Category: 2018-2019

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

No comments

“A Memory of My Existence”

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

A Long Way Gone: Chapter 20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2 Comments

The Unseen World: “Yes, Virginia”

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

The upcoming winter holidays offer us the perfect context in which to study one of the most famous editorials ever written:

http://www.newseum.org/exhibits/online/yes-virginia/

The Wikipedia page adds more context to the story, plus links to related subjects. It’s worth a read, too.

Here is the editorial again, reformatted for our course:

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

 

The Work

What you should notice about that last PDF, which will also be shared with you through Google Classroom, is that it was downloaded from a much larger document. This text is part of a much larger conversation about truth, lies, and the way we frame our world. Our next unit will delve into those issues, and what you will read then will help you make sense of the great lie of Santa Claus — an acceptable lie, perhaps, and one I tell my own children, but a lie nonetheless.

Synthesis — that search for related readings and context — also helps us here. Santa Claus is the subject of many thoughtful essays, from this pseudo-scientific back-and-forth on the physics of Santa to this semi-serious discussion of an actual war on Christmas. Tongue-in-cheek humor is a nice contrast to Church’s endearing earnestness, and I think we need both tones. (Irony and sarcasm don’t help us with the “veil covering the unseen world,” as Church puts it.) You will start to make connections between disparate positions and voices as part of becoming a better writer and as part of our prep for the AP exam in May.

The real lesson is that everything connects, and everything is an opportunity to improve the skills and traits of our course. Remember the metaphor Paul Graham uses: that of the river.

To help you understand Church’s editorial, you’ll need to respond to another batch of prompts on rhetoric and style:

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

 

These are reprinted below. They serve as discussion questions, too, allowing us to talk about the ideas of the letters as much as their rhetoric. Responding will require you to define new terms, ask for the right kind of feedback, and otherwise work with a different goal than just submitting the correct answers.

The prompts for “Yes, Virginia,” reprinted for reference:

  1. You’re going to notice immediately that this letter may not exactly be targeting one little girl. Be specific here, and take a look at every relevant element of Church’s essay: Who is his audience? How do you know?
  2. Church crafts distinct, intertwined arguments of fact, value, and policy in this letter. Research a working definition of each type of argument, identify each one in the essay, and then analyze how cogent or fallacious his reasoning is.
  3. Church believes Santa is real. Or maybe he doesn’t. How we read this editorial depends on the definition of “real” employed here. What is Church’s definition? Be specific. Figure out what definition — or definitions — he implies, and use his language and logic to support your analysis.
  4. Summarize each paragraph’s main idea in fewer than ten words.
  5. Consider the essay’s use of imagery related to childhood: rattles, fairies, dancing, etc. Pull out two or three of these images and explain their rhetorical effect.

These prompts require a mix of convergent and divergent thinking. Once you have your own responses, you can use the following essay as a way of understanding how to respond:

View at Medium.com

The goal, as always, is to analyze in order to emulate. Formal assignments will be posted to Google Classroom, but the overarching goals fall outside of the Skinner-box stuff: Understanding Church’s writing is how we get at the deepest and most productive discussions about truth, childhood, faith, etc., and it’s also how you become a better writer yourself.

Use this post to discuss the assignment with me or to leave observations. Keep your comments succinct. Spark conversations with each other. This is about the way we define and redefine truth in our society, which is a timeless concern. In fact, you might be interested in another famous article that ran in The Sun — although it isn’t quite what Virginia’s father meant when he told her that “[i]f you see it in The Sun it’s so.” It’s now known as the Great Moon Hoax:

Not the best moment in journalism, maybe, but a highlight in creative writing. Speaking of The Sun, I’ll leave you with their reprinting of Church’s editorial in 2012:

https://www.nysun.com/editorials/yes-virginia/68502/

No comments

English 11: Narrative Writing + Literary Analysis

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Start by reviewing our process for reading, analyzing, and sometimes emulating literature:

Literary Analysis Guide

On Narrative Writing

Through this post, you are studying and emulating narrative writing, which is a mode of discourse in which a sequence or series of events, real or fictional, is relayed or described. More simply, narrative writing tells a story.

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

Note: We are using that particular article for two reasons. First, if you read it, you’ll know everything you need to know to do this work. Second, it’s a site full of ads, which lets us use Snap and Read, one of the district’s most useful browser extensions, to eliminate distractions2. Whatever you use, make sure it covers the basics. You’ll need an internalized sense of them to analyze what you read.

Narrative ETA: Emulation Through Analysis

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

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

1⁰ Focus: How You Read
2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For
3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis

Note: For that tertiary focus, we are adapting the directions from Part 3 of the Regents Examination in English Language Arts, since it serves several purposes3.

Here is a downloadable and printable copy of all three stories, including the example text:

Example Text: “Widow’s First Year,” by Joyce Carol Oates

Note: You do not need to run this short story through the three responsive steps. Instead, it’s included to show you what all stories have. Even these seven words — just one more than Hemingway’s apocryphal story — create a story with a beginning, middle, and end. There are characters who experience conflict. That conflict resolves itself.

All stories obey these rules, or they break them deliberately. Keep that in mind as you read the two stories that comprise your assignment, and then use what you’ve learned here to craft your own story.

Here is Oates’ story in full:

Widow’s First Year

I kept myself alive.

Required Narrative #1: “Sticks,” by George Saunders

Click here for the story and a bit of background:

Required Narrative #2: “Give It Up!” by Franz Kafka

The second required story is quite short and strange. It will test your critical thinking and collaborative abilities to make sense of it.

“Give It Up!”

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was walking to the station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized that it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me unsure of the way, I did not yet know my way very well in this town; luckily, a policeman was nearby, I ran up to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: “From me you want to know the way?” “Yes,” I said, “since I cannot find it myself.” “Give it up! Give it up,” he said, and turned away with a sudden jerk, like people who want to be alone with their laughter.

Emulation: Narrative Writing

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

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

The End of the Writing Process

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

  2. When you click to “[r]emove distractions,” that site goes from this:

    To this:

    This is not the only way to get a readable, reviewable source for literary devices, but it works extremely well with our technology. ↩

  3. The first is to give you another way to learn the necessary literary devices, since the full exam prompt offers a list of them. This is what it looks like:

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

    The second purpose is to practice succinct analysis. You are not required to write an essay of analysis on the ELA Regents Exam; instead, you must write only two or three paragraphs. Your focus is on identifying a main idea, identifying a literary device that develops that main idea, and analyzing examples of that literary device in the passage. ↩

No comments

Pareto Projects: 12/10/18–12/21/18

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

The Schedule

Presentation and non-presentation schedules are saved in this Google Drive folder:

You can also load the documents individually:

The Projects

Most student projects will be showcased through this Google Site:

For now, it contains projects, testimonials, etc., from previous years. As new projects come in, that site (and this one) will be redesigned to showcase what students have created.

The Background

The background and FAQ post for these projects are available below.

The Pareto Project: Complete Guide

Pareto Project: FAQ

7 Comments

Bird Sings Why the Caged I Know

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Diction, Poetry, and Hip-Hop

This lesson follows our work with Francine Prose’s “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” which is embedded here:

ETA: Prose’s “Caged Bird”

In her essay, Prose has a few things to say about Maya Angelou. We will now look at one of Angelou’s most famous poems, pairing it with a hip-hop song it inspired:

The usual assignment for this pair of texts is a tone and diction analysis — a breakdown of word choice and how it contributes to the meaning of the overall piece. You might be asked to use this list, for instance, or to search through Google for any of the dozens of other lists available.

But we’re meant to be a makerspace. You should pay attention to word choice, but only because that’s what you do naturally when you read poetry or hear a song. Your assignment needs to be more creative, so: Use your analysis of these texts to create something meaningful. Emulate the poetry, search up other songs by Atmosphere and respond to them, have a circled discussion with a small group — just make it meaningful.

The song needs to be heard, of course, so:

On a side note (sub-tangent?), the comments on that video are, as you might expect, fascinating. Many years ago, I collected some of them for the first version of this lesson, and they ran the gamut from insightful:

It seems to me that this song is a response to Maya Angelou’s poem “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” Maya Angelou is a world-renowned African American poet, and her poem is a moving portrayal of the beauty of freedom. This song expresses the animosity and frustration of people who are NOT YET free, to whom the free bird is insulting and offensive. It might not be the author’s personal view, but it captures an important viewpoint that definitely exists in our culture.

To, well, less insightful:

no joke, i think hes talking about the reptillians/winged serpents/lizards(lizzies)/draconians which are from the planet in the Alpha Draconi star system of the Orion Constellation and created by the their parent race The Carians.

That first quoted comment mistakes the title of Angelou’s poem, “Caged Bird,” for the title of her memoir, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings.” I’ve made that mistake, too. It’s such a common mistake that it lets me link to a Snopes article on the Mandela Effect, which is really about confabulation and the faulty state of our memories1.

As for the second quoted comment: I appreciate the effort to clarify that the lizards can also be called “lizzies,” although I’d like to know if that is a term of endearment or just a sign of informality.

There are many other comments posted under that Atmosphere song. YouTube remains, as always, an endless documentary on the state of American consciousness. Here is a variation on that theme from 2008, which is so far in the past now that it’s a little disconcerting: Michael Agger’s attempt to classify and divide more than 58,000 comments on a clip of a baby laughing.

Use the space below to talk to me about this work.

  1. One of the problems we can tackle in a Humanities makerspace is the problem of memory. We might look at this nonfiction article, this Borges short story, Joan Didion’s essay on keeping a notebook, even another Atmosphere song — four perspectives on memory that open us up to exactly the kind of discussion and writing that asks and answers important questions. ↩

No comments

ETA: Prose’s “Caged Bird”

  By AP English Language & Composition (2018-2019)

Overview of the Concept

In 1946, George Orwell noted that

an 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.

Later in the same essay, he summarizes this idea: “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” This is true. We must focus on that, but we can also focus on a feedback loop that builds strength in thinking through strength in writing. We can listen to Orwell but invoke Neil Postman:

Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

We also pay attention to Paul Graham and his theory that essay-writing in school focuses on literary analysis through “a series of historical accidents,” with the end result that most school essays are “now three steps removed from real work.” Even non-literary assignments lose authenticity in the pursuit of academic emulation.

The path forward has you read what you write and write what you read. You must understand how an author writes in order to emulate those strategies in your work, not just to produce the sort of analysis that a cursory search of Google would reveal. It’s the difference between applied and theoretical science, and the difference between blowing up the kitchen and learning how to tell a good joke:

View at Medium.com

So we arrive at emulation-through-analysis (ETA) work, which is designed to teach you how to answer analytical questions while you answer them. You should define new terms, look up new concepts, and enlist the feedback mechanisms of the space to help you. Getting the right answer is a goal; understanding how to use the strategy or technique is the goal. And the substructure is, as always, made of the universal skills of grade abatement, especially these:

Keep those universal skills and traits handy. You must know how to create in order to create. A makerspace requires granular expertise before experimentation and iteration will yield results. Otherwise, it’s just a sandbox.

“I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read” by Francine Prose

Start with the essay, “I Know Why the Caged Bird Cannot Read,” by Francine Prose, which is available to BHS students here:

It will also be photocopied and posted to Google Classroom as part of any formalized in-class and interstitial work. The following questions, all drawn from that textbook chapter, allow us to do the kind of analysis necessary to implement the most effective writing strategies.

Before you answer these questions, know two things:

First, In addition to the usual feedback, I will give you a set of instructional responses to these questions. They are teaching responses, written as much to explain the concept, question, etc., as to give you the “correct” answer. This key will let you test your collegiality and critical thinking, but it will most directly test these skills and traits:

Second, you must answer these prompts by combing a sense of creativity (e.g., discussing your love/hate for literature, imagining what schools might do to encourage reading) with a granular understanding of Prose’s expert effectiveness (e.g., learning how to appeal to ethos as she does). We’ll always move from questions on rhetoric and style into emulative responses, personal essays, even rhetorical analysis essays — all writing that requires both to be effective and enjoyable.

Ask questions, make observations, and engage the assignment in the comment section below.

Questions on Rhetoric and Style

  1. Discuss three appeals to ethos in this essay. What different roles, or personae, does Prose use to establish her ethos?
  2. Prose’s opening paragraph includes such words as appalled, dismal, and dreariness – all with negative connotations. Why does she start out with such strong language? Does she risk putting off readers who do not share her views? Why or why not? What other examples of strongly emotional language do you find in the essay?
  3. Prose makes several key assumptions about the role and impact of reading literary works in high school. What are they?
  4. What appeals does she make to logos?
  5. Prose cites many different novels and plays. Does she assume her audience is familiar with some of them? All of them? Explain why it matters whether the audience knows the works.
  6. According to Prose, “To hold up [I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings] as a paradigm of memoir, of thought – of literature – is akin to inviting doctors convicted of malpractice to instruct our medical students” (para. 13). Do you agree with this analogy? Explain your answer. What other examples of figurative language can you find in this essay?
  7. Toward the end of the essay (paras. 35, 39, and 43), Prose uses a series of rhetorical questions. What is her purpose in piling one rhetorical question on top of the other?
  8. Would Prose have strengthened her argument by including interviews with a few high school students or teachers? Why or why not?
  9. According to Prose, why are American high school students learning to loathe literature? Try to find at least four or five reasons.
  10. Does she propose a solution or recommendations to change this situation? If she does not offer a solution, is her argument weakened? Explain your answer.
No comments

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

Click for the AV Club’s review of The Twilight Zone episode, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.”

The Point of a Story

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

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

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

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

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

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

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

To this:

Analyzing Narratives

After you’ve read the background above, you can move on to analyzing and emulating. Because you take the English Regents Exam in June, however, we’ll start not with short stories that can be emulated easily, but with a longer story that has been adapted into an Oscar-winning film.

After reading the story and watching the film, run each through the protocol for works of literary merit. Use the template provided below. Load it, make two copies of it in your Drive, and then complete both.

The headings are repeated below for reference.

1⁰ Focus: How You Read

Focus on what this work reveals about how you learn and how you read. Does the length of the text help? How? Did you print a copy of the texts, or did you read online? Why? What was the effect? When you watched the film adaptation, how did you do it? Were you alone or with others? Did you watch it all at once or in sections? What did your choices reveal?

2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For

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

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

Often, this kind of analysis is pitched in terms of essential questions about human nature or society. For this particular study, you should have already considered the following:

⍰ To what extent can any of us trust our senses?
⍰ To what extent can any of us trust our memories?
⍰ How do ignorance, knowledge, and happiness interact for us? In other words, would you want to be ignorant and happy, or have knowledge and be miserable?
⍰ To what extent and in what ways does power corrupt?
⍰ In what ways are any of us ever truly alone?
⍰ To what extent are people naturally self-destructive? What does it mean if we are?
⍰ At what point and for what reasons should a group stop an individual from doing whatever he or she wants?

3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis

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

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

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

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Short Story)

Author: Ambrose Bierce

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [Google Docs]

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [Free eBook at Project Gutenberg]

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [PDF]

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F11%2FAn-Occurrence-at-Owl-Creek-Bridge.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” (Short Film)

Director: Robert Enrico

An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge [on Vimeo]

Emulation: Narrative Writing

If you are so inspired, you can and should attempt to emulate Bierce’s short story with one of your own. That is the best use of this kind of analysis and discussion. You will, however, be asked soon enough to read, analyze, and emulate flash fiction — narratives that are short enough to be emulated by anyone, regardless, just through our work during each class period.

If you do elect to write your own story, take your time. Refer to this post:

The End of the Writing Process

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

2 Comments

English 10: Narrative Writing + Literary Analysis

  By English 10 Regents (2018-2019)

The Point of a Story

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

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

As You Read: Works of Literary Merit

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

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

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

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

To this:

Analyzing Narratives

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

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

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

1⁰ Focus: How You Read

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

2⁰ Focus: What Literature Is For

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

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

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

3⁰ Focus: Emulation Through Analysis

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

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

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

ETA Narrative #1: The Shortest Story

Author: Ernest Hemingway

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

ETA Narrative #2: 50-Word Short Story

Author: Michael Lawrie

First Impressions

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

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

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

first_impressions (1)

This is the original, unedited version.

ETA Narrative #3: Short Fiction

Author: Stuart Dybek

Sunday at the Zoo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Emulation: Narrative Writing

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

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

The End of the Writing Process

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

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

4 Comments

Pre-GAP Triage: November 5, 2018

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

Note for the week of November 5: The scoring panels, as always, refer to the calendar for the year.

For Q1A of 2018, students were given a set of exhaustive notes on their progress. For Q1B, they were again given notes on collective and individual progress in English 10, English 11, or AP English.

Those same students will read this post on November 5. Q1C ends on Friday, November 9. Current progress and provisional GAP scores, correct as of November 5, are the end of this instructional post.

This is triage, and it is designed not just to help students, but to give them clarity and agency.

Why a Spreadsheet

I want to explain why I am taking such pains to create a spreadsheet instead of using Infinite Campus. As always, this is in addition to the many kinds of feedback we use regularly.

First, a spreadsheet requires each student to do a little more work to see what is missing, what is insufficient, etc., which shakes off the fog of habit. Infinite Campus is part of a routine. Feedback outside of that routine is likely to be processed more mindfully.

Second, this shows each student the entire class. The notes are anonymous, so it’s about the collective learning environment. Every student has a role to play in what kind of classroom we have.

Third, this kind of spreadsheet is somewhere in between scores on individual assignments and narratives. I believe Alfie Kohn is right that “posting grades online is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.” It is also inevitable. We are looking for the line between that toxic salience and a sustainable feedback model.

When I find time, I will rewrite this old clarification of grade abatement, because most of it is prescient about what ends up mattering most1. Look at this section:

The crux of grade abatement is the idea that we can gather and assess all the information we need to help students learn without resorting to grades on individual assignments. There are a number of points to address, however, before we delve into how that works:

  1. Grades aren’t necessarily toxic. The presence of grades does not preclude effective teaching and learning. In fact, the case can be made that grades are useful, that they motivate students, that they provide valuable data, and so on. It also doesn’t do us any good to demonize grades. All we need to do is acknowledge that…

  2. Grades do warp learning. Grades change the learning environment. Kohn covers a lot of the research worth studying — research into student engagement, self-esteem, self-efficacy, and so on — but anyone with experience in a classroom knows what grades do. As soon as numbers are introduced, the student’s relationship to the material changes. That’s why the quotation at the start of Kohn’s essay rings so true: When the student, Claire, says, “I remember the first time that a grading rubric was attached to a piece of my writing… Suddenly all the joy was taken away,” we hear our own students. And that’s because…

  3. While grades aren’t necessarily toxic, they are vectors for toxicity. Think of them as clouds of mosquitoes in a malaria-ravaged country. Grades can — and often do — lead to gamesmanship, cheating, hyper-competitiveness, disengagement, and almost every other enemy of authentic learning. Students scrap and fight over a hundredth of a point. They define their self-worth in numbers. They’re afraid to take risks. Grades spread this negativity from assignment to assignment and quarter to quarter. Unfortunately…

  4. Whatever we believe, grades are unavoidable. It isn’t possible to abolish grades in a public high school. You might as well try exterminating every mosquito in the world. What we can change is the extent to which grades affect learning in our classrooms. We can’t change the entire system, but we can remove grades from most steps in the learning process, chip away at a student’s extrinsic motivations, and build a self-powered kind of learning.

Grades are vectors for toxicity. They spread the habits that hurt authentic learning. That’s the key distinction I keep forgetting: A number itself does nothing until it’s tied to a GPA, the threat of failing, the shadow of college acceptance, and so on.

These spreadsheet numbers are simple. They convey only the most basic kind of feedback about work — again, because more meaningful feedback is given in other ways. But some students truly need to be shown that they aren’t handing in work. Telling them isn’t enough. Showing them in person isn’t enough. Even a GAP score isn’t enough. They need to see a zero next to an assignment.

What This Means

We have to recognize that institutionalized students are motivated by certain symbols. These spreadsheets weaponize that through a simple set of annotations and some conditional formatting added to Google Sheets2.

Any student work that has the potential to receive feedback gets a 0, 1, or 2. Other work (e.g., bringing in donations for a charity drive, submitting a form) gets checked in for completion only. That’s a stripped-down version of this:

Take that, which is clear enough, and strip it down further, and it’s just 0, 1, or 2. The conditional formatting added to the Google Sheet automatically converts those three choices to a color. A student doing an adequate or better job sees green, as in, “Keep going.” A student not doing work sees a zero in red — probably the two most powerful symbols of error or failure in school.

The zero is not factored into an average in any mathematical way. It indicates only that an assignment wasn’t completed. Some students need the zero in a red box to begin to process and adjust to the reality that they didn’t do the work.

The vexing part of this is that no student should be that unaware when an assignment doesn’t get handed in. The deadline comes and goes. My co-teachers and I give feedback to other, adjacent students. The work is discussed. We use a dozen different techniques to differentiate and reiterate and redirect. Yet we know it is necessary to indicate, again, that the work is missing or insufficient.

What this kind of spreadsheet really does, therefore, is this: It pushes students to take couple of extra steps to engage with numbers that aren’t vectors for traditional toxicity, and it uses red, yellow, and green colors to trigger something basic.

Note: Functionally Missing

Some students hand in work that is so insufficient that it is functionally missing. It’s barely there. There’s no there there. The work isn’t missing, but that’s another reason to avoid traditional grades: That area of student quasi-compliance has to be investigated with more nuance. Yes, there was an effort to hand something in, but it doesn’t matter when that something is a non-starter for feedback.

As an example, I’ll use an assignment given to juniors. The prompt asked for a response to a lengthy article. Students were given the article ahead of time, and then they were given a day to write — 40 minutes or so in class, plus the rest of the day and night to finish, as necessary.

The instructions called this response an essay. It didn’t have to be five paragraphs or feature a thesis, but it had to be developed. It was the foundation of in-class work and further reading.

Here’s a “finished” response with significant composition errors (“perposley,” run-on sentence, etc.) and no development:

Humans are addicted to procrastination you can stop hesitating to work by making work the only thing to do like perpoisley be bored like the author of the hunchback of notre dame he locked away all of his clothes and wore a sackcloth so he can stay home and finish his books. Moral of the story it is more important to start work than to get it done.

That’s not an essay, no matter what definition of the word we want to use. In the spreadsheets below (which include this assignment), that response is a 1. This is coded as a 0:

Procrastination is an impulse; it’s buying candy at the checkout.
This quote means that Procrastination never fails to beat someone

It’s functionally missing. There is no feedback to give.

Note: In-Class Focus

In-class focus is the first and most important step to successful learning. Spreadsheets like the one below can be used to indicate how focused students have been. In the past, some have argued that they were only off-task for a moment, or that it only looked like they were off-task, or that they finished the work, or some other excuse. But this misses the point.

I am not looking to catch students off-task. Neither are any co-teachers in the makerspace with me. We are looking to help students who are focused. We are looking to help them with their work. We are giving them feedback and redirection. We are building posts and projects and lessons. That takes our focus and attention. We aren’t watching the room for mistakes.

If a student is off-task often enough or significantly enough during a GAP panel for it to affect a profile, it’s a serious lapse. These are students who are doing homework for other classes without permission, who are on social media repeatedly, who are gossiping and chatting. It’s well past the point of semantics, debate, and appeal.

It’s also critical for students not to elide how often they’re told to get back on task. This isn’t a gotcha environment. Any teacher in this space is constantly and kindly pointing out the serious repercussions of not doing work. We’re here to help you to focus, hence entire units built as triage for exactly that purpose.

Therefore, a student with a 0 or a 1 for in-class focus on a spreadsheet has been told, again and again, that they are off task, individually and generally, with opportunities to improve. They have continued not to meet the most basic expectations of the space, despite this feedback. The 0 or 1 is designed to deliver a sort of limbic shock: Yes, you need to work harder.

Provisional GAP Scores and Assignment Data: November 5, 2018

Sorted by student number:

  1. The scoring scales are wrong, and the skill/trait criteria are less precise than they are now. It’s the philosophical stuff that remains useful. That’s the problem with a one-man show, at least as far as writing the guides goes: I’m running to stand still. ↩

  2. In this post from a previous year, the feedback is much lengthier, but it teaches a tremendous amount by being so lengthy. Over time, these old posts become connective threads: links that can be used for the truly motivated and invested students to deepen their learning. The practical work, like the implementation of a spreadsheet, can be more straightforward, as a result. ↩

No comments

English 11 GAP Q1B: Added Value

  By English 11 Regents (2018-2019)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Dürer’s Rhinoceros