Home » 2016-2017 » Category "All Junior Classes (2016-2017)"
Category: All Junior Classes (2016-2017)
Interstitial instruction, feedback, and discussion for students in all junior-level classes (AP English Language & Composition and English 11 Regents), for the 2016-2017 school year.
Today was the last day of classes, and tomorrow starts your final exams. As always, if you have questions or concerns about what to do, you should email me or leave a comment on this post. I will get back to you as quickly as possible.
At any rate1, let’s run down our work, one last time.
Regents Examination in English Language Arts (Common Core)
Juniors and seniors taking this exam should arrive to the gym no later than 8:00 AM on Wednesday, June 14. If you are in a separate location, make sure you know where to go before arriving to school on Wednesday. The exam begins at 8:15 AM, and you must be there on time.
Note: The original calendar for final exams had 9:15 AM, not 8:15 AM. The Regents begins at 8:15 AM. Set your alarm. In fact, here is a checklist in all caps:
DATE: WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14
TIME: 8:15 – 11:15
LOCATION: GYMNASIUM
If you are taking this test in a special location, or if you have extended time, you have already been given that information. Let me know if you are uncertain.
Review this post and your exam folder at some point Tuesday. Set aside a pen and pencil; you absolutely must have a pen, but I suggest bringing both. Your teachers will be in the gym to help you get seated and organized. The usual rules will apply: no cellphones, no bags, no papers or folders aside from the test itself.
Another note: Your teachers always bring candy to give you some energy2 and to celebrate the end of high-stakes English testing (for this year, at least). If you have a preference, leave a comment on this post, and I’ll see what I can do. Otherwise, I will put the decision in my four-year-old daughter’s hands, which means you will get something with Shimmer and Shine on it.
GAP Q4C Scores and Final Averages
Tonight is the deadline for most of you for the final GAP process. Submit your evidence and self-assessed scores, just as you always do. If you would like to share any Pareto Project work, contact me, and we’ll fold that into the scoring discussion. If there is anything else you believe is pertinent to this final cycle, make sure to attach it or share it directly.
Final exam note: If you are one of the students tackling the reader-response essay, that final essay is due by Friday. All GAP scoring and final grading will be held until that point. I’ll keep reminding you as the deadline gets closer, because there aren’t any extensions on this assignment. If you are required to do it, you have until Friday.
I will get the GAP score that fits your evidence and performance into Infinite Campus as soon as possible. When you receive that score, run the usual reflective protocol, and then reach out to discuss any concerns. If you want to conference with me, send an email to set that up. I’ll work around your schedule.
Computers are fickle creatures note: Because there were three seniors spread across your juniors classes, I was required to finalize grades on Friday. This does not mean that your current grades are final. How could they be? I am sure that there was a way to finalize just those seniors grades, but I could not find it, and all of my imprecations failed to make the computer work any differently. Again, your grades are not final, despite what the machine tells you.
Miscellanea
1. Outstanding Books
Where the adjective means both “very good” and “unresolved.” This is for anyone who still has a copy of 1984 or One Hundred Great Essays: Bring that book back in to me before the end of the school year. If I’m not around, you may drop it off on my desk in Room 210. I will take care of signing it back in and filing it away.
As always, if you fail to return a book you signed out from the school, you are responsible for the purchase price of the book. We’d always rather have the books back, though. Please return whatever you have.
2. SUMMER READING
You should already have a copy of the summer reading for BHS and any college-level courses you’re taking. If not, I’ll leave copies in the same place in Room 210 through the end of final exams. Copies of the assignments will be posted online, too, if they haven’t already been uploaded. Look to the high school’s main website for more information.
3. ROOM 210
The makerspace will be open periodically during the next two weeks. You are welcome to stop by before or after exams. In addition to copies of the summer reading, I’ll keep copies of all exam and GAP materials on the bookshelves. Let me know if you need anything.
Any further updates will be posted on Google Classroom. Good luck with your final exams!
Well, not any rate. It is always at the most desultory and uncomfortable rate possible. That is the rate. Think about it: The school has collected your Chromebooks the day before final exams start. Hopefully, you have a phone or tablet or other device on which you are reading this, because it’s a little late to shift entirely to a paper classroom. Ten months of flipped and interstitial instruction and feedback, and you lose your computer right before exams. Is there a more perfect example of public education than that? ↩
Fleeting, sugary energy, yes, but energy nonetheless. ↩
On that note, your self-assessed GAP scores for Q4C are due on Monday. The required Google Form is now available, but you should not — absolutely should not — complete it until after class on Friday, June 9. Start compiling your understanding, insight, and evidence. Plan to attach something appropriate to the Google Classroom assignment. All recent instructional posts in RE11 and AP11 have invited you to be more critical of your efforts in here; this is an opportunity to make up lost ground through self-conscious testimony and analysis.
On the corner bookshelf, near the copies of that “Aged Paper” post, you have copies of pretty much everything else you need for the end of the year and exams2. Take some time on the last two days of school to peruse those piles. Most stacks are labeled. The unlabeled piles on the bottom shelf are less universally useful, so I’ll cover them now. One is a copy of the article on valedictorians and future-proof skills and traits that was recently shared with you; the other is a guide to transitional words and phrases, which I will paste below.
Click here to load the site.
As you prepare for the Regents Exam, this guide can help you to hone your essay arrangement. You can indicate for the reader how ideas are connected, how sections of your essay transition, etc, just by memorizing a few phrases from these lists. Most of you naturally use this language, but in timed writing, it pays to be deliberate. Tell your reader when you are contrasting concepts, when you are adding information, when you are concluding, and so on.
Pareto Project Update
In Room 210, near the windows, you’ll find a remarkable sculpture created by Grace H. in P7. You might have been lucky enough on Thursday to hear Sarah C. perform her spoken-word poetry. Those are the first two examples of what the last post encourages you to do with these projects. There will be workshops on blackout poetry on Monday, for instance, and several groups have reached out about posting their projects here, on this website. I hope that inspires many more of you.
Keep in mind that this was never about the closed-loop learning of a classroom, so it doesn’t hurt you to step away from your project without a final product or performance. Through the end of final exams, however, and through the summer online, I can help you share what you’ve created. That might be as simple as coordinating how to share a link to your podcast or Instagram account, and it might be as complicated as helping you film and edit a performance. It might be a physical product that you’d like to leave in Room 210 for a few weeks, and it might be something you’d like to leave in the Room for all of next year. I can imagine some of you wanting simply to talk with me about a printed portfolio of writing, while others might want to build a blog online to house future essays you’ll write.
The course doesn’t really end on Monday with the last bell of the day. It doesn’t really end on Wednesday when the Regents Exam is over. It ends when you want it to. For a few folks, it ended months ago, and the rest of this time has been a long slog through disinterest and disdain; for most of you, however, this has very much been about lifelong learning. Remember that.
I really did try to go paperless, back in September, and still think it’s worth minimizing the amount that we print in a class like this. That said, there are copies of what you need, if you need them. ↩
Everything you need for your summer work, remember, is on the other side of the entrance. Make sure you know what’s expected of you over the next two months. ↩
The last day of classes is Monday, June 12. You have five days left.
Your productivity and focus for the next week will factor significantly in your Q4C profile score, which should be finalized on or before Friday, June 16. As you’ll read below, there is an optional assignment due on June 15 that may take longer to process, depending on how many of you complete it.
Look over each of these sections as soon as possible — at the start of class on Tuesday, June 6, at the absolute latest. Then recognize that this is the worst time to give in to apathy and atrophy.
ELA Regents Exam
Continue to do Regents Exam prep as necessary. All formal deadlines for the work have passed; at this point, you should prepare based on your individual needs. Refer back to this instructional post:
That has all the resources you need. You can also lean on me to get further practice, feedback, and advice.
RE/AP11 Final Exam
The reader-response prompt shared with you on May 25 is another option for you over these final five days. Obviously, if you were assigned this as a final exam requirement, you have no choice; you must finish your response by the deadline. It is a good prompt for everyone to consider, however, and certainly a fallback for anyone uncertain of how to spend their time.
If you are interested in dedicating some of your time to this work, talk to me in the comments here or in class. The prompt leans heavily on autodidacticism, but not to the exclusion of direct feedback. Here it is in full:
The other default work for the final five days is your Pareto Project. Any and all work done on this project factors into your final GAP score, and you will have an optional assignment next week that allows you to get credit for anything you produce. This will be posted later.
The point of these projects, however, was always
to give you time and space to do something meaningful; and
to honor that time and space by emphasizing process over product.
The work can’t just be submitted to me as part of a GAP report. It also shouldn’t stop when the course does — unless you want it to stop, of course. If you want to present or publish something you’ve done, on the other hand, or if you want to share a part of your project with your classmates through a lesson or activity, this is the time to do it. To give you an example:
That’s an example of blackout poetry, the focus of one of your Pareto Projects. Use Google to look at other examples (this is one from the Google image results for “blackout poetry” that keeps the text intact, which is atypical). The student and I talked months ago about the possibility of an in-class lesson on creating this sort of poetry, which could be a lot of fun. You could bring in newspapers, magazines, books, etc, and see what can be gleaned from them — here is a Scholastic lesson, but I might go with this step-by-step guide instead. Then it’s all in how you isolate and emphasize the words on the page. I could set that up for Thursday or Friday using the student’s suggestions, give everyone a day to bring in materials, and then run the lesson beside her. That’s a great use of one of our last days of class.
Let me know as soon as possible what you’d like to do, if it requires my help. If in doubt, ask yourself a question: What would you do with this project if there wasn’t a single grade, GAP score, or classroom connected to it?
Summer Reading
You also have the option over the next five days to begin your summer reading work. Copies of the school-wide assignment are in Room 210. You’ll find them next to the hall passes and exam folders by our door. If you are taking AP Literature & Composition or DCC, you have an additional assignment. Those are labeled. All of this material will be digitized and shared by the school at some point, too.
I encourage you to use Amazon, Wikipedia, and Goodreads to learn more about these books. The teachers you will have next year aren’t going to care if you memorize the plot or pass a reading quiz; they’re going to ask you to have invested in the text. You’ll be writing about and discussing what you read. The best thing you can do, therefore, is pick a book you might actually want to spend time with.
You also know by now that if you put this off until the last second, you’re probably going to dislike whatever you read. That’s if you read it at all, which is unlikely. So you won’t have much of an experience, at least not compared to what might happen if you take your time now to look into each choice. Do this the right way, and you will almost certainly find something you want to read.
In the meantime, I’m curious about what you’ll do with the following excerpts about reading. They are distinct in tone and perspective. The first is from one of Franz Kafka’s letters:
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? … We’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
The second is from The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man…
I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read, and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity — because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about. I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college.
You could do a lot worse than reading Kafka and Malcolm X this summer, by the way, and that would be quite the interesting pair to bring to the beach. As a point of comparison, revisit this video about why we read literature:
Ask about the BHS or course-specific books in the comments below, and I’ll offer whatever feedback I can. If you want to talk to each other about the possibilities, use the classroom space — or maybe clear the cobwebs from your Google+ Community for these final five days.
Makerspace Shenanigans
That’s a lot to choose from for five days, so you really don’t need another choice… but this option takes us back to the first thing you ostensibly read, when the syllabus was given to you back on September 6. You should be using the space at this point to ask questions and solve problems. That was the point of most of the recent posts, especially the ones on the end of the year. Of course, most of you able to choose this option already have, which makes the following text — edited lightly from that first-day syllabus — just a bit of validation.
We are a makerspace. It’s a term rarely used in an English classroom, and you’ll understand why when you revisit this clip:
That scene from Apollo 13 presents the traditional makerspace experience: A group of like-minded and similarly trained folks are given tools and components, confronted with a problem, and then asked to collaborate to solve that problem.
These engineers pour out a box of components onto the table, and then they experiment in order to do something important and innovative. In most makerspaces, the components that are poured out (metaphorically speaking) are physical — even if they are as tiny as DNA:
From WIRED: “Cow Milk Without the Cow Is Coming to Change Food Forever”
Trying to hack DNA to create cow-less milk requires the same general kind of makerspace thinking that it takes to save a bunch of stranded astronauts. Both examples involve science, and that’s the usual focus of a makerspace: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. When Art is included, they call this STEAM education.
To adapt this for English, we ask two questions:
What important and meaningful problems are we solving in an English classroom?
What components do we pour out onto a table to help us solve those problems?
Well, the problems we face are the universal ones: What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to live in a society? What are our beliefs? How do we want to live our lives? We face the problem of metabolizing anxiety and processing grief, of love and hate, of carving meaning out of the rock in front of us.
Like any makerspace, we must experiment to try to solve those problems. We have to think outside the box. Sometimes we have to destroy the box and build a better one. In an ELA makerspace, however, the tools of experimentation aren’t robotics, circuits, or 3D printers, but a set of universal skills and traits, which we fold into a course in the Humanities.
If that makes sense to you, good. You know what to do, and you know how to fill these five days. As always, I’m here to help.
The poetry practice form had an error in it, so it wasn’t tabulating final scores properly. You and I can still see your correct and incorrect answers, but overall scores provide some important data. So an update:
If your Poetry Practice assignment was originally due on May 24, but you did not meet that deadline, you should finish the work by June 1. This applies to RE11 students.
If you already entered your answers for the Poetry Practice assignment, regardless of when you did, you must reload the form and resubmit your answers. This should tabulate your final score properly.
If you missed the original deadline in RE11, you can now complete the practice passages and required self-analysis to improve your GAP score1. Finish this work by June 1. The complete assignment is on Google Classroom. Here is the link to the form only:
Hard copies are available by the printer in our classroom. They are labeled.
The Poetry Part of It
One of our earlier posts asked you to consider the poetry in this practice packet not just as test prep, but as poetry worth reading and considering on its own. Depending on your progress so far, you’re going to use this post to discuss the study of poetry. If you still need to finish the practice packet, do that first, and then make sure you’ve submitted or resubmitted your data. Our discussion here should help you with the self-analysis and metacognition required after that.
Remind yourself what the last paragraphs of that post tell you, which is that we’re meant to be doing makerspace work now, which is “work that is generated in the moment through questioning and observation and curiosity.” It won’t be work posted on Google Classroom, because it is meant to be folded into your focus on exploration and creativity, but I still want to point you in the right direction. Follow these steps:
Scroll through your course’s post until you find the section labeled HOW TO STRIP POETRY OF ALL ITS BEAUTY.
Consider the quoted metaphor about rose petals and spectrometers.
Read the embedded Medium essay, “Splitting the Atom.”
What I want to know, especially from those of you who are putative 8s or 9s, is what you get out of reading poetry as part of Regents Exam prep. This isn’t like inviting you to read “God’s Grandeur” and think about how incredible the internal rhyme and sprung rhythm is, which you can appreciate without writing an essay or answering a multiple-choice question. It isn’t like inviting you to listen to “Hey Bobby,” which has so many rich allusions that identifying them is part of understanding the song’s purpose2. This is part of exam prep, which means our explicit goal is to get a lot of points. Are you able to compartmentalize and get something more out of the process? If so, what? How?
Talk to me about it below, and we’ll see how that conversation goes this week. Hopefully, a few of you got lost in the hyperlinks in that last paragraph and footnotes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on those poems and songs, too.
And to improve your understanding of the exam and your strengths and weaknesses, etc. That stuff is important, too, even if we can’t always see past the looming threat of final averages. ↩
Or inviting you to compare Sage Francis’ song to the Bob Dylan song that inspired it. That’s worth studying, too, and a comparison between the two as political protest songs would be a lot of fun. And if we’re going to study political poetry, I’d stick with songs long enough to invite you to listen to Brother Ali, even if that one’s a little too controversial to put it anywhere but in a footnote. That controversy is the point, though, isn’t it? Poetry ought to be alive and powerful, and studying it ought to be exhilarating. Brother Ali’s piece is made up of poetry and music and visuals that do something, and figuring out how he’s doing it makes it more powerful. It unlocks it. It’s hard to feel exhilarated by multiple-choice questions and five-paragraph essays, because there’s no life in that analysis. It’s dissection, but not even to figure out how to bring life to our own poetry. Instead, it seems sometimes like education drains poetry until it’s just a desiccated husk. But I digress. Sort of. ↩
If you think of this week as a balancing act, you’ll miss the point of it, which was actually given to you last week. We’re building systems, one choice at a time, until you are capable of effective writing and close reading and critical thinking, regardless of the situation. That starts with how you organize yourself, and this week requires even more organization than usual.
Timed Writing
You have a timed essay to work on.
The design of our recent lessons and readings allows all juniors to talk to each other about this essay, even though you might be answering different prompts. The common skill is synthesis, and you’ve all read the same prep on that concept. Individual course instructions are below.
AP11 Students: Take Monday to finish your timed response to Free Response Question 1 from the 2016 AP Exam. You have all the prep and directions you need. You must be ready on Tuesday to move into rapidfire reverse-engineering work. That will be one of our two focuses for the rest of the week.
RE11 Students: Begin writing your response to Part 2 of the January 2017 ELA Regents Exam. You need the essay booklets that are on the bookshelf by our new whiteboard. Pick one up for yourself, and use that to start writing. You can continue this essay in class or at home over the rest of the week. See below for how you’ll spend the rest of your time.
Character Essay
The following document will also be shared with you on Google Classroom. Use it to figure out what to do, and then get to work. You can ask questions about any of this below.
It will be photocopied for you, too. In fact, you’ll be asked to read it offline first, in order to remove the distraction of the Internet. Then you will do the work of understanding the essay:
Take notes, click on links, ask questions, etc.
Talk to your peers about their notes, questions, etc.
Share the essay or its ideas with other folks, and talk to them a bit about what they believe.
Do the writing assigned below.
To Think More Clearly: March 10 Deadline
Melissa Dahl’s essay emphasizes process over product, which fits your current essay work. The deadline of March 10 was given nearly a month ago, on February 13, alongside a detailed prompt:
What does this week’s reading, “Why Typical Preschool Crafts Are a Total Waste of Time,” have to do with that Orwell essay? Everything. Your assignment is to figure out what happens when you replace “preschool crafts” in Dahl’s article with “high school essay writing.”
To clarify this through a list:
A “finished” Orwell essay is not due on March 10.
You can and probably should keep writing after March 10.
The process of writing is our chief concern and the focus of your self-analysis and metacognition.
Let’s see what you can learn from that process.
Your Assignment
On Friday or over the weekend, write a response that tells the story of your writing process, start to finish, including
your use of time in class and at home;
your collaboration with your peers;
your collaboration with your teacher, including any interstitial or flipped instruction;
your use of other resources; and
especially your overall sense of how that writing process unfolded.
To figure out what you’ve learned through your writing, we must have a sense of how you, like some sort of ersatz Frankenstein, brought the response to life. That doesn’t mean your story will, like Frankenstein’s, involve lightning strikes and violence; it means that you should take stock of all the time and energy that went into creating your writing from all its disparate parts.
In other words, you are writing an essay about your essay, or at least about the process of writing your essay. That’s where you will learn the most. Remember the quotation at the top of this website:
We may take as our guide here John Dewey’s observation that the content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning. As he wrote in Experience and Education: “Perhaps the greatest of all pedagogical fallacies is the notion that a person learns only what he is studying at the time. Collateral learning in the way of formation of enduring attitudes… may be and often is more important than the spelling lesson or lesson in geography or history… For these attitudes are fundamentally what count in the future.” In other words, the most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns. As Dewey wrote in another place, we learn what we do.
~Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
The most important thing you will learn here is something about how you write and how you approach the writing process. In fact, you should weave into this reflective/metacognitive response your thoughts on these three questions:
What have I accomplished?
What have I learned?
What’s next?
Write specifically and purposefully there, too, and focus on efficacy. What new information have you garnered about how you learn? How can you improve future demonstrations of your skills and traits? What lessons can you take away from the writing and post-writing process?
It’s never a bad idea or a waste of time to look over the instruction manual for something, even if you’ve already started using it. You might find some clarity you didn’t have or notice a function he didn’t see the first time. Here is the instruction manual1 for your Pareto Projects:
Click here to read the updated Google Doc.
When I built that guide, the goal was to split your projects into two rounds, which you can see in the original calendar. We also set “deliverable” deadlines, focusing on what you could create and present, in writing or in person, by certain dates.
A couple of months later, I’d like to shift the calendar for these projects. Here is the updated version, which you’ve seen in class and online already:
Course Calendar
Remember that our shift to a GAP score every three weeks shifted our specific lessons and assignments a little bit, and we’ll extend that soft reboot to your Pareto Projects. We will now take one Friday every three weeks to check in on your progress. On those days, you will be in the iLC, where you will be able to spread out and use those resources as you see fit.
Remember, too, that you have spent a considerable amount of time in this course working on organization. When we meet in the iLC on those designated Fridays, you are responsible for setting the agenda and being productive. You must bring your own device, for instance, since we will no longer have a class set of Chromebooks. You must plan in advance for anything else you’ll need.
To help get you in that frame of mind, we have reserved the iLC for every Friday in March. We need to explore that space and see what it offers us in terms of collaborative and innovative learning. That means that you should plan to bring everything you need directly to the iLC, not Room 210, on the following dates:
March 3 | Pareto Project Checkpoint
March 10 | GAP 3B Due
March 17
March 24 | Pareto Project Checkpoint
March 31 | GAP 3C Due
You will be able to choose to focus on anything course-related while we are in the iLC, but there are assignments and checkpoints associated with certain Fridays. It’s like everything else in here: There is tremendous freedom and a precise structure. You need both.
Pareto Project Deadlines
Your new deadline for these projects is June. Note that there is no date attached to that deadline. At the start of the month of June, we will use one of the designated Pareto Fridays to talk about presentations, publishing, final essays, final reports, and so on — the potential artifacts that will tie together the work you’ve been doing.
Because those artifacts will differ from student to student, we can’t set a specific deadline for everyone right now. We can only say that you will spend June finishing up these projects. In the meantime, you should revisit the original blueprint you completed for your project, noting that it has been updated to reflect our new calendar:
Pareto Project: Blueprint
What you “deliver” on each designated Pareto Friday will differ from project to project, but you should approach those deadlines with an eye toward producing something. The idea of “finishing” the projects will be refined as we move forward, too. For some of you, June will be about reviewing your goals and your success in meeting those goals. for others, this project will be a labor of love, and it will continue into the summer and into next year. in the latter case, “finishing” will mean something quite different.
For the first Friday after our shift — March 3 — you need to assess the state of your project. Answer the following questions:
To what extent did you keep up with the biweekly update essays required by this January 3 post?
To what extent did you “curate a digital presence,” as outlined in this December 20 post?
To what extent have your project goals changed over the last two months?
What have you accomplished?
What have you learned?
Finally, what’s your next step, and how are you using the iLC on Friday, March 3, to accomplish that next step?
Write your answers in a Google Doc and set it aside, using your new system of organization to keep track of it. Finish it over the weekend. You will be asked to submit those answers next week, and you will have only a portion of a single class to do that. You will go to Room 210, the assignment will be posted to Google Classroom after the bell rings, and then you will need to find your answers to those questions and submit them inside of five minutes or so. Among other things, this is a test of your ongoing organizational efforts and your ability to invest in these instructional posts enough to figure out what to do.
Ask questions about this work or the Pareto Project overall in the comments below.
For lack of a better metaphor. Orwell would disapprove. ↩
Good news: You can sign out your district-issued Chromebooks this week. That opportunity opens up a number of other opportunities, especially in a class that embraces an Internet-driven, interstitial access to learning. We’ve always been fortunate enough to have a class set of Chromebooks, but now every student has access to a computer, which means we’ve leveled the playing field entirely. You all have access to a device. The choice of using a computer or other device is now yours.
This matters because we’re all creatures of habit, and one of our habits is to occupy the same space in the same way at the same time. When you arrive to Room 210, most of you pick up a Chromebook from the classroom set, say hello to me, and then settle into your usual seat. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing an in-class essay, having a class discussion, or reading a post on this website — you keep the Chromebook open next to you. It doesn’t matter if you have a smartphone (~100% of you do) or a tablet, either — you associate classroom work with a classroom-specific computer plucked from a cart.
Our classroom set will be gone by the end of this week. Those Chromebooks are being repurposed for individual use. Our method of instruction won’t change, though, which means that you must bring your own computer or device to do work. That subtle shift in responsibility will make a noticeable difference in how you allocate your time and other resources. You’ll have to think ahead.
Your first assignment from this post is to organize your personal device, which includes (but isn’t limited to) the following:
District-issued Chromebook
Personal laptop
Smartphone
Tablet
Make this device into a tool for learning. This is deeper than setting up Google Drive and Gmail, although you need your Google tech to be organized; the device itself should be organized, from what tabs open when you launch a browser to which sites you bookmark to how you arrange and access apps. You are leaning on all four kinds of organization outlined in this post:
The device you choose is a physical object, much like a folder or backpack. It will only work as well as your mental approach to it. And you will need to plan ahead in terms of schedule in order to maximize what you do in class, which remains the all-important 36th chamber of instruction.
Assignment: Organize your device for learning, and then take screenshots of that organization. You’ll want screenshots of your Internet browser, bookmarks, Google Drive folders, and Gmail setup, but there are certainly more possibilities, like a screenshot of your smartphone’s app arrangement. Embed these screenshots in a Google Doc, explaining your organizational approach for each one. Attach that document to the appropriate Google Classroom assignment.
Something More Kinesthetic
On Tuesday, February 28, you received a printed copy of this post:
The four quotations embedded in that post offer insight into how we approach essay writing. You’ve had time now to engage with the assignment online and offline, with the freedom to annotate and take notes as you see fit. That lets us talk about some of what separates your offline learning from your online learning. You need a mix of both, and you need to make choices that consider the efficacy of both.
Assignment: Write briefly but insightfully about what you did with the printed copy of the post and what you learned from the printed copy. Did you annotate it? What insight did that bring to the reading? Were the ideas clearer in some discernible way when you read the printed copy? Do you feel the difference in terms of learning and engagement when you consider these quotations offline? Answer some of these questions, plus any other questions that arise, and attach a copy of that writing to the appropriate Google Classroom assignment.
Let’s spend the week experimenting with how you write the essay that follows that post. Look to Google Classroom for the formal assignment, and then start with this quotation from Piet Hein:
Art is solving problems that cannot be formulated before they have been solved. The shaping of the question is part of the answer.
To understand what a real essay is, we have to reach back into history again, though this time not so far. To Michel de Montaigne, who in 1580 published a book of what he called “essais.” He was doing something quite different from what lawyers do, and the difference is embodied in the name. Essayer is the French verb meaning “to try” and an essai is an attempt. An essay is something you write to try to figure something out.
Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.
If all you want to do is figure things out, why do you need to write anything, though? Why not just sit and think? Well, there precisely is Montaigne’s great discovery. Expressing ideas helps to form them. Indeed, helps is far too weak a word. Most of what ends up in my essays I only thought of when I sat down to write them. That’s why I write them.
And we’ll throw in Joan Didion’s “Why I Write,” too, which adds another perspective:
It took me some years to discover what I was.
Which was a writer.
By which I mean not a “good” writer or a “bad” writer but simply a writer, a person whose most absorbed and passionate hours are spent arranging words on pieces of paper. Had my credentials been in order I would never have become a writer. Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write. I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.
Right now, you have a subject for the essay you are writing. You have potential prompts and possible directions to take. You may have jumped into putting words on the page, and you may have only just finished reading that preparatory post1; regardless, you are at the relative start of the writing process.
Now you need a clear and precise approach to the subject at hand. You need an interesting question to ask or a unique perspective to explore. Paul Graham compares this, in “The Age of the Essay,” to a river finding its way to the sea; Virginia Woolf, in Moments of Being, compares it to a “shock” that drives her to “put the severed parts together”:
I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of some real thing behind appearances; and I make it real by putting it into words. It is only by putting it into words that I make it whole; this wholeness means that it has lost its power to hurt me; it gives me, perhaps because by doing so I take away the pain, a great delight to put the severed parts together. Perhaps this is the strongest pleasure known to me.
Come up with your approach. What question will drive your process? What is your perspective as you begin? What’s interesting or inventive or curious about your thinking as you start writing? What are you trying to learn?
Ask me questions and share ideas below.
If you fall into the camp that hasn’t done the prep work, keep that to yourself until you’ve caught up, and recognize the danger of making poor choices over and over again: Eventually, you are what you do. ↩
With Orwell’s 1984 and “Politics and the English Language” as a backdrop, we’re going to talk about grammatical declension1, and that more than justifies a look at LOLcats. They have a rich history (really) and lead us into complex studies of macros and grammar (yes, really). For me, though, if we’re going to look at declining English and memes, nothing really beats the simple stupidity of wurds. (Full LOLcats image available here.)
Orwell’s Inspiration
[A]n effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely. A man may take to drink because he feels himself to be a failure, and then fail all the more completely because he drinks. It is rather the same thing that is happening to the English language. It becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts. The point is that the process is reversible. Modern English, especially written English, is full of bad habits which spread by imitation and which can be avoided if one is willing to take the necessary trouble. If one gets rid of these habits one can think more clearly, and to think clearly is a necessary first step toward political regeneration…
That quotation is drawn from George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” which we will continue to use to frame a unit of study on contemporary English writing and its connection to our thoughts and actions, especially our dishonest thoughts and actions. Refresh your memory of the first instructional post here:
Now we move into some focused writing work that is meant to be balanced through your recent organizational efforts. The way you approach this writing assignment also gets into the circadian dynamics we’ve discussed before, because you must be more vigilant and focused than ever to avoid falling behind. We’re using that Orwell quotation above, though, to focus on two things:
[A]n effect can become a cause, reinforcing the original cause and producing the same effect in an intensified form, and so on indefinitely.
[T]he process is reversible.
In other words: You will spiral into confusion and frustration the more confused and frustrated you get, but there is always a way to stop the cycle and reclaim your learning for yourself. There is a lot going on below, and all of it is interesting, if you’re open to it. Use your time wisely, ask the right questions, and do good work.
First, a Caveat
The idea of political discourse is important to Orwell’s argument, and the connections he makes between clear thinking, “the slovenliness of our language,” and politics should grow more important to us, especially now. I think we should embrace the opportunity. Perhaps we can use some of the original meaning behind the word “politics” to help us focus:
Politicks is the science of good sense, applied to public affairs, and, as those are forever changing, what is wisdom to-day would be folly and perhaps, ruin to-morrow. Politicks is not a science so properly as a business. It cannot have fixed principles, from which a wise man would never swerve, unless the inconstancy of men’s view of interest and the capriciousness of the tempers could be fixed.
That comes from Fisher Ames, whose idea of a “science of good sense” ought to appeal to our better natures, especially in the vexed and volatile world of politics. That said, I want to repeat that this is not a unit about politics, at least not expressly or exclusively. It is a unit on the way language shapes our thoughts — a unit about names, business jargon, school jargon, lying, Twitter, slang, profanity, memes, and much more.
Your Assignment
Write an essay inspired by “Politics and the English Language.” This essay must demonstrate an understanding of Orwell, and it must use his ideas and specific language to an appropriate extent.
The audience, subject, purpose, etc, of this essay are all yours to decide. That kind of freedom can lead to bad choices, however, so I’ll give you a list of possibilities. Consider each before striking out on your own. Whatever your choice, you probably ought to start by skimming Paul Graham’s treatise again. You want an essay that is interesting and insightful — the kind of “river” writing that engages its author and reader equally.
Note that many of these are drawn from the essay by Maddie Crum that is included in the first option. That’s a subtle clue that you should devote some time to Crum, even if you eventually choose to write a completely unrelated essay of your own.
Note also that the deadline for this assignment is posted on Google Classroom, where it will be edited at least once or twice in the near future. The goal is organization, remember? You need to stop self-medicating through deadlines and invest in the process part of writing, reading, and thinking.
§ Option 1 | Degree of difficulty: 8.0
Emulate Maddie Crum.
Maddie Crum is the author of this Huffington Post essay about workplace jargon. It’s much more interesting than you think, and it’s perfect for emulation. Start, of course, with the ETA work: Read Crum, break down her writing, and note how it connects to Orwell. Then consider your own observations of a specific place and its identifying or characteristic language. You might look at the language of textbooks, the profanity of the school hallway, the violent metaphors in sports reporting, or the language of the college application process; you might also analyze the way your family communicates, the way a specific group talks on Twitter or Facebook, or the peculiar grammar of texting and other forms of micro-communication. Whatever your chosen subject, the purpose of a direct emulation of Crum is to (1) identify the problem; (2) explain its causes and effects; and (3) offer a well reasoned approach to solving it.
Write an essay about the current political landscape.
The instructional post that introduced Orwell should help you here, and current events offer almost endless ways to apply “Politics” to current politics. Your goal is to add something meaningful to the discussion. How you approach that goal is up to you, so it will take a lot of individual discussion to get started.
§ Option 3 | Degree of difficulty: 6.5
Write an essay about placeholders such as “like.”
Crum brings up the debate over placeholders, and you can do a lot with the connection between verbal tics and written clarity. It might help you to read Christopher Hitchens’ essay on the subject, especially his idea that “you have to talk well in order to write well, and you can’t write while using “like” as punctuation.”
§ Option 4 | Degree of difficulty: 7.0
Write an essay about the language we use to discuss stress and anxiety.
This builds off of Crum’s inclusion of a Times essay on being busy, which she uses to argue that “[w]hen we replace a specific task with a vague expression, we grant the task more magnitude than it deserves.” The way we discuss stress and anxiety shape how we feel about stress and anxiety, which in turn shapes our responses. You should also look to the recent instructional post on empathy and blame for inspiration here.
§ Option 5 | Degree of difficulty: 8.5
Write an essay on Internet memes.
This one has the most potential to derail even a focused student, so you would need to look past the superficiality of the subject and delve into the way language shapes meaning in memetic circles. Look to the italicized opening of this post for ideas, and bookmark Know Your Meme.
§ Option 6 | Degree of difficulty: 6.5
Write an essay on fonts.
Comic Sans is the obvious whipping boy in this discussion, but it’s a lot richer than that. You would look at whether Orwell’s logic applies to superficial elements of writing like kerning and font type, especially in a hypertextual (or web-based) sense. For instance, does this essay on level design fit Orwell’s ideas, since it deliberately uses no capital letters? Does font choice actually impact clarity of thought?
To give you a little further help, here is an essay written last year by one of the top seniors in the graduating class of 20173:
We’ll be collecting words that we love (and hate) during a future lesson, and I discovered “declension” during a previous year’s study of Orwell. It derives from the same root as the more obvious “decline” and refers to “a condition of decline or moral deterioration.” It somehow seems apt in 2017. ↩
Writing well about politics is always difficult, but the current landscape has made it into a minefield. ↩
A fact that has less to do with her writing ability than you think. Being good at school and writing well are skills that overlap, of course, but much less than any of us would like. ↩
