process | Covers everything.
  • As You Read: Works of Literary Merit | One version of the analysis process. An updated version is here: https://tinyurl.com/simplifiedanalysis.
  • Choosing to Read: Directions | Covers assigned texts versus student-chosen texts.
  • Literary Analysis Guide | Another version of the analysis process.

The Reading Process

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

Choosing to Read [2018]

Literary Analysis Guide

Background: Course Syllabi

Each syllabus covers reading goals for the course in full. A note on AP English Language & Composition follows that embedded syllabus.

AP Language follows the reading requirements from the College Board, which are available here: tinyurl.com/210APCB. The most relevant section is this one:

Language & Composition is explicitly focused on a different kind of reading. Canonical literature isn’t excluded, but traditional analysis is discouraged. Nevertheless, the makerspace so strongly emphasizes literature as an aesthetic experience that exceptions must be made. See the course orientation and Ken Robinson’s “Changing Education Paradigms” video for more on this.

Makerspace Reading Lists: 2018-2019

The makerspace shifts us away from mandated reading and toward literary merit and student choice. One of the essential texts in the prefatory reading is John Holt’s “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which we use to frame that choice:

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

As the “Choosing to Read” instructional post says, students navigate the first 30-40 pages of a novel in order to make that decision. Each time, we use a specific protocol to learn more about how students read, what that means for their learning, and where the threshold lies between challenging their habits and forcing the issue until something breaks.

Ultimately, students decide between the assigned book (e.g., 1984, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest) and another work of equal literary merit. They must read a book. They are encouraged to stick with the assigned one; the choice, however, is theirs.

We then focus on skills, traits, and the common experiences that all works of literary merit provide us. There are no quizzes and no tests. Literature is used in essays when it is appropriate in a real-world sense, or when we must do test prep.

Otherwise, literature is used to teach the reader. Reading gives us life experience, wisdom, and empathy. It also teaches students something about how they read, which is essential to how they learn.

The assured experience is in the skills and traits developed by reading, the discussions that don’t depend just on plot points, and the metacognitive and reflective work that drives growth.

Reading Calendar: First Semester (2018-2019)

My co-teachers and I built the course calendar in September: tinyurl.com/210-2018-cal. For all classes, the Pareto Projects and GAP scoring dates stay the same. Each quarter is divided into panels, like a triptych, with different kinds of literature assigned during each panel.

Here is a post explaining the use of Q1 as a skill-building crash course:

The Big Sky

Through the first semester, a variety of literature and other texts were studied:

Q2 ends with every course having studied a book according to the makerspace protocol, which includes, of course, doing close-reading exercises on prescribed excerpts, discussing thematic elements, and practicing literary analysis.

There are additionally several posts that combat misinformation and disinformation about the makerspace approach to literature. Here is one:

Mongering and Congeries

Here is another that focuses specifically on reading:

Well, Why Read?

Reading Calendar: Second Semester (2018-2019)

Up next will be three full-length books or plays in each course, in addition to short fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

Below (or in the printable version of this post), you can see the major texts cross two GAP panels each, with around 30 class periods available to us during those two panels. This is more than enough time to introduce the literature, begin the reading process, and then make the student-driven choice to continue or to choose a work of equal literary merit.

Each class will keep test prep and the required essays in place, of course, as well as the Pareto Projects and other project-based learning opportunities (like the ongoing NPR Student Podcast Challenge).

Note that the listed texts are provisional. It might be that we decide that Othello is a better play for English 10, for instance, since it is taught in other English 10 classes. We might move up our study of The Catcher in the Rye in English 11 to partner up with other junior classes, too. We are using some of the most commonly taught books in the English Department in order to create assured experiences.

Note on the overlap between English 11 and AP English Language & Composition:

English 11 and AP English Language & Composition are taught some of the same canonical texts. They are also given some of the same essay prompts, including junior-year staples like the personal narrative. This is because AP English Language & Composition, while open to juniors and seniors, is practically and provisionally a junior-level course.

In 2008-2009, it was officially called English 11 AP. In 2009-2010, the course lost its lab periods, dropped the 11, and opened up enrollment to seniors. Since then, 553 students have taken the course. Exactly 20 (or 3%) have been seniors. Over the last four years, sections of AP English Language & Composition have had an average of 29 students. The only three seniors enrolled during that time are all from 2018-2019. The average number of seniors in any section in the last ten years is 0.8 — less than a single student. Juniors take AP English Literature and Composition; seniors do not take AP English Language and Composition.

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NPR Student Podcast Challenge

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

Update for Students: You were overwhelmingly in favor of spending time on this podcast challenge, so it has been folded into all classes. Formal assignments have been added to Google Classroom. You will not be required to produce a complete podcast, nor will you have to enter the contest. Instead, you will have three required assignments: to analyze example podcasts, to gather potential ideas, and to answer six questions about one of those ideas. All of the surrounding information from NPR is critical, of course (click this link for an example), but you will be working more explicitly through the following:

The current deadline for all this is January 25. Let’s revisit that deadline on a class-by-class basis next week.

The Challenge

We’re a makerspace, which means we make things. Sometimes, those artifacts are inspired by people and organizations outside of our walls. Case in point:

This podcast challenge is a ready-made makerspace unit. It requires you to analyze existing podcasts to figure out how to emulate them. It requires all of our universal skills and traits. In fact, if you look through the student resources NPR has provided, you’ll see a mention of a “toolbox” in the first step:

That’s not just a tremendous example of how those universal skills and traits work in the real world; it’s also remarkably similar to a 20 Time or Pareto Project.

The Calendar

Speaking of your Pareto Projects, this is timed well for us. Look at the calendar for the year:

As I write this, we are in between Pareto Projects. February 25 is set aside as the start of the next process. NPR’s podcast challenge ends on March 31. That overlap gives us a unique opportunity:

  • We work on the podcast challenge once a week or so through the February break.
  • In Q3B, which runs from February 25 through March 15, you continue the podcast challenge or begin a new Pareto Project.
  • If you continue the podcast, you will finish and submit it by Friday, March 29.
  • In that case, you would begin a smaller Pareto Project on Monday, April 1.

Projects are meant to be presented from May 28 through June 14, which is the last Friday we meet together. There is, therefore, more than enough time for you to create a podcast and a second, meaningful Pareto Project.

Let’s start with your feedback: What do you think of this podcast challenge? After looking at NPR’s website, are you inspired by the possibilities? How do you think this would fit our space? Talk to me in the comments, where your peers can benefit from the exchange.

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Regents Exam Practice: August, 2016

  By All Classes (2018-2019), English 10 Regents (2018-2019), Test Prep, Triage

 

All test prep should be prefaced with a close reading of the following quotation:

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

That is one of the two framing quotations on the front page of this instructional site, and it gets at the core philosophy of a makerspace: You learn by doing, and by thinking about thinking — being a “capable psychonaut,” as it’s called in this unit on akrasia and self-control.

You should also read the guide to grade abatement and this clarification of the process. Test prep, like everything else, relies on universal skills and traits. It teaches us as much as we allow it to teach us.

Castle Learning Triage: 8/16 Practice

Students in New York must pass the ELA Common Core Regents Exam to graduate high school. It’s a comprehensive exam, which means it is not explicitly tied to a single year of ELA instruction; in fact, it can be taken and retaken at any time, with permission1. All but a few of you will take it at the end of your junior year.

Whenever we do test prep, we are really performing triage — score-driven, teacher-assisted triage. We are also identifying strengths in order to promote a better form of feedback.

The practice discussed in this post comes from the ELA Common Core Regents Exam given in August of 2016. We will use Castle Learning.

Castle Learning has already been set up for each of you according to class period. If you are in a different situation (e.g., graduating early and needing to take the exam in January of what would have been your junior year), you will be added individually. You’ll need your Castle Learning login information, which you can get from any of your teachers. Here is the main site:

You will be helped through the registration process, if this is your first time using the service. Once you are registered, you’ll find these tasks have been assigned to you:

  • 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage A
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage B
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage C
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 2
  • 8/16 Practice: Part 3

For each of those, there is an additional CR — Constructed Response — that asks you to be metacognitive about your choices and performance. These metacognitive constructed responses are essential. They turn cursory work into meaningful work, and they force us to identify and analyze strengths and weaknesses.

For Part 1, which pairs close reading with multiple-choice questions, the metacognitive prompt is this:

Use teacher feedback, your peers, and the correct answers that are provided by Castle Learning to engineer an understanding of how these questions and answer choices work. Write metacognitively about the passage, the questions, and your problem-solving efforts.

For Part 2 and Part 3, which ask for writing responses, the metacognitive prompt is this:

Identify and analyze several writing choices you made in this response. You can focus on your use of detail, your arrangement, your central meaning, or your rhetorical manipulation of grammar and style.

Part 2 and Part 3 will be assigned to students through Castle Learning. There will be no corresponding Google Classroom assignment; scores and feedback will be given through Castle Learning itself. To receive feedback (and credit), the following five steps must be completed:

  1. Write Part 2 and Part 3 by hand in the provided essay booklet.
  2. Type Part 2 in Castle Learning, revising it as you type.
  3. Write a thorough response to the metacognitive prompt about Part 2 in Castle Learning.
  4. Type Part 3 in Castle Learning, revising it as you type.
  5. Write a thorough response to the metacognitive prompt about Part 3 in Castle Learning.

The last step we will take is to look at exemplary student responses, which are provided by New York:

Additional Notes

Use this post to ask questions about the August 2016 exam. These questions can be related to procedure or to the passages, questions, and prompts. These comments will be used now and in the future to save students time.

Remember that this is a grade-abated assessment. Your score on each part of the practice exam is important, and you will be given that score. It does not factor into your GPA, however, because that score is not nearly as important as understanding the how and why of that score. Those of you who struggle on tests will focus on collaboration, growth, and metacognitive insight. Those of you who excel will focus on using metacognitive insight to help others reach your level.

Later this year, we’ll talk about score conversions, final scores, and the gamesmanship necessary for high-stakes exams. Here is a preview:

Gamesmanship: Regents Exam (CC ELA)

  1. Our school has experimented with a few different options. For a couple of years, we gave the exam to sophomores, even having some sophomores take it in January. That was before the test was overhauled and brought in line with Common Core, though. ↩

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Feedback: Improve the Learning Environment

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

From one perspective, this is a gamified environment. There are levels, and you can progress through those levels in many different ways. You earn experience (in the gamification sense and in the academic sense) by accomplishing set tasks. To succeed, you must dodge environmental hazards and avoid other elements that damage you.

That’s why the Pareto Projects work as well as they do: Students aren’t graded on them, but the best projects are evidence of the skills, traits, and knowledge that are found in the strongest profiles. Investment in the project is an investment in the process of the project, which is really an investment in gaining meaningful experience.

Pareto Projects are also among the best opportunities to level up collegiality and empathy, which remain the most important facet of your learning. Peer-to-peer feedback is an essential part of what we do in a Humanities makerspace:

View at Medium.com

Here, then, is a post about a few of the most direct ways to generate evidence of peer-to-peer feedback. And it is fine if you look at this as a way to game the system to earn credit. Even if your motivation is less than pure, the net result is positive. That’s the design, at least: You can’t cheat the system, and “faking” your investment still helps others. That idea is explained in the tenth section of an essay on an earlier (but still relevant) iteration of the makerspace:

When you are in doubt, fake it. Force yourself to be collegial. Force yourself to do metacognition. Force yourself to spend the entire period pretending to be the right kind of student.

Do this for long enough, and the skills and traits you are pretending to hone will be honed. You will become a better student. This is the Wiseman effect transposed onto education. It is a kind of psychosomatic inverse: tricking your brain into developing habits by forcing your body to take particular actions.

In here, it’s fine if you try to game the system by generating whatever evidence it takes to justify that GAP 8 or GAP 9. Why? Because there is no gamesmanship — no way to cheat the system, fabricate evidence, or twist the language of the profiles. There isn’t even a way to cheat yourself.

If you force yourself through the motions in here, those motions will inculcate the skills and traits we want. A misanthrope who forces himself to take collegial and galvanizing actions will incrementally learn empathy. A narcissist who forces herself to reflect and metacogitate every week will incrementally find new self-awareness and insight. An apathetic student who grinds through assignments just to get them done will incrementally gain a real appreciation for the value of the work.

This is a subtle conversion. It evades the entitlement at the heart of both helplessness and arrogance. The helpless among you feel entitled to be shepherded from task to task; the arrogant among you overvalue your intelligence and devalue the good work of this course. Both groups anticipate being gifted a high grade through some kind of alchemical magic.

The logic of this course is immutable, however. There is no game to play and no gamesmanship to lean on. This course does not care how naturally gifted you are. It does not care if you play sports and play them well. It does not care what your parents think of you. It does not care what you look like, how charming you are, or how much latitude you have been given throughout your life to do what you want.

It cares only about what you do.

I think I’d add now, a few years later, that I care about all of the things listed in the penultimate paragraph. As a teacher and human being, I care. But the course has a logic to it that focuses purely on what you do. You can force yourself to give effective feedback, and it doesn’t matter, provisionally, if you are intrinsically motivated. As long as it’s effective feedback — that is, not perfunctory, superficial, vague — the eventual effect is the same.

Galvanic Work: GAP 8

The first and second page of this PDF cover the top tier of profiles:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FGrade-Abatement-Tier-Guide.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

That’s a new iteration of the guide to the profiles. Here is a screenshot of the anchor profile, which is the profile for a GAP 8:

And here, again, one of the many explanations for how this tier works:

Probably the most important requirement of the highest profiles is a feedback loop — an individualized academic connection with the teacher, the materials of the course, and your peers. There are four main ways to do this:

  1. You can learn directly from the teacher in small groups or as an individual.
  2. You can learn directly from folks who’ve done #1.
  3. You can interact thoughtfully with the interstitial instruction of the course.
  4. You can learn directly from folks who’ve done #3.

Learning from an expert peer is nearly as effective as conferencing with the teacher, and it more closely emulates what you’ll need to do throughout your life, which is to read and annotate and think about the writing of others without a teacher standing over your shoulder. Mentorship should be something you seek out, especially as you get older, but it’s not always a given. Collaboration is.

The burden is evenly distributed, too. Once you have learned something meaningful or mastered a skill, you need to teach it to others. That is known as the protégé effect, and it is almost universally accepted as the best way to hone skills and retain knowledge. In this course, we also call it proxy feedback.

That is another key criterion for the highest profiles: evidence that you have contributed to the learning environment. After that, it’s about the other most effective way to learn, which is to think about your thinking — to get to know yourself and your choices through regular reflection and metacognition.

This should all be done through a mix of discussion and writing, and it needs to be insightful and consistent. Throughout the learning process, you should be using the right language — the universal language of grade abatement.

Peer-to-Peer Feedback

Which brings us to what you do now. You are reading this because it is helpful to have direction when you give feedback to a peer. A template is useful. Sometimes, sentence starters are useful. You can default to this worksheet, which comes from collaboration with Mrs. Greenfeld, who runs the other makerspace at the high school. Here’s a PDF of it:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FFeedback_-Glow-Grow.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

As you can see in the file name, this is adapted from the “glow and grow” model of reflection and assessment. The key is the use of sentence starters. It also helps to have the blurb at the top of each feedback section. Because we are grade-abated, we can use Tony Wagner’s idea of “collective human judgment informed by evidence.” The feedback, again, is the key, not a score.

You have a number of options for giving peer-to-peer feedback. Written feedback has lasting power, so focus there — not because face-to-face feedback is unimportant, because it is so important that it happens naturally. If you are talking in class after a project presentation, for instance, feedback will happen. You could use this template to help you be more specific in your feedback, but it’s in the written feedback that it really shines.

Some options:

  1. Leave feedback on the artifact, if possible. Add comments through Google Docs, Slides, Sheets, etc., if you’ve been given permission to do so.
  2. Make a copy of the artifact, if it’s available but not open to comments, and leave comments on that copy. Then send the annotated copy back to the original owner.
  3. Write a response offering positive and constructive feedback, and then email it to your peer.
  4. Send brief but specific feedback through social media.
  5. Leave comments on any teacher-created version of the artifact, like the Pareto Project pages posted online.

Building Evidence

Here is the most important part of the process, at least in terms of quasi-traditional assessment: You want evidence of your feedback. Look again at the anchoring language of the Tier 4 profiles:

To “demonstrably improve the learning environment,” in this context, means to demonstrate that you gave effective feedback. Again, the gamesmanship of this is built into the system, and there is no harm at all in being somewhat extrinsically motivated. You need evidence of your hard work for the GAP process:

The GAP Process

What does that mean? It means that you are putting feedback in writing not just to make it more permanent, and not just to allow for more thoughtfulness in its construction; you are also preserving copies of that feedback for your records. You can take pictures of handwritten feedback and screenshots of typed feedback. You can make copies of emails and other direct addresses.

Most critically, you can write about the feedback. Be metacognitive about what you said and how you said it. Reflect on your use of sentence starters, since those really do help, and on how the conversation developed. It should be a conversation, after all; delivering feedback with no follow-up is much less effective than a discussion about the work.

Ask questions about this below.

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Moratorium

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

Starting Wednesday, December 12, there will be a moratorium in our classroom on the use of any all devices (e.g., phones, tablets) except district-issued Chromebooks and personal laptops. There will also be a moratorium on choosing your own seats1.

We’ll review this together — hands-on, with liberal use of a whiteboard to define and detail certain points — but you may have questions or comments that require an interstitial forum like this one. Remember, too, that this site is for all stakeholders, not just students. Our conversation about technology is an inclusive one.

The most important note is probably this: moratorium refers to a pause or delay in action. It’s a temporary suspension. It isn’t a permanent ban. The second most important note is that you can be part of the conversation about technology use and learning. Start in the comment section here by asking questions, making observations, etc., so that I can reply to you.

Moratorium on Phones

Since smartphones are the most common distraction, “phone” is a placeholder for any device except district-issued Chromebooks or personal laptops.

If you want context for this moratorium, you’ll find it in the unit we did on self-control and self-discipline:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

Self-control is one of the most important skills you can develop, so we’ve used the flexibility of the makerspace to give you opportunities to test your focus and discipline. Many students failed those tests.

That’s okay, at least in a larger sense. The purpose of that akrasia unit is, in part, to normalize the problem as a decidedly human one. In other words, we all struggle with self-control, distraction, procrastination, etc., and we all need to improve.

In a more immediate sense, we have to get these phones out of students’ hands. There are, of course, academic reasons to have a phone, and this site is designed to be read on the smaller screens. But those academic reasons continue outside of school. You’d use your phone interstitially, as intended, when you are making the choice to learn, create, question, etc., in an academic sense.

In class, the phone is too much of a distraction. We’ve tested it for three months now, and the rate of improvement is too slow. I imagine that this moratorium will remain in place for a long time.

Assigned Seats

The context for assigned seats:

Objects in Space

All we’re doing now is keeping you in those start-of-period assigned seats until the bell. You need the separation to get work done. We’ll obviously make exceptions when it comes to group projects, but this is otherwise about isolating you from distractions.

It needs to be clarified that collaboration is the stuff of growth, which is why we start the year there; simply being in a group, however, is not proof of collaboration. Being in proximity to other students is just being in proximity to them. Collaboration refers to what you produce. When members of our group fail to stay on task in their chosen groups, it helps to assign seats.

We Have Work to Do

All of this is predicated on the obvious: You have work to do. You are in a makerspace, and that means there is always more work to do. Even that last link proves its own point, because it would take a while to read that entire lecture and process its ideas.

Right now, as the winter holidays approach, you need to be more focused than ever. In every course, the end of your first Pareto Project process requires the following:

Pareto Projects: Final Self-Assessment

Meanwhile, English 10 students are writing personal letters, English 11 students are analyzing and writing short stories, and AP students are applying the makerspace mentality to Santa Claus. This is perhaps the worst time of year to lose focus.

Below is the version of our grade abatement profiles that was affixed to each workstation earlier this week. The color-coded tiers may help you to maintain focus. You shift into the red by ignoring directions and disengaging from the work, and the more you resist, the more you build evidence of those lower tiers. In other words, refusing to focus, especially in the particular way you are being directed to focus, is enough by itself to lower your profile and grade.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F12%2FGAP-Color-Arial.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

  1. With the possible exception of the AP classes. This is based on group dynamics, which is really about a kind of herd immunity, and AP students have earned a few days to prove they have the requisite discipline to choose their own seats. The moratorium on phones applies to everyone, though, which says something about the addiction we’re dealing with. ↩

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“A Memory of My Existence”

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

A Long Way Gone: Chapter 20

Whether you chose to continue reading A Long Way Gone or switched to a different novel, it is important to consider what Ishmael Beah has to say about our place in the world. At the end of Chapter 20, for instance, his departure from New York City on November 15, 1996, leads to this insight:

My sixteenth birthday was eight days away, and throughout the flight back home I still felt as if I was dreaming, a dream that I didn’t want to wake up from. I was sad to leave, but I was also pleased to have met people outside of Sierra Leone. Because if I was to get killed upon my return, I knew that a memory of my existence was alive somewhere in the world.

Beah is describing a very human need: to have left a mark on the world. He knew, even then, that he would persist through the memories of the people he had met. The way he has continued to impact and influence people around the world is simply a larger and more powerful version of this.

If you are reading this, you have already left a mark on this world, and you will continue to do so. Your existence has impacted others. Your day-to-day life continues that impact. Still others remember you, even if you are no longer a part of their lives, and that memory of your existence is alive somewhere in the world.

This is existentially heavy stuff. But it leads us to a straightforward opportunity for reflection, introspection, and more of that psychonaut exploration we have undertaken before.

The writing prompt: Consider the excerpt from A Long Way Gone carefully, and then write a letter to yourself about the mark you make on the world. You may write about the impact you’ve had so far in your life, the impact you intend to have in the future, the idea of “a memory of [your] existence,” and any related subjects that arise from your contemplation of Beah’s words.

This letter can be private or public to any extent you choose. You may publish it as an open letter, or you may keep it from even your teacher, making it a purely personal exercise Either way, you will be asked to write about the letter-writing process. That metacognitive analysis is what lets you control every aspect of the letter’s audience.

You also have the option of printing this letter, sealing it in an envelope, and leaving it to be opened by a future version of you — at the end of this year, the end of next year, as you graduate, or at any other point you choose. Every choice you make has an impact, which reflects the core of the assignment itself.

Ask questions below. Deadlines and other requirements will be posted to Google Classroom.

Featured image source: “Nora’s Letter,” as archived at The Victorian Web.

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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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English 10: Narrative Writing + Literary Analysis

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

The Point of a Story

In our course, you write what you read and read what you write. We call the process emulation through analysis, or ETA writing. It means that you pick apart a text because you want to emulate it, not because of a “mean-spirited, picky insistence that every child get every last little scrap of ‘understanding’ that can be dug out of a book.”

That quotation comes from John Holt and his essay, “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” which you studied as part of our introduction to literature and the reading process. Following that, you also received a three-part guide on how we read:

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

Our goal, again, is to emulate the works we study. To get there, we must analyze them, being careful not to let that analysis break the magic.

This time, we are studying narrative writing: a mode of discourse in which a sequence or series of events, real or fictional, is relayed or described. More simply, narrative writing tells a story.

For a piece of writing to be considered a complete narrative, it must fit the criteria outlined above, which it does through certain literary elements. Some of the basic elements of writing, like syntax and diction, are included in that protocol; everything else falls on a list you are given every year in your English classes. That’s why you’ll recognize everything in this article1:

Note: We are using that particular article for two reasons. First, if you read it, you’ll know everything you need to know to do this work. Second, it’s a site full of ads, which lets us use Snap and Read, one of the district’s most useful browser extensions, to eliminate distractions. When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:

To this:

Analyzing Narratives

After you’ve read the background above, you can move on to analyzing and emulating.

Below are short stories of increasing length. After reading each story, run it through the protocol for works of literary merit. Write about each focus separately and completely, using the template provided below. Load it, make a copy in your Drive, and then complete it.

This template will be attached to any Google Classroom assignments, as well. The headings are repeated below for reference.

1⁰ Focus: How You Read

Focus on what this work reveals about how you learn and how you read. Does the length of the text help? How? Did you print a copy of the texts, or did you read online? Why? What was the effect?

2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For

Use the post and the ideas we gleaned from its central video to ask yourself what each text teaches you. Is it giving you wisdom and insight? Into what aspects of yourself or your world? When in doubt, remember the video’s final quotation:

We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.

Often, this kind of analysis is pitched in terms of essential questions about human nature or society. For longer works of literary merit or nonfiction, those questions are usually provided in class.

3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis

The post on how to read covers diction, syntax, and other universal elements of writing. You can emulate those aspects in any writing response.

For this particular mode of discourse, and for each model text, you should also focus on literary devices. Characterization, conflict, foreshadowing, irony — all those and more can be analyzed and emulated. In fact, the best way to approach this sort of analysis is by adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts:

Closely read the text provided and write a well-developed, text-based response of two to three paragraphs. In your response, identify a central idea in the text and analyze how the author’s use of one literary element or literary technique or rhetorical device (characterization, conflict, denotation/connotation, metaphor, simile, irony, language use, point-of-view, setting, structure, symbolism, theme, tone, etc.) develops this central idea. Use strong and thorough evidence from the text to support your analysis. Do not simply summarize the text.

ETA Narrative #1: The Shortest Story

Author: Ernest Hemingway

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

ETA Narrative #2: 50-Word Short Story

Author: Michael Lawrie

First Impressions

Beth: Socialist, vegan, Amnesty volunteer, and generally lovely girl. Her band wore the Swastika, SS badge, and the Totenkopf — so she did, too.

Walking home after a gig, she felt the blade slide in, cold then warm.

The police dismissed her as just another dead Nazi. Her killer was happy to have done his bit.

first_impressions (1)

This is the original, unedited version.

ETA Narrative #3: Short Fiction

Author: Stuart Dybek

Sunday at the Zoo

We decided to stop drinking and spend Sunday at the zoo. It was going nicely until she worked herself up over the observation that it was a horrible thing to cage the animals.

“That’s not very profound,” I said, “everybody who goes to the zoo feels that sometime.”

“Oh, you cruel ********2,” she screamed, “I’m not everybody!”

She bellied over the guardrail and flung herself against the bars of the wolves’ cage.
Three wolves had been circling and as soon as she touched the bars they froze, fur
bristling along their spines.

She had her arms stuck in between the bars up to her shoulders and as much of her face as she could wedge in yelling, “Eat me! Eat me!” to the wolves.

Just that week the newspapers had carried an account of how a small girl had an arm gnawed off – she’d reach in to pet them and one wolf held it while the other ate. It was, in fact, what had led us, along with the crowd, relentlessly to the wolves’ cage.

But the wolves held their ground, snarling, stiff-legged.

An attendant came running down the aisle between the fence and cages and grabbed her by the hair and throat, wrestling her back. She locked her arms around the bars and he kept
slapping her face with a thick, purplish slab of meat he must have been feeding to one of the animals. 

“I’ll give you, ‘Eat me, Eat me,’” he grinned, kicking her down.

At that instant all three wolves rushed against the bars so that they shook, and you could hear their teeth breaking on the metal. Their bloodied snouts jabbed through, snapping at air.

“Stop abusing that woman,” I shouted from the crowd.

Here is a PDF of the original story, with a second bit of flash-fiction attached: “Billy’s Girl,” by Gordon Jackson.

Emulation: Narrative Writing

The last step is to emulate one of the three short stories presented here. Your own narrative can be true or fictional or a combination of both. It can be on any subject you choose. It must only demonstrate the same kind of authorial choices.

Create this emulation however you wish — by hand, through Google, on a typewriter, etc. — and then submit a copy of it as requested for GAP purposes. Additionally, you should strongly consider the extent to which your story might be shared with others. Refer to this post:

The End of the Writing Process

  1. Which is just one of many such documents available to you. The most cursory search on Google would give you hundreds more. ↩

  2. This bit of profanity has been edited out, with sincerest apologies to Mr. Dybek’s original text. We have to tread lightly in a high school. There’s no . ↩

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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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English 10 GAP Q1B: Added Value

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

Look up the word provisional, or click here for the definition. Then read on.

Within an hour after this post goes live, you will have provisional GAP scores for Q1B. These scores are low, for many of you, because of missing and incomplete work. A lack of in-class focus led to lower profiles, too.

If you want to raise your scores slightly before the end of the day on Friday, you will have that opportunity. You can demonstrate your amenability, self-awareness, integrity, etc., while producing the kind of evidence that fits higher profiles.

Step #1: Pick new seats. This could be forced on you, but it will be more impactful if you make the decision yourselves. Pick new seats that give you a better chance to focus. You must adjust, because your current seats aren’t helping.

Step #2: Complete the GAP Q1B report posted to Google Classroom. Be honest and specific. You have permission to do this a day early (see our calendar again for a reminder of these assessment dates). As necessary, let the provisional score you’ve been given direct you toward an accounting of mistakes and poor choices.

Step #3: Then write a separate reflection about your use of this space and your approach to our work. Explain what you will do to be successful in the future. Make this meaningful and insightful. Attach it to the Classroom assignment for the GAP report.

Do that, do it accurately and insightfully, and you’ll have demonstrated enough of the skills and traits that matter to raise your profile — and, as a direct result, you will raise that number in the gradebook. For more on how that works, you can read this:

Dürer’s Rhinoceros