Category: 2018-2019

Parent category for posts from the 2018-2019 school year.

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Video Meliora: Phone Ban

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

Starting Monday, your phones will be banned in the classroom. You’ve been given one of the pockets in the corner of our room as a holder for that phone:

Notes on the surrounding posters and handouts are in the next section. First, a complete list of assigned pocket numbers:

Write down your number. They are assigned in alphabetical order. We may also use these numbers to do some assigned group work.

Part of what you’re doing is performative — you are showing us, at the start of class, that you’ve chosen to remove the distraction of the phone. Putting that phone in its designated pocket does that. You are basically channeling Oedipus in this scene and playing to the back of the theater.

You should turn off notifications, sound, etc., before storing the phone. Make it obvious that you are removing the distraction.

The Why

You’ll notice posters and handouts all around the storage cubby for your phones. These are reminders about how to start the class period so that you can be most effective. The bigger poster is drawn from this:

“What Do I Do Next?”

While the smaller posters are all gleaned from the following document, which will be added to the “What Do I Do Next?” post when I find an extra hour in the day.

This is all about self-control and removing distraction. Remember that we banned phones once before:

Moratorium

That was the trial run. Keep in mind, too, that we looked at self-control and distraction earlier in the year:

The Return of the Fatal Flying Guillotine

That’s where the black-and-yellow poster by the phone cubby originates, at least in this class: Video meliora proboque, deteriora sequor. It means, “I see better things, and approve, but I follow worse.” I think you’ll find your productivity increases greatly without that distraction.

Ask questions about any of this, from the protocol for putting away your phones to the philosophy behind the decision, in the comment section below.

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A Matter of Character

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

Every year at this time — early March, with just enough winter left to make the rest of the year feel interminable — the high school’s National Honor Society chapter invites students to join. The first invitations are based on the student’s cumulative GPA1; the application, however, stresses a wide range of skill, straits, and knowledge.

The most interesting requirement might be character, which gets its first definition in the NHS guide to becoming a member:

The student of good character is cooperative; demonstrates high standards of honesty and reliability; shows courtesy, concern, and respect for others; and generally maintains a clean disciplinary record.

Searching their website for a bit will lead you to a more thorough definition, which is well worth reading in full.  In that address, the president of Trinity Washington University in Washington, D.C., states that

[c]olleges and universities seek students who demonstrate high moral character. University leaders desire students who will contribute richly to a campus community, not only through scholarship, leadership, service, and citizenship, but with a mutually inclusive commitment to trust, honor, and respect.

She ends by telling her audience — students preparing to apply to and attend college — to “remember the influence your character has on your opportunities, relationships, and future contributions to society.”

The National Honor Society doesn’t have a monopoly on character, of course. Character matters to every student preparing to apply to and attend college, which is why it’s one of the essential skills and traits in Brewster’s SCP and our makerspace’s grade abatement profiles:

This “ongoing, underlying focus on the individual learning experience” is dependent on a student’s character. Individualizing learning2 requires a strong sense of who that individual is.

Which is why you see articles like this one, from Bucknell Magazine, stressing character, not GPAs and SATs, as critical to “an open and holistic process of recognizing talent.” Read the entire piece below:

In the end, this is not about the National Honor Society at all. It’s a larger conversation around character and its role in school cultures, from high school to college. The March emergence of NHS simply gives us the occasion to discuss and to write about character.

It’s worth noting, as we move on, that while NHS is a net positive in school, it does succumb to some weird logic. Click for the xkcd site, or go here for an explanation of the comic.

Defining Character

To write about character requires a definition of character, even before we launch the writing process. This definition will change through discussion and reflection, but we need a starting point. I’d suggest the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which often addressed “building character” through Calvin’s interactions with his dad.

After reading a set of such strips, you should see the way a child’s perception of “character” conflicts with an older generation’s definition. It’s an interesting starting point, and it lets us return to the academic definition with a clearer perspective.

Start with what Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, gave as her definition of character:

  1. a concern for and personal commitment to a community

  2. an individual’s integrity, honesty, and trust

  3. an unwavering pledge to abide by established policies and regulations

  4. a willingness to stand and be an advocate for those who are experiencing adversity

  5. a demonstrated commitment to fairness and social justice

  6. a respect for the rights, needs, reputation, and intellectual and physical property of others

Each term and phrase in that list can be unpacked, discussed, etc., to draw us closer to our own definition. We can then compare that to the criteria given by the National Honor Society itself. NHS indicates that a student of character:

  1. takes criticism willingly and accepts recommendations graciously;

  2. consistently exemplifies desirable qualities of behavior (cheerfulness, friendliness, poise, stability);

  3. upholds principles of morality and ethics;

  4. cooperates by complying with school regulations concerning property, programs, office, halls, etc.;

  5. demonstrates the highest standards of honesty and reliability;

  6. shows courtesy, concern, and respect for others; observes instructions and rules;

  7. exhibits concentration and sustained attention as shown by perseverance and application to studies;

  8. manifests truthfulness in acknowledging obedience to rules, avoiding cheating in written work, and showing unwillingness to profit by the mistakes of others;

  9. actively helps rid the school of bad influences or environment.

These are interesting criteria to analyze. Pay attention to adverbs and adjectives, to abstract ideas like “morality and ethics,” and to the significant overlap between these criteria and our set of universal skills and traits3.

Writing a Character Essay

If you’ve invested in this interstitial post so far, you’ve already done a fair bit of the first part of our writing process:

The Writing Process

Now we can tie your background reading, critical thinking, and definitional work into a formal prompt:

Write an essay about your character.

Use the writing process to do this. Here is a direct link to the printed document:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F03%2FWriting-Process-v4-1.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

Start with the prompt, which is a deceptively simple one. You’ll need to think about your audience, your purpose, the sorts of clichés that abound in the more rote character essays — and then it’s a matter of finding an approach that explores your character in a unique and authentic way.

This sort of essay can be explicitly about selling yourself, including language that specifically references an application process (“I would be a good fit for these reasons”), but the best responses will do this more subtly, often by letting the storytelling guide the reader. Showing, not telling, will be our goal.

It is all embedded in the writing process itself. Use the digital or printed version, and remember that the makerspace is built for this kind of exercise. You are solving an authentic problem: how to write a character essay about yourself in a world that increasingly demands that you demonstrate great character.

Use the comment section to ask questions about the process, or to comment on some of this background reading and definitional work. We will do the bulk of our writing work in class, together, and probably without screens. This is an opportunity to prep at home and embrace the physicality of writing in school.

Keep something in mind: This is the first year that juniors will write their college essay at the end of the year, instead of writing it at the start of their senior year. Our character essay is a precursor to that, and many of your responses will be useful to us in May and June. This prompt does not, however, carry with it any restrictions on word count, subject matter, and style.

Let’s find the river.

  1. As always, I would point interested stakeholders toward Alfie Kohn and Jerry Jesness for a crash course in why GPA might not be the best starting point, even if it is the most straightforward way to sort students. ↩

  2. And it may always haunt me, like Marley haunting Scrooge, that “individualizing” is erroneously capitalized in this printed/posted/publicized version of our universal skills and traits. ↩

  3. Note, for instance, that “tak[ing] criticism willingly” is amenability. Collegiality and empathy are shown through “courtesy, concern, and respect for others.” This is universal stuff, and that should help us in writing. ↩

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One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019), Literature (2018-2019)

This is the instructional hub for a study of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Essential Questions

First, students will work in small groups to write answers to a set of essential questions adapted from the year-long questions suggested by the syllabus. These questions inform the literature and nonfiction we study.

  1. To what extent should we trust that what we see is what is really happening?
  2. To what extent should we trust our memories of the past?
  3. Is it better to be ignorant and happy, or to gain knowledge, even at the cost of happiness? Why?
  4. To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
  5. What does it look like to be truly alone, and what is the impact of loneliness on us?
  6. To what extent is human nature self-destructive?
  7. How should we deal with individuals who threaten a community?

Remember that you have precise feedback about how to answer essential questions thoroughly in this post: Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work.

We start with handwritten responses. After small-group discussions, those responses can be typed up and submitted for feedback.

Holt’s Threshold

Students will be given class time to read the novel and find what we call “Holt’s threshold.” We can then discuss whether to continue to read One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or to select a work of equivalent literary merit. Here are the two relevant instructional posts:

The Reading Process

Choosing to Read [2018]

Non-Fiction

We will also study this nonfiction piece, written on the 50th anniversary of the novel:

Ken Kesey’s Wars: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” at 50

Ever since it was published 50 years ago critics have described Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as the great nonconformist novel, but Nathaniel Rich writes that the novel’s true message is about the militarization of American society-and the trauma of war.

This is literary analysis and argument from Nathaniel Rich, who writes often about literature. The first paragraph:

When a novel becomes a “classic”—when it is digested by critics and English teachers and study guide authors into bite-size morsels that can be slurped with a spoon—it undergoes a peculiar type of transformation. For one, it ceases to resemble a novel. Even the messiest, most obstreperous books are reduced to a litany of bullet points, or a single bullet point. Moby Dick: Obsession devours. Crime and Punishment: Guilt corrupts. White Noise: Technology numbs. It can be disorienting to actually read the damn thing, and find out the epitaph is no more descriptive than a chapter title, and a misleading one at that.

This fits our approach to reading. For a refresher, look back at the reading process posts, or read this:

Well, Why Read?

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Data, Data Everywhere [English 10, 2/25/19]

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

Schedule time before March 1 to read this post and apply its data and feedback to yourself. Think of it in terms of interstitial awareness: When and how will you be able to read this most carefully?

Ask any general questions in the comment section at the end of the post.

GAP Q3A Scores

It is critical that you first read this post on pre-GAP triage:

GAP Score Triage: Overview

Then you must find your set of GAP Q3A data in the following spreadsheet:

You can also use type the URL directly: https://tinyurl.com/gap-triage-218. Scores for Q3A will be posted in the morning on February 25.

New Hall Passes

On Friday, February 15, one of the bathroom passes for Room 210 was found on the floor of the cafeteria, which is, as you may have noticed, not the bathroom. We’d already lost a pass or two this year to that sort of abuse, so you’ll now be signing out and back in every time you leave the room.

If you take too long, go too often, wander down to the cafeteria, or in any other way abuse the privilege, you lose that privilege.

No More Phones

December saw the first moratorium on phones:

Moratorium

Phones can be learning tools, though, or so the thinking goes. In January, we went back to student choice and self-control (again), and you were allowed to use phones and other personal devices in the makerspace.

Starting February 26 — on Tuesday, so you have Monday to make peace with the change — you’ll be prohibited from using your phones in the makerspace. The negative impact on your learning far outweighs the benefits.

You might want to read this to understand why the ban is necessary:

I will sort out individual access as necessary. Anticipate putting your phone in the holder in the corner, or accept that one of your teachers will take the phone to administration.

Spreadsheet Specifics

You should read the triage post and look over the spreadsheet first.

Total Check-In %

These numbers are based on the maximum possible “Daily Check-In” responses from November 17 through February 14. Absences and individual circumstances were taken into account after the fact on a case-by-case basis.

These percentages also ignore the content of those responses; instead, we are using them as reference points for habit-building and compliance. They are part of a bigger picture, like everything else.

Learning By Doing

This will get its own lesson, post, and discussion at some point.

The basic idea is that the more you, the student, do on your end, the more you learn. The work teaches you without the need for constant correction and redirection. When the assignments, texts, questions, etc., are done sincerely and thoughtfully, the doing is often enough. Hence the 0/1/2 scale on a triage spreadsheet like this.

That scale is there to tell you, after the fact and in conjunction with a GAP score, “No, you didn’t do enough.” Find the folks who wrote a lot for the ETA podcast assignment, for instance. Their work taught them through the way they did it. Others would be recorded as a “2” mostly out of kindness, but they definitely didn’t learn a lot from the writing — it’s a couple of sentences, if that, and obviously not enough to construct real meaning.

You get out of this what you put in. That’s the key to learning. You are given lessons that teach you by making you the agent of change. It’s not just about being corrected and redirected and so on. You explore and think in writing, and while helpful correction always comes in person, in class, in face-to-face meetings, etc., the habits and understandings that last longest happen through the work itself.

It’s a better form of feedback. When you don’t complete the assignment sincerely and thoughtfully, it doesn’t work. For you. It’s on you, then, to put in your best effort each time.

Update: Reading Calendar [Assignment Notes]

This assignment is on the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet as “Update: Reading Calendar.” It required only a single click. You had to indicate that you read the update by marking the assignment as done. Look at the directions in Google Classroom: “Let us know that you read the post.”

That’s it. Click a button. Let us know. Look at the spreadsheet, and note how many folks didn’t do that. Whether it was an oversight, an indication that they didn’t read the update, or disengagement, the takeaway is the same: You have to get better at organization. You might want to revisit that unit from the beginning of the year:

Organization: Getting Things Done

Regents Students: Overall Feedback on Q3A

https://tinyurl.com/gap-anchors | Load that document. Review at the descriptions on pages two and three. When you’re done, look at your assignments on Google Classroom for Q3A.

Here is a comment that could have been applied to many students:

Read both the student’s thoughts and my response. Then read a similar exchange with a different student:

Both students feel that directions, deadlines, and expectations are unclear. That feeling is important, because we need to work together to alleviate it. It is not a feeling based on fact, however.

There absolutely are deadlines. They are clear and consistent deadlines. Here is a student from the same Regents class as the previous two:

 

Note the time stamps for my responses. My feedback for these three students was within the same ten-minute window on Saturday, February 16. Here is another student in the same class, less than ten minutes later:

This student is using the idea of “External Artifacts” to take responsibility for missing work, because they know how clear and consistent the expectations have been. Rather than make excuses, they’ve embraced the empathy and flexibility at the heart of the course.

It’s also important to note that you have several days to write a paragraph like that about some element of your grade abatement profile. Here is what is possible in just 25 minutes of focused writing:

Again, read the student’s response and my feedback. This is a student is “focused and productive,” despite “a very large class with the potential to distract”; since every Regents class in the space this year is large, that could be said for all focused and productive students.

This student’s response is also honest. That’s why we focus so much on the Dunning-Kruger effect and the fear of being honest that holds students back. That last student has the following row in the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet:

That is exactly what they describe in their paragraph. That’s why they are a 90 in Infinite Campus: self-awareness, amenability, integrity, and overall consistency.

Practice Regents Exam (Aug. ‘16) [Assignment Notes]

First, a review of how we got here. On January 3, you were given this post:

Regents Exam Practice: August, 2016

On January 7, through Castle Learning, you were assigned the following:

  1. 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage A
  2. 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage B
  3. 8/16 Practice: Part 1 – Passage C
  4. 8/16 Practice: Part 2
  5. 8/16 Practice: Part 3

We dedicated class time to each assignment, and then extended the deadlines for each section of the exam to February 15, which was the day before your February break.

The metacognitive or reflective prompts attached to each section of the exam were generously assessed as sufficient or insufficient according to this standard:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

We left feedback where and when we could, prompted you repeatedly to return to incomplete assignments, and so on.

Load the GAP triage spreadsheet, and scroll over to the English 10 tab. The practice Regents Exam has its own section in your sheet. Before I paste in a copy of that spreadsheet, two note:

  • Part 1 multiple-choice scores with yellow shading reflect incomplete task (questions left unanswered), not a total score.
  • Essay scores of 0 in red reflect missing work (no attempt at a response at all), not a low content score.

As we explained in class, the least important part of exam prep is your score; it’s far more important that you understand how to improve, how to help others, and so on.

Here is a screenshot of roughly half of the total students in English 10:

Let’s talk about what this means.

Rewards and Incentives

If you earned an 85 or higher on the practice Regents Exam we did between January 7 and February 15 — five weeks or so — and you did the majority of the all-important metacognitive analysis, then congratulations are in order: You don’t have to do any more Regents Exam prep this year.

That includes the otherwise required work on exemplars and rubrics, all of which will be assigned in late February and March. You did well enough with the test and the required self-analysis that further test prep is not necessary.

If you earned between a 70 and an 85, you’ll be asked to redo the section with your lowest score. It will depend also on how much of the all-important metacognitive analysis you completed. You’ll also need to work on some, if not all, of the exemplar and rubric assignments.

If you’re below 70, you need practice, either in following directions and meeting expectations, or in the core skills of the test itself.

Depending on how low the score is, we’ll be folding in lots of exam-related practice to boost your skills. You’ll definitely be completing all of the exemplar and rubric assignments — that’s a great way to see what the state expects, and one of the fastest ways to improve written responses. Otherwise, we are going to individualize the work based on your scores and the quality of your self-analysis.

A scale score of 65, for instance, might just mean that you need to redo the section with your lowest score. You might need extra attention on the exemplars, and we’ll look closely at the quality of your metacognition.

Failing scores, of course, indicate the need for more support. Don’t worry! Again, the least important part of exam prep is your score; it’s far more important that you understand how to improve. We have plenty of assignments that will help you. We’ll make sure you do lots of self-analysis and reflection, too, including a special focus on the rubrics and exemplars.

For those students who really struggled and have scores at the bottom of the scale — 31, 27, 6, and so on — there is obviously cause for concern. Don’t beat yourself up, though. Test-taking is a skill. You’ll just need to keep practicing.

Fortunately, we’ll keep giving you chances to improve. That might mean that you have to give up a Pareto Project Friday or in-class reading day to finish another practice test, but the Regents Exam is something you must pass to graduate. That was the purpose of this diagnostic — to show us where the greatest needs are.

GAP Q3A Starts the Ending

With all that in mind, you have to start thinking in Regents English about getting credit for the year, passing the final exam, etc., because some of you are closing in on the point of no return.

We’re going to try to slow down. You’re still going to have to make good choices, pay attention to directions, etc., but we’re going to go as slowly as we possibly can. You must

  1. follow all directions exactly;
  2. meet all deadlines, unless explicitly told otherwise;
  3. use all individual and general feedback to improve; and
  4. stay focused each and every day in class.

If you don’t know what to do after reading this post, start with a review of what it means to do enough work to get credit:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

Ask general questions in the comment section below.

No comments

Data, Data Everywhere [English 11, 2/25/19]

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Schedule time before March 1 to read this post and apply its data and feedback to yourself. Think of it in terms of interstitial awareness: When and how will you be able to read this most carefully?

Ask any general questions in the comment section at the end of the post.

GAP Q3A Scores

It is critical that you first read this post on pre-GAP triage:

GAP Score Triage: Overview

Then you must find your set of GAP Q3A data in the following spreadsheet:

You can also use type the URL directly: https://tinyurl.com/gap-triage-218. Scores for Q3A will be posted in the morning on February 25.

New Hall Passes

On Friday, February 15, one of the bathroom passes for Room 210 was found on the floor of the cafeteria, which is, as you may have noticed, not the bathroom. We’d already lost a pass or two this year to that sort of abuse, so you’ll now be signing out and back in every time you leave the room.

If you take too long, go too often, wander down to the cafeteria, or in any other way abuse the privilege, you lose that privilege.

No More Phones

December saw the first moratorium on phones:

Moratorium

Phones can be learning tools, though, or so the thinking goes. In January, we went back to student choice and self-control (again), and you were allowed to use phones and other personal devices in the makerspace.

Starting February 26 — on Tuesday, so you have Monday to make peace with the change — you’ll be prohibited from using your phones in the makerspace. The negative impact on your learning far outweighs the benefits.

You might want to read this to understand why the ban is necessary:

I will sort out individual access as necessary. Anticipate putting your phone in the holder in the corner, or accept that one of your teachers will take the phone to administration.

Spreadsheet Specifics

You should read the triage post and look over the spreadsheet first.

Total Check-In %

These numbers are based on the maximum possible “Daily Check-In” responses from November 17 through February 14. Absences and individual circumstances were taken into account after the fact on a case-by-case basis.

These percentages also ignore the content of those responses; instead, we are using them as reference points for habit-building and compliance. They are part of a bigger picture, like everything else.

Learning By Doing

This will get its own lesson, post, and discussion at some point.

The basic idea is that the more you, the student, do on your end, the more you learn. The work teaches you without the need for constant correction and redirection. When the assignments, texts, questions, etc., are done sincerely and thoughtfully, the doing is often enough. Hence the 0/1/2 scale on a triage spreadsheet like this.

That scale is there to tell you, after the fact and in conjunction with a GAP score, “No, you didn’t do enough.” Find the folks who wrote a lot for the ETA podcast assignment, for instance. Their work taught them through the way they did it. Others would be recorded as a “2” mostly out of kindness, but they definitely didn’t learn a lot from the writing — it’s a couple of sentences, if that, and obviously not enough to construct real meaning.

You get out of this what you put in. That’s the key to learning. You are given lessons that teach you by making you the agent of change. It’s not just about being corrected and redirected and so on. You explore and think in writing, and while helpful correction always comes in person, in class, in face-to-face meetings, etc., the habits and understandings that last longest happen through the work itself.

It’s a better form of feedback. When you don’t complete the assignment sincerely and thoughtfully, it doesn’t work. For you. It’s on you, then, to put in your best effort each time.

Update: Reading Calendar [Assignment Notes]

This assignment is on the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet as “Update: Reading Calendar.” It required only a single click. You had to indicate that you read the update by marking the assignment as done. Look at the directions in Google Classroom: “Let us know that you read the post.”

That’s it. Click a button. Let us know. Look at the spreadsheet, and note how many folks didn’t do that. Whether it was an oversight, an indication that they didn’t read the update, or disengagement, the takeaway is the same: You have to get better at organization. You might want to revisit that unit from the beginning of the year:

Organization: Getting Things Done

Essay Writing: Five Prompts (Process) [Assignment Notes]

Go back to Google Classroom and read the directions for this assignment. Here is the second-to-last paragraph:

It’s also a test, again, of your ability to read directions carefully: You should attach evidence of your writing process here, but that evidence will vary from person to person. Anything from brainstorming to reflections on the process to a final essay would be evidence. You’ll need to work with your teachers in class to figure out what works for you.

You had to attach something here. Something. “Anything from brainstorming to reflections on the process to a final essay would be evidence.”

Here from one of your peers is an actual essay that works as evidence: https://tinyurl.com/y4mx634q.

Here is an essay that came from an individualized prompt: https://tinyurl.com/y3rqpkcg. That works, too.

The point is that the directions tell you what to do. They aren’t open for interpretation. You can’t replace them with your own assignment unless you have explicitly and individually been told otherwise.

Essay Writing: What’s In Your Name? [Assignment Notes]

Go back to Google Classroom and read the directions for this assignment. You’ll be told to read the instructional post, and when you do, you find this:

The prompt for this writing assignment is simple: Write an essay about your name. The trick is unpacking that prompt and finding an interesting approach to the subject.

That was posted January 31. We talked a lot in class about this essay as an alternative to the “five prompts” essay, so you might not have finished it. That would be fine, but finishing is obviously different from starting. You had to do something over the three weeks this was an assignment, and it needed, to some extent, to reflect your understanding of the writing process:

The Writing Process

In other words, if you don’t have anything here, and you don’t have anything submitted for the “five prompts” essay, what did you write? Where is the evidence of three or four weeks of makerspace work?

For the most part, if you did anything here, it “counts” for the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet.

Regents Students: Overall Feedback on Q3A

https://tinyurl.com/gap-anchors | Load that document. Review at the descriptions on pages two and three. When you’re done, look at your assignments on Google Classroom for Q3A.

Here is a comment that could have been applied to many students:

Read both the student’s thoughts and my response. Then read a similar exchange with a different student:

Both students feel that directions, deadlines, and expectations are unclear. That feeling is important, because we need to work together to alleviate it. It is not a feeling based on fact, however.

There absolutely are deadlines. They are clear and consistent deadlines. Here is a student from the same Regents class as the previous two:

 

Note the time stamps for my responses. My feedback for these three students was within the same ten-minute window on Saturday, February 16. Here is another student in the same class, less than ten minutes later:

This student is using the idea of “External Artifacts” to take responsibility for missing work, because they know how clear and consistent the expectations have been. Rather than make excuses, they’ve embraced the empathy and flexibility at the heart of the course.

It’s also important to note that you have several days to write a paragraph like that about some element of your grade abatement profile. Here is what is possible in just 25 minutes of focused writing:

Again, read the student’s response and my feedback. This is a student is “focused and productive,” despite “a very large class with the potential to distract”; since every Regents class in the space this year is large, that could be said for all focused and productive students.

This student’s response is also honest. That’s why we focus so much on the Dunning-Kruger effect and the fear of being honest that holds students back. That last student has the following row in the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet:

That is exactly what they describe in their paragraph. That’s why they are a 90 in Infinite Campus: self-awareness, amenability, integrity, and overall consistency.

GAP Q3A Starts the Ending

With all that in mind, you have to start thinking in Regents English about getting credit for the year, passing the exam (final or Regents), etc., because some of you are closing in on the point of no return.

We’re going to try to slow down. You’re still going to have to make good choices, pay attention to directions, etc., but we’re going to go as slowly as we possibly can. You must

  1. follow all directions exactly;
  2. meet all deadlines, unless explicitly told otherwise;
  3. use all individual and general feedback to improve; and
  4. stay focused each and every day in class.

If you don’t know what to do after reading this post, start with a review of what it means to do enough work to get credit:

Insufficient vs. Sufficient Work

Ask general questions in the comment section below.

No comments

Data, Data Everywhere [AP English, 2/25/19]

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Schedule time before March 1 to read this post and apply its data and feedback to yourself. Think of it in terms of interstitial awareness: When and how will you be able to read this most carefully?

Ask any general questions in the comment section at the end of the post.

GAP Q3A Scores

It is critical that you first read this post on pre-GAP triage:

GAP Score Triage: Overview

Then you must find your set of GAP Q3A data in the following spreadsheet:

You can also use type the URL directly: https://tinyurl.com/gap-triage-218. Note: Profile scores for Q3A will not be posted for AP students. See one of the later sections for an explanation.

New Hall Passes

On Friday, February 15, one of the bathroom passes for Room 210 was found on the floor of the cafeteria, which is, as you may have noticed, not the bathroom. We’d already lost a pass or two this year to that sort of abuse, so you’ll now be signing out and back in every time you leave the room.

If you take too long, go too often, wander down to the cafeteria, or in any other way abuse the privilege, you lose that privilege.

No More Phones

December saw the first moratorium on phones:

Moratorium

Phones can be learning tools, though, or so the thinking goes. In January, we went back to student choice and self-control (again), and you were allowed to use phones and other personal devices in the makerspace.

Starting February 26 — on Tuesday, so you have Monday to make peace with the change — you’ll be prohibited from using your phones in the makerspace. The negative impact on your learning far outweighs the benefits.

You might want to read this to understand why the ban is necessary:

I will sort out individual access as necessary. Anticipate putting your phone in the holder in the corner, or accept that one of your teachers will take the phone to administration.

Spreadsheet Specifics

You should read the triage post and look over the spreadsheet first.

Total Check-In %

These numbers are based on the maximum possible “Daily Check-In” responses from November 17 through February 14. Absences and individual circumstances were taken into account after the fact on a case-by-case basis.

These percentages also ignore the content of those responses; instead, we are using them as reference points for habit-building and compliance. They are part of a bigger picture, like everything else.

Learning By Doing

This will get its own lesson, post, and discussion at some point.

The basic idea is that the more you, the student, do on your end, the more you learn. The work teaches you without the need for constant correction and redirection. When the assignments, texts, questions, etc., are done sincerely and thoughtfully, the doing is often enough. Hence the 0/1/2 scale on a triage spreadsheet like this.

That scale is there to tell you, after the fact and in conjunction with a GAP score, “No, you didn’t do enough.” Find the folks who wrote a lot for the ETA podcast assignment, for instance. Their work taught them through the way they did it. Others would be recorded as a “2” mostly out of kindness, but they definitely didn’t learn a lot from the writing — it’s a couple of sentences, if that, and obviously not enough to construct real meaning.

You get out of this what you put in. That’s the key to learning. You are given lessons that teach you by making you the agent of change. It’s not just about being corrected and redirected and so on. You explore and think in writing, and while helpful correction always comes in person, in class, in face-to-face meetings, etc., the habits and understandings that last longest happen through the work itself.

It’s a better form of feedback. When you don’t complete the assignment sincerely and thoughtfully, it doesn’t work. For you. It’s on you, then, to put in your best effort each time.

Update: Reading Calendar [Assignment Notes]

This assignment is on the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet as “Update: Reading Calendar.” It required only a single click. You had to indicate that you read the update by marking the assignment as done. Look at the directions in Google Classroom: “Let us know that you read the post.”

That’s it. Click a button. Let us know. Look at the spreadsheet, and note how many folks didn’t do that. Whether it was an oversight, an indication that they didn’t read the update, or disengagement, the takeaway is the same: You have to get better at organization. You might want to revisit that unit from the beginning of the year:

Organization: Getting Things Done

No Q3A Scores

Bolded to help you find it: There will be no scores in Infinite Campus for Q3A. You’ll get a six-week score at the end of Q3B1.

Look again at the spreadsheet for your course:

Look at the entire class. Many of you are expecting an 8 or 9 for work that objectively cannot fit those profiles. That’s on the basic level of sufficient work, which you’d do well to review:

For Honors Students: Sufficient vs. Insufficient Work

You have the rest of this panel to live up to what you’ve given yourself for Q3A. If don’t, your six-week score will reflect that lack of amenability and self-awareness.

This is about preparing you for the future. You have to be aware that you or some of your close peers are cutting corners, self-sabotaging, making excuses for poor work, etc., and you have to help each other to be better.

Here is a paragraph written on February 15 by a student whose body of evidence for GAP Q3A actually fits a 9:

One of the interesting things I have noticed particularly about the Tier 4 Group 9 students is how it relates to self-awareness. One of the main aspects that helps a student categorize themselves into a Tier 4 Student is their ability to be self aware of their work. When filling out a GAP report, it is almost entirely reliant on a person’s ability to be self aware for them to be able to judge themselves. If I am attempting to grade my work over the past 3 weeks, I must have a good enough understanding on how I work, and the level of the work I have done. However, when filling out the report and being self-aware about one’s self-awareness, it almost creates a paradox. If a student fills out anything lower than a 9 for self aware, the student has automatically proven themselves wrong by showing they are aware enough to know their work isn’t up to standard. And if a student is blindly filling out the form, putting 9’s because that is the grade they want, are they really being self-aware and looking at themselves from an objective microscope? It is interesting to be able to have such a high level of self awareness, because if you are aware of the fact that you do not know self-awareness, then you are self aware of what you know and what you don’t know. At some point by the 4th Quarter, I would like to be able to gain a better understanding of this concept, so I can be objective not just when scoring myself on GAP, but when looking at all my work in general. I believe gaining this knowledge would be beneficial to me not just in AP Lang, but all other classes, and many other places in life as well.

You can test yourself immediately: Did you read that closely? Did you think about its purpose within this lengthy, ameliorative feedback post? Or did you skip over it?

Draw your peers back to that paragraph. In our post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet, that student has nothing but twos. They are solidly effective, too, not barely adequate. Point out that fact to folks who don’t read this post closely.

Here is what I wrote back to that student on February 17:

This is a great answer to the prompt, but it’s also a great starting point for a necessary discussion in class. You have peers who lack that self-awareness, and by default, that means they aren’t the 8 or 9 they *think* they are. You, however, are a 9; your work is consistent, thoughtful, thorough, etc., and all the feedback you get reflects that.
The discussion is about how to help others *be* an 8 or 9, not just *want* an 8 or 9. What tone does the course need to strike? Does the feedback need to be harsh or kind? Do these folks need multiple chances without the penalty of low scores?

Think about those questions. These are essential questions to all of you, whether you deserved a 9 or not. These are questions that inform how you are taught and how you learn. Offer some of your answers in the comment section below.

While you’re there, consider what another student with twos across the board of our post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet wrote on February 15:

I also believe I displayed the characteristics of a fourth tier student through my feedback and peer collaboration. I have sought feedback in a variety of ways. Whenever I am unsure of an assignment or what a prompt is asking, I reread instructional posts, utilizing this source of online feedback. I also ask for my peers’ feedback frequently. Just for one example, when writing my response to prompt #1 for the essay writing assignment, I read my response to [a peer]. I was unsure of a few of the things I included in my piece, so I asked for her opinions. [They] advised me to add a few sentences to improve the piece, which I ultimately did. Further, I think I reach out for teacher advice frequently, asking questions or asking for a piece to be given feedback on.

Perhaps the biggest difference between an accurate end-of-panel justification and one that is just wishful thinking is specificity. The students who work backward from the high score can only repeat the language of the profiles, if even that; they haven’t actually done what they should have. Folks who have met the criteria can reach into almost any lesson, day, week, etc., and talk about specific evidence.

But I empathize with you. I know exactly how hard it is to untangle the way you think about grades. I know this feeling:

The rest of my comment:

This is worth unpacking, so I invite you to write about it. The number is what trips you up, not the self-awareness. It’s an unavoidable part of a system built on grades: We can’t untangle their connotations easily, even when that’s the healthiest and most productive thing to do.

This student is one of many who would be a 90 or 95, if I didn’t decide to forego scores until the end of Q3B. They all know, to some extent, what their evidence deserves, but they can’t reconcile that knowledge with what a 90 or 95 does to their overall GPA.

This is a reflection of a broken system. It’s no one’s fault. But if the system is broken, we have to be better than the system. Not by floating the standard2, but by gutting the machine and rebuilding it. The chassis can’t change, but everything inside can.

Individual Exemptions and Exceptions

On the subject of empathy: Zeroes in any post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet have to be considered in context. Missing work goes in as a zero; that’s how the formula works. There are often individual exceptions or exemptions, however.

The point of the spreadsheet is to draw your attention back to specifics. If you didn’t negotiate the requirements of an assignment or communicate clearly and explicitly what you were doing, that’s a problem.

There’s a reason that communication is before writing in our set of universal skills and traits. When in doubt, you need to communicate.

Essay Writing: Five Prompts (Process) [Assignment Notes]

Go back to Google Classroom and read the directions for this assignment. Here is the second-to-last paragraph:

It’s also a test, again, of your ability to read directions carefully: You should attach evidence of your writing process here, but that evidence will vary from person to person. Anything from brainstorming to reflections on the process to a final essay would be evidence. You’ll need to work with your teachers in class to figure out what works for you.

You had to attach something here. Something. “Anything from brainstorming to reflections on the process to a final essay would be evidence.”

Here from one of your peers is an actual essay that works as evidence: https://tinyurl.com/y4mx634q.

Here is an essay that came from an individualized prompt: https://tinyurl.com/y3rqpkcg. That works, too.

The point is that the directions tell you what to do. They aren’t open for interpretation. You can’t replace them with your own assignment unless you have explicitly and individually been told otherwise.

Essay Writing: What’s In Your Name? [Assignment Notes]

Go back to Google Classroom and read the directions for this assignment. You’ll be told to read the instructional post, and when you do, you find this:

The prompt for this writing assignment is simple: Write an essay about your name. The trick is unpacking that prompt and finding an interesting approach to the subject.

That was posted January 31. We talked a lot in class about this essay as an alternative to the “five prompts” essay, so you might not have finished it. That would be fine, but finishing is obviously different from starting. You had to do something over the three weeks this was an assignment, and it needed, to some extent, to reflect your understanding of the writing process:

The Writing Process

In other words, if you don’t have anything here, and you don’t have anything submitted for the “five prompts” essay, what did you write? Where is the evidence of three or four weeks of makerspace work?

For the most part, if you did anything here, it “counts” for the post-panel proof-of-process pre-GAP spreadsheet.

Moving Forward

With all that in mind, you have to start thinking about the end of the year.

We’re going to speed up. You’re going to have to make good choices, pay attention to directions, etc., because we will be balancing exam practice with the usual reading, writing, and problem-solving we do.

Remember that you are in a college-level class, not just an AP class, and college is all about making good decisions. Use the space.

Ask any general questions you have in the comment section below.

  1. The only potential exception to this is giving students whose body of evidence fits a 9 profile the 100 they earned. My fear is that this would still create, through the lack of scores for other students, a kind of Pavlovian panic or self-doubt in those other students. ↩

  2. I’ve linked to this before, so I’ll bury it in a footnote:

    That essay will ring true to most of you. We have to better than that floating standard. We don’t have to be cruel, however, to do it. It’s not just about grit; it’s about empathy, too. We can use our profile system to walk the line. ↩

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Galvanizing Feedback: How to Sisyphean High

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

“Sisyphean High” is an example of anthimeria in the title of this post, because we’re talking about a different sort of action. As always, the most important thing we learn is always something about how we learn, and the makerspace exists to build a better version of each student.

To Sisyphean High, so to speak, is to study how we learn the way we’d study computing in order to build our own PC. It’s highly modular learning — that is, learning with a focus on understanding and then experimenting with each component1.

It is also best done collaboratively, hence:

In It Together: 2/14/19 Discussion

That activity and the subsequent discussion need to be codified somehow, or we’ll lose the insight students gleaned from this year’s feedback after analyzing it in class2. For instance, that instructional post, “In It Together,” asks us to sort the responses into positive and negative piles, but students had a better idea almost immediately:

  1. A pile of responses that could be used to help others
  2. A pile of responses from students who seem to need help

That’s a great example of the best kind of feedback. And after we’ve done that — sorted the responses according to a different sort of efficacy and need — we can start getting down some of your insights.

Students: Use the comment section of this post to share ideas. Focus on how to galvanize peers and improve the learning environment. Reflect on the patterns you saw and the specific details that resonated. Above all else, be empathetic.

We’ll talk in class about how to use our universalized writing process to respond to this activity, too, according to your interest and investment. An open letter, a narrative, a how-to guide — these are all possible writing responses that could be published and publicized in order to help others.

  1. If PC building isn’t your thing, I really do think this essay that uses cooking as the analogy is a helpful one. ↩

  2. It’s important to link back to last year’s feedback, too, as part of this exercise. The insights are the same, although the data pool is shallower. ↩

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In It Together: 2/14/19 Discussion

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

Note: This post is from 2019, but it may help other students and stakeholders to understand the efficacy of the course. The lesson outlined and explicated here was designed to showcase positive feedback from students, both to defend the space from its detractors and to encourage buy-in from students and other stakeholders.

On to the original post:

Scroll past the background to the first subheading (“Rising Tides”) to see the details of the lesson itself. We will be setting up on February 13, weather permitting, and sharing out our findings on February 14. And if you missed this on the main page of the site, here’s an essay about taking risks and getting engaged in our makerspace:

View at Medium.com

In brief, the lesson we’re running this week is about collecting and sharing feedback in order to increase student buy-in and agency. The makerspace embeds Brewster’s SCP and other “future-ready” methods, and specific student feedback, positive or negative, helps us improve that work.

That’s one of our makerspace walls, with notes on the Daily Check-In and its mindfulness component; the use of engineering “failsafes” to insure a common language; the connection between our work and Brewster’s SCP; and in the corner, a note on adaptability in the face of inevitable curricular dissonance.

Just like it is in our writing process, adaptability here is about a universal language that students can take with them1.

Consider what Gerald Graff and Steve Benton published about this in 2013:

[C]urricular dissonance also does much to widen the achievement gap. The high achievers manage to synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning from course to course, but the rest do not. For them, education is not a cumulative process, but a bizarre obstacle course in which students must virtually start from scratch every time they enter a new course. Who can blame them if they come away believing that education is just a cynical business of learning enough to get past one teacher and then setting aside those lessons to meet the unrelated or conflicting demands of the next one?

This matches what you see in a high school. Students move from class to class and year to year without a guarantee that things will stay the same. That “bizarre obstacle course” persists, even when progressive systems like Brewster develop ways to bring teachers together — and Brewster’s Strategic Coherence Plan really does give students universal languages for assessing their own learning.

The high achievers’ ability to navigate this is the key. That ability can be learned, and all students need to know how to “synthesize the mixed messages on their own and thereby deepen their learning,” as Graff and Benton put it. We need to teach deeper skills and develop persistent traits in students.

With that in mind, here are the prompts and instructions that were posted on January 28, with a soft deadline of February 4:

Engines That Could

The prompts are carried over from the 2018 version of this survey. They are, in order:

  1. Reflect on our use of makerspace ideas and strategies — project-based learning, process-focused feedback, collaboration, etc — to promote student-centered work.
  2. Reflect on the extent to which the interstitial classroom’s flipped, multi-level instruction has changed how you access lessons and other important information.
  3. Reflect on the ways grade abatement’s use of profiles, skills, and traits has impacted your self-awareness, self-efficacy, and overall sense of success. Use this post as necessary: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2139.
  4. Reflect on how you use technology (e.g., smartphones, Chromebooks) in the makerspace to individualize and organize your learning.
  5. Reflect on our approach to writing, especially the focus on process over product and the use of radial and proxy feedback to empower and encourage students.
  6. Reflect on our approach to reading, especially the use of student choice in literature through the process outlined here: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2106.
  7. Reflect on the extent to which the course and classroom have impacted your social and emotional well-being, especially the use of a mindfulness-inspired daily check-in (http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2539).
  8. Reflect on our focus on empathy and collegiality as the “stuff of growth,” including the extent to which your work with others has helped you to accomplish your learning goals.
  9. Reflect on the big questions we consider as a Humanities makerspace — the problems we solve, individually and collectively, through creative and critical thinking.
  10. Reflect on the extent to which this course invites you to take risks, overcome obstacles, and forge connections between hard work and success.
  11. Reflect on the extent to which you are given clear goals and actionable feedback that help you adapt to academic and social/emotional challenges. See the posts on feedback as necessary: https://medium.com/@sisypheanhigh/a-better-form-of-feedback-b340032e3dd0
  12. Reflect on how this course instills in you the skills, traits, and attributes you believe are necessary for college and a 21st-century career.
  13. Reflect on the extent to which our universal skills and traits have helped you in other academic disciplines and assignments.
  14. Reflect on how this course is explicitly and implicitly preparing you for any and all high-stakes tests, including explicit test prep. Consider, too, our approach to quizzes: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=2562

There is also a space on the form for additional reflections that don’t quite fit one of the other prompts.

Rising Tides

To set up student work on these responses, my co-teachers and I needed to

  1. take the unedited feedback from students and transfer it to a spreadsheet;
  2. post that spreadsheet: https://tinyurl.com/SSCP-19;
  3. print the responses and add some of the feedback from last year’s students;
  4. cut out each individual response; and then
  5. bag the responses by prompt.

Each class period gets a stack or two on one of the tables in the makerspace. Then, in groups, they sort the responses, putting positive feedback in one stack and negative feedback in another.

Remember, this is unedited feedback, except where we had to remove identifying details. That’s the point. Students will see overwhelmingly more positive feedback, and that positive feedback tends to be specific and clear. The focus on metacognition and self-efficacy creates that kind of clarity.

And what that does is to open up a discussion about why students are not successful, or at least about what those students report about their lack of success. No one is singled out or otherwise embarrassed, even through an individual conference, because our focus is on helping everyone improve their learning.

As the responses are sorted, each group talks about what they observe, with the ultimate goal of reporting out those findings in a discussion over the next period or two. Each group will also share ideas on how to move the less successful students into the much larger group of motivated, successful students.

We’ll repeat the lesson in each class, from 10th grade to AP, and then provide everyone a chance to codify their findings through website comments, posters in the classroom, and open letters to struggling students.

This is empathy-driven problem-solving, done anonymously so that struggling students in the room can listen and incorporate the feedback at their own comfort level. It’s also a reminder of how powerful the profiles we use can be. The GAP process covers this, of course, but we’ll also be using the first page of a handout on GAP anchors:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2019%2F02%2FGAP-Anchors-WIP.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

The fourth tier of profiles center around a GAP score of 8, which becomes a 95 — by any metric, then, a measure of outstanding work. And the key in a makerspace to that performance is improving the learning environment for others. The strongest students benefit as much as anyone from the protégé effect, especially because of what that hyperlinked article ends with:

Above all, it’s the emotions elicited by teaching that make it such a powerful vehicle for learning. Student tutors feel chagrin when their virtual pupils fail; when the characters succeed, they feel what one expert calls by the Yiddish term nachas. Don’t know that word? I had to learn it myself: “Pride and satisfaction that is derived from someone else’s accomplishment.”

Unmotivated or disengaged students are given a way to reenter the learning environment, not out of fear or through force, but because the path is clear, and high-achieving students are shown a path to even greater success.

And that brings us back to how we started the year.

The Stuff of Growth

The first thing we do in the makerspace is watch the animated version of Ken Robinson’s speech on educational paradigms:

The complete poster of this RSA Animate hangs on our wall, too. And while it’s all inspiring, the key is what he says toward the end:

Great learning happens in groups. Collaboration is the stuff of growth.

As high schools move toward teaching students how to learn, not just teaching content, this collaborative “stuff” will be the most important element. Students will need empathy and a sense of the greater good to teach each other.

Herd Immunity

The other side of Robinson’s coin is that we need students who are inoculated against misinformation, cynicism, and self-doubt. That takes herd immunity:

View at Medium.com

This makerspace is emblematic of the need to arm students with information, open-mindedness, and patience. I can address rumor-mongering directly, and I can clarify what we do repeatedly; it’s only through the testimonials of students, however, that the paradigm shift begins to find roots. If we want buy-in for any major change in education, it has to be sold on the words of students.

That’s the point of a lesson like this: For all the lengthy, hyperlinked instruction delivered through this a website, the real impact will be in class using the oldest tools we have. We’ll have paper, pens, and voices. We’ll have each other.

As always, the comment section below is for questions.

  1. The next few paragraphs are lifted verbatim from that post on the writing process. This is really the focus of a Humanities makerspace, and I am getting used to the language as much as the idea. We are building substructural strength. As Neil Postman wrote, the most important thing students learn is always something about how they learn. ↩

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1984

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

A still from the film version of 1984. Click for more information.

Choosing 1984

In “How Teachers Make Children Hate Reading,” John Holt offers a litmus test for reading:

I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me…

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.

The bolded sentences give us our approach to novels like 1984. You’ve had Orwell’s book for a while now, and the important question is this: Have you given the story 30-40 pages? If not, that’s your assignment. You need to read far enough into 1984 to determine if you are going to keep reading or not.

We need to tweak Holt’s language a bit to make it more meaningful, of course. Waiting for an author “to get his story going” isn’t precise enough to be useful, and there are other reasons to continue a book beyond “lik[ing] the characters.” What matters is that you should be getting something out of 1984, and if you aren’t, you have the right to stop reading.

This is part of our reading process, which you should review as necessary:

The Reading Process

To make any decision about what you need, you need to invest in the attempt. You can’t begin a book expecting to hate it, nor should you bring your previous reading experiences to that particular table. Start clean. Recognize that many folks, including your teacher, think highly of the book you’ve been given. Then give Orwell a chance to hook you.

If you invest in the attempt, you can make a respectable decision to stop. Either way, you need to account for your decision, which brings us to what you do after giving Orwell at least 30-40 pages:

Write reflectively and metacognitively about your decision to continue 1984 or your decision to stop 1984. Explain your reasons as a result of earnest attempt to invest in the book’s world and characters. Justify the time you dedicated to reading the rest of the novel, or justify the choice to put it aside and look for other texts.

This will be a formal assignment at some point, and you will be encouraged to choose a “replacement” from a list of other dystopian novels (e.g., A Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World), if you stop reading 1984.

As always, the thinking that surrounds any decision is more important than the decision itself. Some of you have are deep into 1984, and a few have already finished the novel. Some read it previously. A few will have forgotten that it was assigned. All of you, to a person, can answer the prompt above by reflecting on the decision to keep reading.

I also invite you to share your experience with your peers in class and interstitially. Would you recommend the book? What general reasons for reading it (or not) would you give? Here is a student answering those questions eloquently back in 2016:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2016%2F11%2F1984Essay.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

Reading 1984 Online

Through the following site, you have the option of reading some or all of 1984 online:

http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/english/

We have enough hard copies of the book for all students to have a copy during any period of silent, sustained reading1, or for any close reading exercises. We have enough for a handful of you to borrow copies to read on your own. This online version is another way to read, though, and it presents a few unique opportunities.

One compelling reason to use this online version is that we can then use Snap&Read to translate the text, Co:Writer to take notes, and an open browser tab to look up character and plot summaries. We’ll review how those two plugins work as necessary, so that your Chromebook (or other device) can become a powerful tool for navigating a difficult text. Using other resources, from John Green’s Crash Course to old teacher banes like eNotes, is a way to borrow insight from others.

Another compelling reason to work online is what happens if we search “1984” — just those four numbers — in Google. The first page of results contains no fewer than three articles about how the novel relates to contemporary America. Keep looking, and you will find dozens more articles from just the past few years.

This isn’t about the politics of any of those articles, by the way, nor should you read too much into the political perspective shared by many of them; our lesson here is about the way this country talks to itself, and about itself, and how this novel now factors into that discourse. As a makerspace, we are concerned with literary resonance, not political beliefs.

Here is one of the articles in those search results, from The New York Times:

Another is from The Atlantic:

And here is a third, from The New Yorker:

One way to deepen our experience of a novel is to look for how real folks in a non-academic world talk about it. For instance, I might encourage you to scroll back up in this instructional post to the following paragraph:

This will be a formal assignment at some point, and you will be encouraged to choose a “replacement” from a list of other dystopian novels (e.g., A Handmaid’s Tale, Brave New World), if you stop reading 1984.

If you click on those links, you don’t get descriptions or summaries of the novels; instead, you get essays about those novels, and more specifically about how those novels are part of our national discourse. The first one is by the author of A Handmaid’s Tale herself, Margaret Atwood:

The second, from 2017, compares 1984 to Brave New World in the context of modern America:

Again, this is not about advancing a political agenda. We are a course in rhetoric and argument. We must notice, as Charles McGrath does in that second article, how important 1984 and other dystopian novels have become to our country’s discourse. This is the currency of political debate, and you should use the resources of our makerspace to make sense of that currency — and to use it yourself.

Which is to say that it matters what you believe, just like it matters what these writers believe. You need to be able to wade into this discourse effectively, having read some of the literature mentioned, and thus having earned your seat at the table. You need to know how you would respond to the rhetoric in use in the following paragraph of McGrath’s article:

“Donald Trump was inaugurated. All of a sudden, as many commentators have pointed out, there were almost daily echoes of Orwell in the news, and “1984” began shooting up the Amazon best-seller list. The most obvious connection to Orwell was the new president’s repeated insistence that even his most pointless and transparent lies were in fact true, and then his adviser Kellyanne Conway’s explanation that these statements were not really falsehoods but, rather, “alternative facts.” As any reader of “1984” knows, this is exactly Big Brother’s standard of truth: The facts are whatever the leader says they are. If you’re a rereader, thumbing through your old Penguin paperback, those endless wars in “1984,” during which the enemy keeps changing — now Eurasia, now Eastasia — no longer seem as far-fetched as they once did, and neither do the book’s organized hate rallies, in which the citizenry works itself into a frenzy against nameless foreigners. Even President Trump’s weirdly impoverished, 12-year-old’s vocabulary has an analogue in “1984,” in which Newspeak isn’t just the medium of double talk; it’s a language busily trying to shed itself of as many words (and as much complexity) as possible.

We can (and maybe should!) analyze articles like this as a class, looking for how they lean on literature to score political points or to stake a political position. This is how the real world uses literature, after all, and why we use the reading process we use. It’s also why you must choose to keep reading:

Choosing to Read [2018]

To repeat the end of that instructional post, you are always after a novel that

  1. teaches you something about how you read;
  2. serves as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
  3. is well-written enough to teach you how to write.

1984 is one such novel. If, through your own search or with the help of your teachers and peers, you find a suitable and more interesting alternative to 1984, you should read it.

Ask questions below. Look to Google Classroom for formal assignments related to 1984.

  1. And we will fold these in from time to time, I think, to see what it does for you. How often do you truly get to read in silence during a school day? It’s worth exploring. ↩

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The Invisible Man

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)
From the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man.

From the 1933 film version of The Invisible Man, which is quite different from the novel. We will watch the film, regardless of your individual reading choices.

Essential Questions

In education, the sort of question you’ll find below is often called essential. The Greeks called these discussions dialectics. In brief, they are the reason we read and think and write: to answer questions that matter. Or, at least, to start to answer them.

You have a foundation now, and you’ve been using it to read and write. You know what is expected in a learning environment like this one1. You also have a reading process that guides us through literature and more:

The Reading Process

As you did with your first assigned, full-length novel, you are required to read enough of the next book to hit John Holt’s threshold, which will allow you to choose what to read. Before we get to the assigned book, remember that anything you read in here must

  1. teach you something about how you read;
  2. serve as “a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity,” using most or all of the ideas under that aegis; and
  3. be well-written enough to teach you how to write.

The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells

Your assigned novel is The Invisible Man, by H.G. Wells. This is a short, strange story that uses science fiction to grapple with issues of morality and society. It also has an excellent film adaptation that uses the idea of an invisible man to tell a much different story.

You can read the novel here:


More on why reading online helps later. First, you need to answer the essential questions that go with this novel:

  1. To what extent do you trust that what you see is what is really happening?
  2. To what extent do you trust your memories of the past?
  3. Would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable? Why?
  4. To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
  5. What does it look like to be truly alone?
  6. To what extent is human nature self-destructive?
  7. How should we deal with individuals who threaten a community?

Define terms, seek examples, and, above all, talk to each other. Ask clarifying questions below in the comments. Use the makerspace to anchor your in-class conversations and then continue those conversations in writing. Share your observations and insights as often and widely as you can.

Note: As always, the formal assignment will be posted to Google Classroom, alongside copies of the novel and links to the other resources you need.

We will also add to these questions as we continue, shifting the language and focus as necessary. As you read and write, new questions will occur to you. This is Piet Hein’s idea: “Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.”

Throughout all of this, work in writing as often as possible. Sketch out ideas, take notes, write metacognitive responses — whatever it takes to generate understanding and GAP evidence, since those are one and the same in this course. Look to Google Classroom for formal assignments, as always, and advocate for yourself when you feel lost.

Choosing to Read

Again, we are using John Holt’s litmus test for reading to choose what to read:

I would like you to read a lot of books this year, but I want you to read them only for pleasure. I am not going to ask you questions to find out whether you understand the books or not. If you understand enough of a book to enjoy it and want to go on reading it, that’s enough for me…

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.

This time, you will use the protocol for choosing a work of literary merit after about nine chapters of The Invisible Man. At that point, if you want to start a different novel, you will be encouraged to choose one of the following:

These are shorter novels chosen as much for their length as the quality of the stories. They are also the same sort of science-fiction novel as The Invisible Man. If you want to choose a new novel other than these two, we’ll look first at Victorian science-fiction literature. Then we’ll look at more modern novels that cover the same concepts. So you’ll have choice within a predetermined framework.

We have a few copies of The Invisible Man on our bookshelf, almost a full class set of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but no hard copies of The Time Machine. That’s okay: You should attempt to read these novels online when possible.

Reading Online

Here again is The Invisible Man:


The most compelling reason to use this online version is that we can also use Snap&Read to translate the text, Co:Writer to take notes, and an open browser tab to look up character and plot summaries. Your Chromebook (or other device) becomes a powerful tool for navigating an interesting but difficult text.

We will review Snap&Read and Co:Writer as we start this novel. If you have questions, ask them below.

  1. Which is an atelier model, by the way — a specific kind of makerspace that centralizes creativity and expertise through the ripple effect of teaching others. That’s worth mentioning in a footnote. ↩