Category: AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in AP English Language & Composition for the 2016-2017 school year.

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Orwell Essay Writing: Approach

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

To Think More Clearly

Let’s spend the week experimenting with how you write the essay that follows that post. Look to Google Classroom for the formal assignment, and then start with this quotation from Piet Hein:

Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.

That echoes Paul Graham, whose “Age of the Essay” tells us what writing should do (emphasis mine):

To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.

Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.

If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.

And we’ll throw in Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” too, which adds another perspective:

It took me some years to discover what I was.

Which was a writer.

By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.

Right now, you have a subject for the essay you are writing. You have potential prompts and possible directions to take. You may have jumped into putting words on the page, and you may have only just finished reading that preparatory post1; regardless, you are at the relative start of the writing process.

Now you need a clear and precise approach to the subject at hand. You need an interesting question to ask or a unique perspective to explore. Paul Graham compares this, in “The Age of the Essay,” to a river finding its way to the sea; Virginia Woolf, in Moments of Being, compares it to a “shock” that drives her to “put the severed parts together”:

I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.

Come up with your approach. What question will drive your process? What is your perspective as you begin? What’s interesting or inventive or curious about your thinking as you start writing? What are you trying to learn?

Ask me questions and share ideas below.

  1. If you fall into the camp that hasn’t done the prep work, keep that to yourself until you’ve caught up, and recognize the danger of making poor choices over and over again: Eventually, you are what you do. ↩

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To Think More Clearly

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

With Orwell’s 1984 and “Politics and the English Language” as a backdrop, we’re going to talk about grammatical declension1, and that more than justifies a look at LOLcats. They have a rich history (really) and lead us into complex studies of macros and grammar (yes, really). For me, though, if we’re going to look at declining English and memes, nothing really beats the simple stupidity of wurds. (Full LOLcats image available here.)

Orwell’s Inspiration

[A]n 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. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration…

That quotation is drawn from George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” which we will continue to use to frame a unit of study on contemporary English writing and its connection to our thoughts and actions, especially our dishonest thoughts and actions. Refresh your memory of the first instructional post here:

Politics and the English Language

Now we move into some focused writing work that is meant to be balanced through your recent organizational efforts. The way you approach this writing assignment also gets into the circadian dynamics we’ve discussed before, because you must be more vigilant and focused than ever to avoid falling behind. We’re using that Orwell quotation above, though, to focus on two things:

  1. [A]n effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
  2. [T]he process is reversible.

In other words: You will spiral into confusion and frustration the more confused and frustrated you get, but there is always a way to stop the cycle and reclaim your learning for yourself. There is a lot going on below, and all of it is interesting, if you’re open to it. Use your time wisely, ask the right questions, and do good work.

First, a Caveat

The idea of political discourse is important to Orwell’s argument, and the connections he makes between clear thinking, “the slovenliness of our language,” and politics should grow more important to us, especially now. I think we should embrace the opportunity. Perhaps we can use some of the original meaning behind the word “politics” to help us focus:

Politicks is the science of good sense, applied to public affairs, and, as those are forever changing, what is wisdom to-day would be folly and perhaps, ruin to-morrow. Politicks is not a science so properly as a business. It cannot have fixed principles, from which a wise man would never swerve, unless the inconstancy of men’s view of interest and the capriciousness of the tempers could be fixed.

That comes from Fisher Ames, whose idea of a “science of good sense” ought to appeal to our better natures, especially in the vexed and volatile world of politics. That said, I want to repeat that this is not a unit about politics, at least not expressly or exclusively. It is a unit on the way language shapes our thoughts — a unit about names, business jargon, school jargon, lying, Twitter, slang, profanity, memes, and much more.

Your Assignment

Write an essay inspired by “Politics and the English Language.” This essay must demonstrate an understanding of Orwell, and it must use his ideas and specific language to an appropriate extent.

The audience, subject, purpose, etc, of this essay are all yours to decide. That kind of freedom can lead to bad choices, however, so I’ll give you a list of possibilities. Consider each before striking out on your own. Whatever your choice, you probably ought to start by skimming Paul Graham’s treatise again. You want an essay that is interesting and insightful — the kind of “river” writing that engages its author and reader equally.

Note that many of these are drawn from the essay by Maddie Crum that is included in the first option. That’s a subtle clue that you should devote some time to Crum, even if you eventually choose to write a completely unrelated essay of your own.

Note also that the deadline for this assignment is posted on Google Classroom, where it will be edited at least once or twice in the near future. The goal is organization, remember? You need to stop self-medicating through deadlines and invest in the process part of writing, reading, and thinking.

§ Option 1 | Degree of difficulty: 8.0

Emulate Maddie Crum.

Maddie Crum is the author of this Huffington Post essay about workplace jargon. It’s much more interesting than you think, and it’s perfect for emulation. Start, of course, with the ETA work: Read Crum, break down her writing, and note how it connects to Orwell. Then consider your own observations of a specific place and its identifying or characteristic language. You might look at the language of textbooks, the profanity of the school hallway, the violent metaphors in sports reporting, or the language of the college application process; you might also analyze the way your family communicates, the way a specific group talks on Twitter or Facebook, or the peculiar grammar of texting and other forms of micro-communication. Whatever your chosen subject, the purpose of a direct emulation of Crum is to (1) identify the problem; (2) explain its causes and effects; and (3) offer a well reasoned approach to solving it.

§ Option 2 | Degree of difficulty: 9.92

Write an essay about the current political landscape.

The instructional post that introduced Orwell should help you here, and current events offer almost endless ways to apply “Politics” to current politics. Your goal is to add something meaningful to the discussion. How you approach that goal is up to you, so it will take a lot of individual discussion to get started.

§ Option 3 | Degree of difficulty: 6.5

Write an essay about placeholders such as “like.”

Crum brings up the debate over placeholders, and you can do a lot with the connection between verbal tics and written clarity. It might help you to read Christopher Hitchens’ essay on the subject, especially his idea that “you have to talk well in order to write well, and you can’t write while using “like” as punctuation.”

§ Option 4 | Degree of difficulty: 7.0

Write an essay about the language we use to discuss stress and anxiety.

This builds off of Crum’s inclusion of a Times essay on being busy, which she uses to argue that “[w]hen we replace a specific task with a vague expression, we grant the task more magnitude than it deserves.” The way we discuss stress and anxiety shape how we feel about stress and anxiety, which in turn shapes our responses. You should also look to the recent instructional post on empathy and blame for inspiration here.

§ Option 5 | Degree of difficulty: 8.5

Write an essay on Internet memes.

This one has the most potential to derail even a focused student, so you would need to look past the superficiality of the subject and delve into the way language shapes meaning in memetic circles. Look to the italicized opening of this post for ideas, and bookmark Know Your Meme.

§ Option 6 | Degree of difficulty: 6.5

Write an essay on fonts.

Comic Sans is the obvious whipping boy in this discussion, but it’s a lot richer than that. You would look at whether Orwell’s logic applies to superficial elements of writing like kerning and font type, especially in a hypertextual (or web-based) sense. For instance, does this essay on level design fit Orwell’s ideas, since it deliberately uses no capital letters? Does font choice actually impact clarity of thought?

To give you a little further help, here is an essay written last year by one of the top seniors in the graduating class of 20173:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F02%2FOrwellEssay-AmberKrisch.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

  1. We’ll be collecting words that we love (and hate) during a future lesson, and I discovered “declension” during a previous year’s study of Orwell. It derives from the same root as the more obvious “decline” and refers to “a condition of decline or moral deterioration.” It somehow seems apt in 2017. ↩

  2. Writing well about politics is always difficult, but the current landscape has made it into a minefield. ↩

  3. A fact that has less to do with her writing ability than you think. Being good at school and writing well are skills that overlap, of course, but much less than any of us would like. ↩

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On Empathy and Blame

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

In designing your lessons, I cling to this idea, from the GAP protocol you’ll need to review before Friday:

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

The most important thing is always something about how you learn, and you learn what you put into practice. We need more “collateral learning” in our lives. Keep that in mind as you watch these next two videos and prepare to write a response.

Prompt #1: On Empathy

Prompt #2: On Blame

Your Response

Take the next 48 hours or so, in and out of class, to write a response to these videos. Use these three ideas to guide you:

  • These videos obviously connect to the skills and traits of this course. What do they add to your understanding? To what extent can you use these as part of our learning?
  • Last week, the entire building spent P1 looking at the idea of accountability, and the second video above especially connects to that lesson. How do these videos on empathy and blame tie into what you saw last week?
  • Your personal reaction matters as much as the course and the building. To what extent do these videos resonate with you? What will you take away from them to put into practice?

Write something that weaves those three focuses together, if you can. Consider your response an essay in the true sense of the word, and attach a copy of that response to the post in Google Classroom.

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Getting Things Done

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

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

Load the following calendar in a separate tab or window:

That calendar will be plastered everywhere it can be this week. It organizes two major components of our course for the rest of the year:

  1. Grade Abatement | You will pause every three weeks to complete a Google Form, which will be used as it was in Q2 and Q1 to generate a GAP score for that three-week period. You’ll have three GAP scores by the end of the quarter. They will be averaged together for your quarterly grade.
  2. Pareto Projects | On the Fridays indicated, we’ll set aside the period for focused Pareto work, including as many trips to the iLC as we can manage. Ignore the previous calendar for now1.

Remind yourself that there is a protocol for grade abatement that will, if followed specifically, allow us to post a GAP score every three weeks. Load a copy of that protocol here, or through any of the half-dozen links on this site. There are always extra copies in the classroom, too.

That protocol, like every iteration of every element of this course, focuses on how skills connect and concatenate2. And like every iteration and element, it emphasizes one skill as the one on which the others depend:

This screenshot includes the surrounding page material from the document, because it lets me emphasize again the need to “explore, create, learn” in here. (It also reminds you that the document is nine pages long, which means you have nine pages of information that you should have internalized months ago.) That is our focus, but it’s the less-exciting work of organization that gets us into that maker mentality.

For the next few days, you are looking at 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. Your assignment is to assess your organization of that stuff in four categories:

  1. Physical | Start by opening up your backpack or bag, any and all notebooks you keep for your classes, your vintage Trapper Keeper, etc. You could pour this stuff out onto a table, if you have the space, or just flip through. 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 look like?
  2. Digital | At this point in an instructional post, you should have a number of tabs open. That’s the first half of this category: How do you keep track of what you’re looking at online? Do you have a system for organizing ramiform reading? The second half is Google-driven and requires you to assess your Google Drive, Google Classroom, and Gmail organization. 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?
  3. Schedule | This is probably an extension of the first two, but let’s see if it helps to separate it. Do you have your schedule organized? To what extent do you plan out your days and weeks, and what does that plan look like? The calendar I’ve made for you is an example of organizing your time in this fashion. What do you do with those teacher-provided documents?
  4. Mental | Again, this is an extension of the rest, but it will probably help to keep it separate for this exercise, because we can focus in on GAP skills and traits. How do you organize your approach in this course and in other courses? What do you prioritize in terms of those universal skills and traits? Refresh your memory as necessary through this link.

Write down your observations after talking them over with your peers and/or me. The obvious next step will be to revisit and refine your systems for organization, but for now, concentrate on what’s in front of you. You will be able to put a copy of your notes and writings on Google Classroom.

Getting Things Done, Part 2

As a possibly important sidebar, let’s talk about your personalities. There is a caveat a little further down, but we should start with an introduction to the concept we’ll be using and then jump right into the test:

Free personality test | 16Personalities

Free personality test – take it to find out why our readers say that this personality test is so accurate, “it’s a little bit creepy.” No registration required!

This isn’t required, but you’re probably going to be interested in taking that test, which will give you a four-letter designation and a detailed explanation of what those letters mean. First, though, you’ll want that caveat:

What’s the Forer effect?

Have you noticed that you’re the kind of person who, while inherently empathetic, is also marked by a strong streak of independent thinking? Or perhaps you’re more the type who is a little self-critical and insecure, but can defend yourself when needed? Maybe you’re a human being, with various thoughts and feelings that sometimes contradict.

When we’re talking about how you organize yourself in here, we’re really talking about you as a whole person. That’s the universality our work drives toward. A personality test, especially one as steeped in good research as this one, might be useful. But that Forer effect is a real and powerful phenomenon.

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. Without taking the test again, I can read through the differences and apply that knowledge to myself. I believe those differences are crucial to my development as a teacher, which gives me a starting point for meaningful metacognitive discussion and writing.

Approach this Myers-Briggs diagnostic with the same understanding: It’s more about how you use the ideas to organize your self-analysis than it is about being judged by an Internet test. If you do take this test, discuss its efficacy here and elsewhere in our classroom. Be sure you read everything the site presents to you, keep that Forer effect in mind, and do some reflective writing.

From the profile of an INTP, or “Logician”

  1. It’ll stay on the front page until I can insure that we’re able to use the new calendar. Remember that this sort of thing is iterative, which means it needs to be as flexible as it is focused. ↩

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

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Advanced Placement Ownership

  By AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

I spent way too long on this page learning about non-Euclidean geometry.

What You Own

Your first timed essay prompt, and our first foray into the eldritch geometry of the College Board, deals with the concept of ownership. This is not an accident. You must own your learning in this course, and you have now a post of street-corner preaching that tells you that. We’ve shifted the paradigm. It’s not going to look like anything else, especially in terms of student ownership. When it does look familiar, in fact, I’ve failed you — given into half-measures, which Mike Ehrmantraut would tell us is a bad idea.

But a full-measure approach doesn’t mean a lack of transparency or agency. Far from it. To make sense of your performance on this timed essay, you must simply1 embrace the interstitial and grade-abated structure of the course itself. Your feedback is built into the process, with additional mentoring and proxy feedback available starting on Thursday of this week. (We’ll need Wednesday for a frank discussion of that last post.)

Only… you haven’t met your end of that bargain. For the last week, I’ve been asking questions of individuals and small groups designed to test your close reading and internalization. A few students stood out; many more students failed that test. You aren’t doing the work.

Front-Loaded and Responsive

On January 20, four days before you wrote the timed essay itself, you were given instructions through Google Classroom. Here are those instructions in full:

On Tuesday, you will write your first timed essay. We delay this in our course (most AP courses start the test prep early) in order to focus on the substructural skills that matter beyond a high-stakes test, but we don’t ignore timed work; if anything, we emphasize the gamesmanship and performative skill involved. This assignment gets right at that emphasis.

Attached below is an AP exam guide I developed, plus a more specific guide for the third-free response question. You will be writing one of these free-response essays (abbreviated as FR3) on Tuesday. You will, in fact, be answering FR3 from the 2013 AP English Language and Composition Exam. That prompt is attached below, too, as part of a collection of all free-response questions from 2007-2014. (It has yet to be updated for 2015 and 2016. Blame the small humans crawling and sprinting around my house; I have a lot less time than I used to have.)

Finally, you will find a link to a Sisyphean High Medium post that explores the idea of gamesmanship on high-stakes exam. Reading this instructional essay will give you a much stronger sense of how to approach Tuesday’s writing — and all of the other timed writing and timed multiple-choice we’ll do over the next four months.

Your assignment here is to account for your choices this weekend. When Tuesday arrives, will you have read the guides and prepared for the FR3 essay? Will you have looked at the prompt ahead of time? Will you have studied the Medium essay like you would a lecture or textbook chapter? You can and could do any of these things. Because we are grade-abated, the focus is, as always, on:

1. How you grow over time in these skills, traits, and performances
2. How you collaborate with others to improve, learn, etc
3. How you monitor and analyze your individual choices and development

Growth, collaboration, and metacognition. Approach all of our test-driven work with that in mind — and a copy of your grade abatement profiles next to you — and you’re going to maximize your potential when it comes time to take the actual test.

One quick note: I have spent time over the last few months (when I’m not chasing down those small humans in my household) developing a more streamlined and helpful version of bishop composition, the writing process that includes the DAMAGES rubric many of you have used before. I should finish the work soon. In the meantime, you have access to old version of the rubric and writing process, including versions that link up with the College Board’s essay rubric, through the central Sisyphean High site. You’ll also find embedded copies of DAMAGES and related processes within the test guides attached here.

Now to your assignment:

Write a short, insightful essay about your preparations and approach to this first free-response prompt. Account for and analyze your choices. Consider the extent to which you studied the guides, whether or not you read the prompt, and the purpose behind every one of these decisions.

You can do write this metacognitive/reflective response whenever you like, but I might suggest waiting until Tuesday evening to start, since you will then be able to fold in your experience writing the FR3 response itself. Treat the essay you write for this Classroom assignment as you would any essay: Use Paul Graham’s logic and river metaphor alongside our systemic approach to learning to say something meaningful and truthful about your learning.

I’ll pull out the two central questions embedded in that assignment:

  1. Will you have read the guides and prepared for the FR3 essay?
  2. Will you have studied the Medium essay like you would a lecture or textbook chapter?

The answers that many of you would be forced to give are:

  1. Not really
  2. Not really

But as the last post argues vociferously, these front-loaded instructions and lessons are more important than the writing itself. This is where your learning happens. This is where all feedback starts. Without a deep dive into those guides and lectures, you can’t hope to sit with me and unpack your performance on the timed essay. You simply won’t have the context or language to do that. You will instead fit the quotation at the start of this instructional essay, Dunning-Kruger effect in full force:

I tend to subscribe to a different theory on [Jason] Whitlock. What people see as his self-serving imposture is in fact little more than political and historical illiteracy, mingling with a hack columnist’s instinct for provocation… [H]e’s a low-information guy, infinitely suggestible, learning on the fly, joining in on a conversation in a language he has no interest in learning… Given his lack of intellectual curiosity, the astonishing thing with Whitlock is that he’s ever right at all.

It is possible that you, at this moment, are pedagogically illiterate, because you have not invested the necessary time in this course. You might, at this moment, be a “low-information guy,” using an outdated language to try to talk to me. What you control, however, at this moment, is whether or not that changes — whether or not you conquer any “lack of intellectual curiosity.”

The Timed Essay as Example

In order to work closely with me (or any proxy) on this timed response, you must start with this:

View at Medium.com

Bring a consistent, careful, annotated interaction to that essay. Then read both of these guides with the same consistent, careful, annotated interaction:

I hope that this step is review for some of you. That’s a good thing, and you want that kind of engineering redundancy in your studies — a backup of things, essentially. For many of you, however, this is obviously the first time you’ve truly engaged with that instructional material. Make it count.

When you’re ready, you can finally take a look at your timed essay… and set it aside almost immediately in favor of this:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2Fap13_scor_q3.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

That PDF is lifted directly from the College Board’s page of free-response material. That page has every resource you need to be ready to work directly with me. You can look over the 2013 exam, read what students had to say about Question 3, and then look at the scoring rubric and exemplars. It’s only after you’ve prepared with all of this that you’re able to benefit from my feedback.

Which brings us to your assignment:

Dedicate your class periods to this timed essay, and make sure that you are ready as soon as possible to work with me in small groups or individually on your timed response. You may ask questions about the guides, the exemplars, the lectures, etc, and I will help you. When you do seek feedback about your own essay, however, you must have a relative mastery of all this preparatory content. Do not seek feedback on your essay until you’re ready for it.

A few other notes:

  • When you’ve internalized enough of this prep material, you and I will be able to determine out what your essay would have gotten from an AP reader. Figuring that out on your own is much more effective than having me tell you.
  • That said, I will tell you what you’d have gotten. The same investment requirements apply, of course.
  • You won’t have physical copies of the College Board’s student essays, because we have to try to save the forests at some point. You should already have a copy of the scoring rubric (the correct one, not the one I erroneously printed in your timed writing packet).

Ask questions below.

  1. An adverb that takes on very different connotations in this course, I know. ↩

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Tilting at Windmills

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

Picasso’s take on Don Quixote.

Q2 GAP Feedback

TL;DR | The three most important elements of this course right now are these:

  1. Consistent, effective, respectful use of every class period
  2. Consistent, careful, annotated interaction with all interstitial instruction/feedback/etc
  3. Consistent, collaborative, goal-oriented feedback looping with the teacher or proxies

Assignment #1 | Pull out every adjective from that list. You should have an immediate and intuitive sense of what each adjective means, but you’ll want a more articulated definition, too. What, for instance, does effective use of every class period look like? What does respectful have to do with your use of class time?

Assignment #2 | The following document uses data from Q2 to illustrate these elements and give you direction as you move into Q3. You have a Google Classroom assignment built around this document (and the interstitial directions you are currently reading) to force you to start doing what’s required of you. Complete that Google Classroom assignment.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2FTier4LanguageandLogic.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

Maker Spaces

Where you sit in a makerspace is critical. Your use of space is critical, hence the term makerspace. Small shifts in our physical setup open up new perspectives — which is exactly what happened when I moved the de facto teacher desk to the middle of the room. Two days of observing you was enlightening1.

From today onward, all junior classes will be allowed to sit where they like, but they must recognize the need to improve their in-class focus, interstitial reading, and use of resources. There are six desktop PC stations in Room 210, for instance, any of which would work well as study corrals. Our round tables should be for discussion, most likely without Chromebooks, or with a shared Google Document as the focus. The U-shaped conference tables should be for a different sort of discussion, probably led by a student with some proxy or atelier feedback to share. The high tables should be regularly moving into new configurations that reflect each group’s goals.

If you are in one of the juniors classes in Room 210, your assignment is to make better use of the space. I will be observing your efforts and giving you feedback on your choices. You probably want to keep the criteria for a Tier 4 GAP score in mind, too, since this is a formal assignment, and you know that those aren’t just given through Google Classroom2.

Sophomores will have assigned seats, with some self-selected groups allowed to stay together. That class simply isn’t focused enough when given free reign over the classroom space. We will need to shift into more teacher-monitored group work, and individuals will need to sit where they can be held accountable for pretty much every choice.

I’m sharing these decision with everyone at once, by the way, because juniors can absolutely lose the ability to choose where to sit and what to do. There is a limit to this course’s patience, and after that limit, you must be forced to work. You’ll either develop these habits on your own or be forced to develop them. You probably know that the former is almost always more powerful and long-lasting than the latter.

  1. Terrifying? Depressing? I’m not sure what the word is there. ↩

  2. They aren’t always marked in metaphorical neon lights, either. The point of this interstitial reading, remember, is to force you to read slowly and carefully. ↩

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Politics and the English Language

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

From a recent Daily Beast article on Orwell. Click to read.

Clarity Is the Remedy

In searching the Internet for recent articles on George Orwell, I found an NPR story that was published more than a decade ago:

Most people these days think of George Orwell as a writer for high-school students, since his reputation rests mostly on two late novels — Animal Farm and 1984 — that are seldom read outside the classroom. But through most of his career, Orwell was known for his journalism and his rigorous, unsparing essays, which documented a time that seems in some ways so much like our own.

I used to teach Animal Farm, and you know, of course, that I’ve encouraged you to read 1984, among other novels1. But I agree with Paul Graham and Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace and many other smart people: The surest way to ruin a student’s experience with an author is to make the student take tests and write essays about the experience. Instead, you need to recognize that there might be a reason for Orwell’s surge in popularity over the last few weeks.

Read the rest of this NPR essay from 2006, and then tackle Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which is embedded below and will be photocopied as soon as possible. We’re going to go slowly, but we are going to talk about politics. Everything is about politics, after all, especially lying. As Orwell said,”Politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

Orwell on Writing: ‘Clarity Is the Remedy’

Most people these days think of George Orwell as the author of high school reading staples Animal Farm and 1984. But author Lawrence Wright says that Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” is the piece of writing to which he most often returns.

Politics and the English Language

Reading an essay like this in a climate like ours requires some interaction. I’ll focus your efforts later in the week; for now, take notes in a way that feels natural to you.

Sidebar: If you are in AP11, plan your week around two assignments: Orwell’s essay and the timed essay you wrote a while back. All juniors should expect general feedback on grade abatement early this week. GAP scores will be posted by Wednesday afternoon.

If you want to read Orwell online, use this link:

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse.

Remember to enable the reader function on Safari if you’re using an iOS device, which will make the text easier to skim:

It’s a little more complicated to do this on Android, but here’s one set of directions for the Chrome browser. If there’s an easier way, leave it in the comments below. The goal is to make it possible to read this sort of essay (and this sort of post) interstitially.

If you want to print your own copy, use the document embedded below. I’ll make copies for you, however, as soon as I’m back in the building tomorrow morning.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2FPoliticsandtheEnglishLanguage1946.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

  1. I was a little too ambitious in floating so many novels at once, but that’s the point of a makerspace: Be ambitious, make mistakes, and learn something from our failures. Don’t be surprised if we randomly spend a period discussing how to catch an invisible man, though. ↩

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Second Perspectives: Q2 GAP

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

Click to see more of Felice Varini’s perspective-warping artwork.

Trompe-l’œil Learning

At the end of the first quarter, you were given this:

The process [of GAP scoring] should be individualized. Grade abatement stresses individual learning, and it would undermine our philosophy to treat the end of each quarter as a high-stakes event. It would turn us back toward the warping pressure of the old model of learning, and none of us — teacher absolutely included — benefits from the wearying push through 140 essays, reports, or conferences.

This is still a new idea to me, but it seems more and more important as it plays out in the classroom. We can’t be a course that focuses on final artifacts over process. The experimental model — the makerspace mentality we’re trying to embrace — values results, but it shouldn’t prioritize them. The push for risk-taking and integrity is undermined by any traditional teacher-as-judge-and-jury assessment.

As always, though, your ability to provide what Tony Wagner calls “collective human judgment informed by evidence” is dependent on how much you’ve invested in the course. Your independence and individuality depend on how closely you’ve read posts like this one. I’m running out of metaphors for this — cooking still seems apt, and vaccination is never more appropriate than during flu season — but, to use a metaphor to describe using metaphors, these windmills won’t tilt at themselves.

I’d like my role at the end of any GAP process to be simple: I’m there to put you in the exact spot that lets you see yourself clearly. I help you find clarity, especially when your learning starts to seem random and unconnected, like the spatial artwork of Felice Varini:

I’m there to shed light on the evidence you’ve accrued when it looks like a pile of trash, as in the mixed-media artwork of Tim Noble and Sue Webster:

The most important step is about perspective. Varini’s artwork only makes sense if you stand in exactly the right spot. Find that spot, and the random shapes snap together:

With a bit of light in the right spot, the pile of trash transforms into this:

You need to find the necessary perspective on your body of work. The picture might not always be positive or pretty — the hammer and axe in that silhouette are a little disconcerting — so it must always be clear. The end of a quarter should be a validation and a celebration, and then it should pass quickly. If you have struggled, it should be a moment of reflection that spurs greater effort and focus — and then that, too, should pass quickly.

Q(x) Assignment

Which brings us to your GAP assignment, to be completed efficiently and insightfully and in two stages:

  1. Google Form due before 7 AM on Wednesday, January 25
  2. Google Classroom assignment due before 7 AM on Friday, January 27

The early morning deadlines allow me to read your responses throughout the day, which speeds along the triage process. The form can be done in class or in 15-20 minutes at home on Tuesday, January 24, so that shouldn’t be a problem. You’ll have Wednesday and Thursday to figure out how to solve the second prompt, which is over on Google Classroom.

Start, of course, with the protocol given to you last quarter. Read it again (or for the first time, if you haven’t quite realized how essential that sort of guide is). Then read or re-read the massive update to Sisyphean High that was delineated back in November. The links are below:

  1. Grade Abatement Protocol | How to put together the evidence and understanding necessary for an accurate score.
  2. Mind the GAP: Sisyphean High 9.3.0 | An update on the course that covers pretty much everything.

Again, if you’ve done your work this year, you’ve already seen those. You internalized enough of them to have needed only the period on Monday to jostle your brain into the right position. These links are review. If you haven’t been keeping up with interstitial instruction, however, you don’t have a choice: You need to read it all now1.

When you’re ready, you can find your assignments over on Google Classroom. Remember:

  • Ask questions in the usual places.
  • Teach each other what you learn.
  • Fight the predictable, learned helplessness that comes with a difficult task.

Good luck. Let’s settle these scores, make something meaningful, and get back to our studies.

  1. Well, you do have a choice, I guess. You could choose to be frustrated and confused and misinformed. As much as that seems to be gaining in popularity around the country, I would advise against it. ↩

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Unspoken Rules

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

Our primary learning goal this week involves your new groups:

New Groups

That post explains why assigned groups have become important for a nontraditional space like ours. This week is the experimental step — the test of what those groups can do, with time set aside to debrief and adjust on Thursday and Friday.

The secondary learning goal this week is to analyze an author’s writing in a unique way. You’ll have an article from The New York Times that was published on Thursday, January 5. Specific instructions for analysis will be given on Tuesday, after you’ve had a day to interact with the text as you normally would.

We also have a tertiary goal1: to extend and apply the text’s ideas to our current work, including the online components of your Pareto Projects.

Monday

Start by reading the article:

Rules for Social Media, Created by Kids (Published 2017)

Another group of seventh graders (of mixed gender and in a different community) told me the rules regarding how many pictures to post from an event. There was a sense of what was acceptable and what was not.

Work with this text however you normally would2. You can take notes, annotate the printed copy, click on hyperlinks, have discussions — anything goes. We’ll use whatever you choose to do as the basis for reflection and metacognition later in the week.

Tuesday

Remaining in your current seats — that is, wherever you normally sit during a class period — spend Tuesday analyzing the text. Commit as much of that analysis to writing as possible. You need written work for Wednesday. Use these prompts:

How does the ol’ rhetorical triangle break down in this text? More specifically, what can you tell about the audience of this text, especially compared to you? I think we can make a meaningful distinction between the intended audience and you, the actual readers of the article.

Beyond the rhetorical triangle is the style of this piece, specifically its tone. What is that tone? Make a distinction between tone that is backed up by language and logic in the text and a reader-projected tone. The latter is a tone that isn’t actually present. We often hear what we expect to hear, not what is actually written.

Finally, what can you, the reader, do with this? I would call this practical redirection. Are there other unspoken rules for social media? And since the answer is obviously yes, which ones matter to our studies?

Wednesday

Get into your new groups as you enter the classroom. Find space to work with these two or three other students, and then figure out how best to share your writing and thinking from Tuesday. Then work together to revisit the text and refine your responses.

If done correctly, this day will see you editing whatever you typed on Tuesday. You’ll have a record through Google, which monitors every change like a benevolent Big Brother, of how you incorporated your new group’s feedback.

Thursday

On Thursday, sit again with your new group. I imagine that many of you will need the extra period to finish Wednesday’s assignment, so that will be first; then you’re going to start reflecting on the previous three days. Consider how your new group meshed, how well you worked together, and how different the experience was compared to your usual chambered work.

Your assignments over the next few days are (1) to submit the text-based work you’ve done, and (2) to write metacognitively and reflectively about the group work, focusing on collegiality especially among the many other GAP skills and traits.

You’ll receive Google Classroom assignments for both of those. Expect the text-based work to be due on Friday; the metacognition will probably have a due date of Monday night.

Friday

Friday’s lesson will be determined midway through the week. As always, pay attention to the interstitial hubs of the course for information.

  1. Mostly so I can use the word “tertiary,” which is one of my current favorite words. ↩

  2. With emphasis on the imperative verb there: Work with this text. If your normal approach is to ignore an assignment, try something outside the box. ↩

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New Groups

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

TL;DR: Let me know if these new groups create any serious interpersonal problems, and then expect to use them in class.

The Stuff of Growth

Back in September, we watched Ken Robinson’s speech on education. You can revisit our discussion through the first part of this corner of Sisyphean High, but we’re talking today about his idea that collaboration is the stuff of growth and that most great learning happens in groups.

The complication arises from how you form those groups, and through the end of 2016, you had almost total control over your collaborative setup. A few class periods were rowdy or unfocused enough to force assigned seats, but never for more than a day or two.

The shift we’re about to make is not an indication that you failed, individually or collectively, to work well in your self-selected groups. Some of you proved Ken Robinson right every day. Instead, this is a deliberate effort to change the classroom space, which has begun to stagnate in recent weeks. You sit in the same places and work with the same folks, and you’ll all benefit from a test your ability to collaborate outside of your circle of friends.

UPDATE, 1/11 | Your groups have been adjusted. You can access the new copies through Google Classroom. Look for the update from January 10, which has a PDF attached. These updated groups are smaller and should prevent the interpersonal problems that were brought to my attention.

If you have any more concerns, juniors should look to the metacognitive and reflective writing outlined in this more recent post. Sophomores can bring their concerns directly to me or Mr. Looby. The goal is to improve, using the resources of the room as effectively and efficiently as possible. Remember:

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