After all this time1, you know what to expect from this first day of school. You know what mixture of exhaustion and nervousness and excitement you’ll have. You know you’ll see a half-dozen course syllabuses and classroom expectations. You might do an icebreaker or two. Usually it all blurs together, because (barring variations in clip art), it’s just another variation on the rules, regulations, and grading policies that you’ve seen since middle school.
Our course will hit many of the same notes, but the tune is going to be quite different before we’re done. Or, to switch to a culinary metaphor:
Molecular Learning
That links to a Medium essay I wrote last year to explain the course you are now taking. It is the first of three essays in this opening post. None of these essays is required — more on how assignments work in a second — but they all will help you with the most important step you can take over the next few days: getting to know your teacher.
The written word is the primary means of instruction here, and these opening-day materials are your first lessons. You must read carefully, because I have written carefully, and in the writing are the answers to questions and concerns you haven’t even had yet. The writing will also model strategies and techniques for you. It will tell you a lot about my style and personality, too, which is just as important at this early stage.
Course Syllabus
You’ll notice that this post addresses all of you, whether you are enrolled in AP Language as a junior or taking English 10. This collective address will be rare as we move forward — note the menu that lets you select your class posts above — but you need to recognize that you share this digital space. That’s no different from sharing our physical space, and you’ll see soon enough how important it is to pay attention to the needs and impact of those folks.
This is all by design. All English instruction address the same universal skills and traits, and you develop those traits in the same sequence. There is much to gain from observing what your peers do, even if you are not given the same assignments. And when there is opportunity for alignment or collaboration, you’ll gain much from talking to each other.
Whenever you load this website, you should use the menu at the top of the page to look for class-specific lessons and feedback. If a post isn’t tagged for your course, you can still read it, but it’s not required. This is the digital equivalent of homework or notes written on a chalkboard.
Load your specific course syllabus below:
Read your syllabus over the next few days. Let me know immediately if one of the links is broken, won’t open, or leads to the wrong syllabus; errors are almost guaranteed in this kind of extensive, interstitial writing, and I’ll need your help to correct them.
Google Classroom
Your assignments will always be sectioned out by class period and posted to Google Classroom. You must register for the right section to see those assignments, of course:
- Period 2 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — joqb9v
- Period 4 [English 11] — 21n73p
- Period 5 [English 10] — 15wtqr
- Period 7 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — s1epxu
- Period 9 [English 11] — 1y60dxk
Use those codes to register for Google Classroom. If you have never used Classroom before, enlist a peer or talk to your teacher about what to do. Right now, each classroom stream is empty; on Thursday, you’ll get your first reading and writing assignments.
A Typical 24 Hours
As you complete your first assignments and work with me and your peers, you will experience firsthand what the typical day in here looks like. You will see what each part of the interstitial classroom is for and learn more about how grade abatement functions. You’ll begin to learn what the interstitial classroom and grade abatement are.
You learn by doing in here. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, however, you should read this essay:
Circadian Dynamics
This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background lessons and texts are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with these brief 39 minutes. We might circle up some days; we might talk in groups or meet individually; we might take practice tests or take a shot at timed writing. Without grades, there is enormous freedom to do what is needed, and you will direct most of the lessons yourself.
Your job, then, is to know what you are doing each day and to waste no time in doing it. That is the most important part of this course: When we are together in our classroom, you must be ready to work.
The interstitial/online elements are there to support this (and to make the Sisyphean grind of high school a little more manageable). Grade abatement is there to free you and empower you. Still, technology is only a tool. There is no replacement for the learning that occurs through discussion and collaboration when you share a learning environment with someone.
This essay explains more about how crucial our face-to-face work is:
Head Training: The 36th Chamber
(It also lets me reference Wu-Tang and Grindhouse kung-fu movies, which is important stuff.)
If nothing else, I want you to be able to answer these two questions each and every day:
- What are you working on?
- How can I help you?
If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know, because you are wrong.
This week, you might need time to go over the syllabus with me. You might need help setting up your Google account. Or you might know that you need to do your first writing assignment in class, because you won’t do it at home over the weekend.
You face no risk right now, so ask questions and try things out. The more you experiment and the harder you work over these first few days, the easier you will find it to begin generating evidence for your grade abatement profiles — a concept that will be second nature to you soon enough.
