Welcome back. We’ll do most of the heavy lifting online this week, so be sure to pay attention during class. We will cover all of the follow items.
Before you get to class on January 4, you will have a Q2A score in Infinite Campus. It can be unpacked through the same general feedback post you’ve had all year:
You can also use a spreadsheet that has been specially prepared for you. Load it here:
If you were to look at all the categories assigned to this post, you’d see it covers everything from grade abatement to feedback to triage. Looking through those categories isn’t the point today, though; the links are there to emphasize that the post you are reading is important. Very, very important. Use-an-empty-adverb-and-italicize-it important.
The central concept here is that you must maximize your work for the 66 minutes of class time allotted this year. You’ll have breaks built in, including breaks you can schedule yourself; the rest of the time must be fully focused on our work.
You’ll have a flexible set of guidelines for this, which you can load below:
That schedule is printed and posted in the classroom, too. This post provides context. You will start with a list of instructional posts that have something in common.
You do not need to read these, because they are assigned when needed; several of them, in fact, have been sent in concert with the post you are reading now.
Again and again, these posts circle back, like so many falcons in the widening gyre, to in-class focus and feedback. Those are the keys.
The feedback in question is more than the feedback you receive on work. It’s the instructional feedback chain that you need to learn and to grow. You cannot be successful without sustained in-class focus and a habit of reading — closely reading — every instructional post, guide, letter, and comment.
This year, 2020-2021, you are physically present for our course only once a week. The odd Wednesday you attend will be dedicated to the Pareto Project. This is a strange schedule for a strange year.
Here are multiple versions of the full scope and sequence of the year:
What this exhaustive planning drives home for me is also what it should drive home for you:
In other words, if you do not make the most of your in-class focus, and if you do not invest fully in the instructional framework of this course, you cannot be successful.
Each week, you meet for just 66 minutes in person for a period of intense focus. This will include conferences, in-person workshops, presentations, lectures, and class discussions. You must make active, thoughtful choices.
There will be just 33 minutes additionally of at-home focus. This will include synchronous activities like discussions, lectures, and peer presentations. Distance learners can extend this beyond the required 33 minutes. You must make the best of the situation.
Again, you have access to a schedule for this:
Wednesdays will always be set aside for “genius hour” passion projects. Students who are on the schedule will workshop their projects, in person or remotely; the other students have the option of asynchronous feedback through Drive, Docs, or a meeting during office hours.
Overall, there is a limited amount of time for the critical in-person work on writing, reading, and the other Humanities skills and traits. You must, therefore, direct yourself outside of class time to prepare for in-person feedback and workshops.
If you do nothing else, you must treat the 66 minutes of in-person time as sacrosanct: You must do good, authentic Humanities work while you are in the classroom.
This is possible. 66 minutes is just 0.65% of your entire week. If you happen to be in person on Wednesday, too, that percentage doubles to just 1.3% of your life over seven days.
You can dedicate a single percentage of your time each week to this space. And a strange thing will happen, when you do: You will find it easier to dedicate more time outside of this space to this work. You will find the work more meaningful. It will be easier.
This is the trick of it: The more you invest in the class, the more you benefit; the more you benefit, the more you will want to invest in the class, and the easier it will be to do so. Authenticity and understanding stack.
Once more, here is the post that breaks down your 66-minute periods for 2020-2021:
This is the text that you’ll find reprinted below, almost verbatim. ↩
Read these posts first:
The single-sheet schedules posted separately to Google Classroom are available by period in this folder:
Note that these schedules are designed to give us structure and predictability; we will follow them closely, but they will not be rigidly enforced. There is built-in flexibility.
See below for nonspecific versions of the in-person and remote schedules. See the folder above for your specific period’s times.
Use the first three minutes to set up your workspace and to complete the Daily Record: Self-Report form.
The next 15 minutes are dedicated to direction instruction. Take notes, ask questions, and otherwise interact with in-person instruction, which will include lectures, assignment adjustments, and general feedback. This will be delivered synchronously to remote learners.
After direct instruction, you will have 15 minutes, sometimes more, to ask questions, to receive individualized help, or to begin the day’s task. This also applies to remote learners, who will interact with the teacher via chat.
You will then take a five-minute break. This happens exactly 33 minutes into the period. During this break, remote learners will log off, so the teacher will answer their last-minute questions over chat. You can take off your mask, have a snack or drink, etc, as long as you remember not to talk to each other while unmasked.
Note: As long as it is not during direct instruction, you can schedule your own breaks throughout the period by using e-hallpass. You may leave to get a drink of water, to go to the bathroom, or to take a quick walk.
The next 25 minutes of the period are dedicated to in-person work. This includes individual conferences, small-group instruction, and class discussions. Students will help set the agenda.
With three minutes left in the period, you should pack up your workspace. Leave the space as clean as you found it. Ask any last-minute questions.
Use the first three minutes to set up your at-home workspace and to complete the Daily Record: Self-Report form. Most importantly, log into Google Meet.
Note: You must write in the chat window of Google Meet that you are present. Chats are archived.
The next 15 minutes are dedicated to direction instruction. This is delivered synchronously to in-person learners, so you should follow those guidelines: Take notes, ask questions, and otherwise interact with in-person instruction, which will include lectures, assignment adjustments, and general feedback.
Note: The camera will initially show the teacher speaking at the front of the room; after that, materials will be presented directly to your device.
After direct instruction, you will have 15 minutes, sometimes more, to ask questions, to receive individualized help, or to begin the day’s task. Use the chat function for this. You must also monitor the chat for any additional comments from the teacher.
Note: You may choose to keep your camera on or off during remote learning. Keep the mic off. You must write in the chat at the beginning and end of your session. The classroom mic will remain on for direct instruction and radial feedback.
When you reach the 33-minute mark of the period, you may choose to log off. You may also stay for the entire 66-minute period, or for any portion of it.
Note: You must write in the chat that you have no further questions before logging off. Chats are archived.
The next 25 minutes of the period are dedicated to in-person work. You may stay logged into Google Meet for the rest of the period. When you log off, you must still write in that chat that you are doing so.
With three minutes left in the period, you must log out of Google Meet to allow the teacher to archive the chat.
TL;DR — If you have no evidence of work by the end of this quarter, you may be given an incomplete and required to take a summer course of Edgenuity. You do not want this, so you should do the assigned work.
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Your final projects are due over the next two weeks.
To prepare for this, you’ve been asked to check in each day, to set goals based on that week’s part of the final project, and to use a feedback chain to revise and refine each step. If you fell behind over the last month, you were given two posts to help you catch up:
You also have a post about finding your motivation during this pandemic:
The question we must ask is this: What happens if you don’t complete any work by the end of the quarter?
Start by recognizing how hard it is to fail. In this makerspace, you are helped tremendously by the aggregate nature of grade abatement:
A profile score of 3 becomes a 65, and that profile’s language is largely about resistance to feedback and a lack of any positive movement. That is still a “passing” score. If you do even less, even when contacted repeatedly across an entire quarter, you might fit the profile of a 2, which is a 60.
This is not a floating standard. It is a recognition of the cumulative nature of true learning and the vector-like toxicity of grades, as that “Clarifying Grade Abatement” post explains.
In other words, if you are able to do enough work to meet the criteria overall of a GAP score of 3 or 4, you have authentically and legitimately passed the course. You would be obviously weak in basic skills and traits, but that would not mean numerical failure is appropriate.
The school is also making exceptions for you during Q4 if there are extenuating circumstances. Those exceptions fit our set of universal skills and traits, too: To establish those extenuating circumstances, you have to communicate with us, show self-awareness and a sense of self-efficacy, accept feedback about your situation, and much more.
So the real question is this: What happens if you don’t complete any work by the end of the quarter and haven’t communicated about an exemption? What if you really have done nothing, even after being contacted?
Well, here is one possibility:
If you have no evidence of work by the end of this quarter, you may be required to take a summer course of Edgenuity.
As the TL;DR at the top of this post says, you do not want this, so you should do the assigned work.
Before we look at how Edgenuity works, be sure that you have read the BCSD letter sent to the community on April 16:
You will also want to have looked at the post on motivation, since it dives more deeply into what motivates you, how that shifts during distance learning, what happens if you fall behind, and much more. Some of what is written below is lifted directly from that post.
The district’s letter explains, among other things, how and why traditional grades have been eliminated for Q4. Instead of a score on your report card, you’ll be given a Pass/Incomplete (or Pass/Fail) for each course.
Recognize that you’ve lost grades as a motivator after being institutionalized for a decade or more. Removing the Skinner box would be difficult without a pandemic. You may need another extrinsic motivation.
That’s what Edgenuity can be: an extrinsic motivation for some of you. More precisely, avoiding it can be an extrinsic motivation for some of you.
If you aren’t aware of the program, here is Edgenuity’s explanation of credit recovery:
Edgenuity’s credit recovery courses are designed to help students learn at their own pace and on their own time. The flexibility and design of these courses empower students to focus on exactly the content they need to in order to catch up to their peers, recover lost credits, and graduate on time.
You can click the link for more at the official site. It is a program designed as another chance, and while that is a good thing, it is also a last resort. Your assigned English work will always offer you more choice and enjoyment.
The following examples will show you how Edgenuity works. After reading, you should understand that meeting the criteria for your assigned Q4 work will be easier and more student-centered than having to come in (virtually or not) to do Edgenuity over the summer.
Start by enlarging this screenshot of an Edgenuity unit that ends with a quiz:
This is part of the Common Core ELA curriculum for NY. You can see the units that are prescribed by the state and Edgenuity on the left side of the image. The units that are checked have been assigned; the rest have been eliminated.
If you are required to do Edgenuity, a teacher or other educator will go into the Common Core ELA curriculum, remove enough units to line up with the required hours, and then assign it to you.
Now note the time required for each lesson, unit, quiz, etc. The highlighted lesson, on sound and structure in poetry, requires an hour. That lesson is part of unit requiring more than seven hours.
The time you spend is all tracked, and you have to do all of it. You can’t skip ahead. You can’t rush. You are required to follow the program.
Zoom in on the poetry lesson:
This is an example of how you lose flexibility when you move from your assigned ELA work to Edgenuity: You must warm up, go through the instruction, do the assignment, go through the next set of instructions, review, and take a quiz, and you have to do it in exactly the prescribed order.
Edgenuity excels at this sort of structure by eliminating almost all flexibility. To generate enough data, the program can’t tailor the learning and assessment to your needs. There’s very little differentiation, especially in the moment.
That’s why doing the assigned work for Q4 is preferable: Even through the hurdles of distance learning, you have teachers and other educators racing to meet you where you are. In Edgenuity, the driving force is a computer program. You necessarily lose the feedback and attention you need.
There are humans involved in Edgenuity, of course. The quizzes and tests are controlled and assessed by the educator overseeing the curriculum. But if you are required to complete Edgenuity over the summer, that educator likely won’t be your current teacher. You’d replace someone who’s spent a year getting to know you as an individual student with someone who may never see your face.
Here is an Edgenuity lesson that includes a writing assignment:
Writing-based lessons in Edgenuity are prescribed for you, just like everything else. This one requires almost three hours. The process is rigid: You must submit your writing, get some feedback, revise the writing, etc, and if that’s all normal, the rigid time constraints are not.
Your writing units will also include quizzes, even when that kind of assessment doesn’t quite fit. Again, this is a computer program: Quizzes and time-on-task are the easiest ways to generate data. It’s not necessarily about you. It’s about getting data to analyze.
Writing in Edgenuity is assessed according to rubrics and according to universal ideas of effectiveness, just like in any ELA course. Here is one Edgenuity rubric:
The standard for effectiveness is similar to what you’d see in any English class, because writing is a universal process with modular elements. The specific vocabulary and labels change, not the core components. There is much less margin for error in Edgenuity, however, because you are working against the clock, without easy access to face-to-face feedback.
Revision, for instance, is assigned as a 30-minute process. There is less time to go back and earn more points or a higher score, and you are graded in Edgenuity, regardless of the policy in place elsewhere. You will receive scores out of 100, pandemic or not.
The work, therefore, is more regimented and less student-centered. It is less engaging. It does not easily adapt to your circumstances, and you will always receive numerical grades.
The goal of distance learning is to provide you meaningful opportunities to learn, flexibility in how you reach goals, and authentic projects that showcase your skills and knowledge. Your teachers and administrators — all faculty and staff — are doing what we can to get you through this unprecedented time in our lives.
That’s why you’re being assessed this quarter through a Pass/Incomplete or Pass/Fail system. You are being given the flexibility you need to handle everything else going on.
Remember, too, that you have teachers streamlining requirements and adapting instruction almost daily. As long as you make a good-faith effort to do the work, you will be given the benefit of the doubt.
In here, we actually talked at length about that good-faith contract and the effort required to be successful during distance learning:
What Edgenuity adds to the discussion is an extrinsic motivation for students who require it. You should do the work assigned this quarter, advocating for yourself along the way, in order to avoid Edgenuity.
It’s also important to note that extra chances and modifications are built into the post-COVID learning you’re doing. It’s ultimately easier for all students to do what is assigned, when it is assigned, to the best of their abilities.
There is even an understanding that making a bad choice is not always a malicious act. It rarely is, in fact. All of us succumb to procrastination and other bad habits, which is why we spent part of the fall in this makerspace talking about akrasia:
Remember the phrase we had hanging in our room: Video meliora, proboque deteriora sequor. “I see and approve of the better, but I follow the worse.” It’s a human failing.
All of which is to say this:
You can do the English work assigned this quarter. You have time. It doesn’t matter what today’s date is. You also have a lot of folks to help you. We can tailor the work to your needs.
Feel free to ask questions below. Again, if anything about this situation changes, you’ll be informed immediately.
JMW Turner, The Thames above Waterloo Bridge, c.1830-5.
We are a few days into Week Three of this Final Project. Many of you have your topic from Week Two and are well on your way to the statement of purpose that is due Monday, May 18. This post is for any student still struggling with the first few steps of this project.
Here are this week’s resources:
The models in the second link offer many options. If you are feeling overwhelmed, however, or simply don’t know how to move forward, read on. This post will give you three more options.
Each of these options fulfills the requirements of the final project. The benefit now is that you could develop a statement of purpose by Monday, even if you start today1.
These options all rest on the universal writing process available for download here:
You’ll have to do some research and further reading, draft your response, generate feedback, and so on, but your project will start with the “river” writing approach we’ve used all year.
The idea here is to give you another level of help: You would choose one of the following three options, write a statement of purpose by Monday, and then be back on track for the rest of the calendar.
Ask questions in the comment section below.
Use the universal writing guide to develop a three-minute graduation speech. You can submit this to administration for a chance to give the speech during graduation this year. Ms. Horler sent a note to you on May 6 with more information:
It’s that time of year already. We are looking for one amazing, unique and heartfelt speech for graduation. We will be hearing speeches on June 1st from 10-12. The speech needs to be under 3 minutes. If you are interested, work on a speech and email your intent. I will send you a time slot to give your speech to our panel.
Stay Well!
Ms.Horler
This speech requires a statement of purpose, some research, a draft, etc, just like any other project. Don’t let the three-minute requirement deceive you — this has a high degree of difficulty!
Resources:
Use the universal writing guide to develop an open letter or longer speech. This could be an address to the graduating class, like the three-minute speech in Option #1, but it would not be limited in scope.
You could also select a different audience for an open letter. To do this, you would use that universal writing guide. There is definite overlap here with Option #3; the difference is the concept of an open letter or speech in this one.
Note also that the goal of this letter or speech is to share it. That is not required, but it is a goal. Consider the instructional post on the end of the writing process: A specific audience beyond your teacher(s) makes the work more authentic.
Resources:
Use the universal writing guide to develop an essay. For this option, you are using the definition of essay we identified by studying Paul Graham in the fall.
Start with your observations, feelings, etc, during this quarantine. Read what others have written in the last two months. Cast a wide net, and pay attention, as Graham says, to what you’re not supposed to.
You can use Jerry Jesness’ “Floating Standard” essay as a model, if that helps your own design. Note that specific kind of research-driven essay, as the original project explains, is about identifying and trying to solve a problem; for this final option, you do not need to do that.
Resources:
This will be posted on May 13, five days before the deadline. Remember, though, that these deadlines are flexible: You can take the time you need to do this the way you’d like. ↩
Edited for June 8, 2020.
Back in February, you were given a post on final assessments for the year. The final exam, at that point, was an essay reflecting on the Senior Talk. That project shifted in April, as did everything, but reflecting on the experience is more important than ever. We’re now at the end of the strangest semester.
First note: You can continue to hand in final projects through Friday, June 12. The deadlines have been extended. For the next ten days, your work will be showcased and shared as part of a general celebration of your graduation.
Second note: If you aren’t able to complete and submit a project, you can earn a Pass for the quarter by completing this week’s reflective tasks in full. Those tasks have been tweaked to make this easier.
Just like in the original version of this post (from April 28), there are three tasks for the five days of Week Seven. We’ll shift focus to your entire senior year, however, for the second and third tasks:
The first Google Form will allow you to talk about your Final Project and fourth quarter, and you’ll be able to answer some of the prompts whether or not you finished a project.
The second Google Form invites you to reflect on your entire senior year. It’s an outline for the third task.
The third task is to write a short essay about your senior year. This written response should follow the philosophy of our universal writing work — that is, it should seek out interesting and surprising insights into your learning.
This last essay is truly about what you take away from your senior year. You are entering a world that seems to change every day, where the only certainty is uncertainty, and where just about any cliche seems likely to come ytrue.
That’s why it’s important for you to think about what you learned about how you learn. It is, once again, about the fundamental goal of authentic learning:
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
Use the steps of the writing guide:
Whether you have an intended audience of one or everyone, use to the metaphor of the river and the purpose of writing:
In the original plan for your Senior Talk, you were asked to sign up for a specific date, time, and location for your presentation. That sign-up document still exists, but it won’t work for us now — not even if we are lucky enough to return to the high school before the end of the year.
Instead, you must use these two weeks, from May 25 through June 5, to finalize your project in a way that makes sense for you.
One note: Because everything you do will have a digital component — video, writing, photos, etc. — you should base your work for these two weeks around the possibility of reaching out to a wider audience. Remember the guiding ideas of project-based learning:
A public product makes your project authentic in a way nothing else can. You are not required to share your work, of course, but you are required to consider the possibility.
Anyone still doing a presentation can use these two weeks to film and submit it, and you’ll follow the guidelines laid out in Week Four for length and timing. Everyone else will need to think divergently and collaboratively.
Some possible questions to get you started:
You should use the comment section of this post to brainstorm possibilities. Look again at that rundown of project-based learning: This is an opportunity for choice and authenticity about a project you’ve designed and built. What could you do during these two weeks?
You should also consider how you can involve a public audience, however large or small, in the critique and revision of your work. Critique and revision are part of these two weeks. You want a final product, but that final product can be a living thing that continues to grow.
Let’s say, as an example, that you are designing a digital town hall to tackle racism — a project that very much may happen — and will have an online meeting with a group of students as a final product. Could you share a video of that town hall afterward? Could you involve local newspapers? How about national journalists?
This is your chance to do something remarkable, and you don’t have to wait until May 25 to start. Add your thoughts below when you’re ready.
As you figure out the crux of your project, you’ll need to do more research, reading, and discussion. At some point, that will lead into the actual Final Project design.
You should continue to use the skills outlined for your research paper and the resources of the iLC, but you can also create new information in this step — through interviews, reflections, surveys, and so on.
This is also when you would paint, record, and otherwise create the raw materials of an alternative project. If you are still doing a TED-inspired talk, you’ll write a script. A script is also required for a video essay.
In other words, this step is when the most essential design decisions are made: What are you building? How do you plan that? What resources do you need?
Then you build the project itself. You’ll need models, feedback from peers and teachers, help from people stuck with you in quarantine, and so on. This is the week put the project together.
This is probably the most time-intensive step, and you are especially encouraged to lean again on the “stuff of growth” — the collaborative energy and efforts of your peers. Use Zoom, Skype, etc, to talk things out. Share documents. Do whatever it takes to make this collaborative.
Note: Like every step of a process like this, you will be more successful if you fold this step into the previous week’s work and extend the design process into the next two weeks. You don’t necessarily stop designing the project on Friday!
The default form of this project is still a “talk” based on the format of TED Talks:
Your project, if it emulates a TED Talk, should be 8–10 minutes long. If you think you might benefit from more structure, you can also do an Ignite presentation:
These presentations use exactly 20 slides that advance automatically every 15 seconds. If your presentation uses this format, it will be exactly five minutes long.
Ignite is a much more performative structure, since it eliminates any extemporaneous elements. Use their site to find examples and guides.
There are other models for presentations, of course, and you can use those. You can, as mentioned a few times already, create a video essay. There is a form and function to that kind of artifact, too, and you can look to the models from Week Two for examples.
This doesn’t have to be a presentation, of course! Your project can be an essay. It can be a paper with multimedia elements embedded. It could be a website. It could be an album of original music. It could be a personal journal, or just your meta-commentary on a personal journal.
Really, there are very few limitations to what the project is. The key is that you have to research it, design it, and filter that all back through a clear purpose. It can’t just be a link to your DeviantArt profile. It can’t just be a copy of a research paper you’ve already written this semester.
Think of it like this: If you do a talk, TED-inspired or Ignite-inspired, you must get approval of a written script as part of these steps — that is, you must submit a typed artifact that details your presentation in full. It may be verbatim, or written word-for-word, or organized by salient points and comments. It must be precise, however, and you must follow it when you present.
All projects need a similar “script” at this stage. For what that means, you’ll have to collaborate and think divergently.
Ask questions below!
For these two steps, you must collect evidence of research and then write a statement of purpose. You will be given a form on May 11 and asked to fill it out by Friday, May 15. See the final calendar for context.
These steps are combined because they happen concurrently. You must use the same methodology outlined for the research-driven essay to explore the topic you chose during Week Two, and that research should generate a statement of purpose, which is explained in this post:
On May 11, you will also be given this post as a formative assignment.
This post is from February, and you should have handouts and notes from that time. Read this post and any notes you have carefully. Your statement of purpose must reflect an understanding of these instructions.
Note again that the Senior Talk is now a Final Project. You can still create a traditional presentation, if you want, but you can also design a wholly different kind of project.
It may help to call the statement of purpose a thesis, which has Greek roots meaning “a setting down, a placing, an arranging; position, situation.” A thesis is the central staging or placement of a work.
A better term to use is crux, which literally means cross, but which is more generally understood as follows:
Crux
1. a puzzling or difficult problem : an unsolved question
2. an essential point requiring resolution or resolving an outcome
3. a main or central feature (as of an argument)
Your statement of purpose is really the crux of the project. That is what you are writing and rewriting during these steps. Your research helps you figure out the problem you’re addressing, the question you’re answering, the resolution you’ve reached, etc.
Your use of feedback is essential. We should collaborate to answer questions like these:
Your statement of purpose will look like this when finished1:
Continue to use the models you’ve been given in other places to guide you, too. Each of the video essays posted for Week Two, for instance, has a thesis or crux to it. You should be able to identify (and then emulate) the crux of any meaningful project in the Humanities.
Ask questions below. You can also use the comment section to workshop statements of purpose or to analyze possible models for your own work.
The filler text has an interesting history, and you can read about the origins of lorem ipsum here. In this case, the filler text shows you about how long your statement of purpose should be. ↩
Review the idea of project-based learning through this PBL graphic:
Your goal is to check off each of the seven elements there as you work your way through the seven steps of the Final Project. Whether or not you have a topic in mind — and even if you made great strides with the Senior Talk — you should spend this week reading, thinking, and discussing what is possible.
There are many ways to find a challenging problem or question, for instance. How about the Japanese concept of ikigai?
This is another angle on the Pareto Project idea of finding your passion, but it’s bigger than that — perfect for the final months of your senior year, in fact. Ask yourself:
The third question is perhaps not as inspiring as the other two, but it’s no less essential. As for the world around us: We are weathering a generational crisis, so you are witnesses to what the world needs. You could (and perhaps should) consider making this Final Project somehow related to this moment in history.
You also have the original set of options for the Senior Talk, as outlined in that February post. Here they are again, with some edits:
Option A: Pareto Projects | One intention of your Pareto Project was to generate a topic for any sort of Final Project. This applies whether you maintained the same passion project for the entire year or rebooted it. The connection to a final project may be obvious, or it may take some divergent thinking. As always, you should ask for feedback when you need it.
Option B: Self-Prescribed Book | Your self-prescribed book project is another option for the Final Project. Could it be evolved into something more substantial? Could it be turned into a video essay or other artifact? Again, the best approach is to brainstorm in class about the connections between your book, any work you’ve done toward a book-driven project, and this Final Project.
Option C: Research-Driven Essay | The research-driven essay may also lead directly into a Final Project. The research portion can serve a kind of double duty, since two of the seven steps outlined here involve research. What else could you do to expand on your statement of purpose, if you got to that step? What could be done with the writing to turn it into something more substantial?
Option D: New Focus | If you like, of course, you can develop a new topic. You can talk with peers, talk to me, ask questions in the comment section below — whatever inspires you. Consider that ikigai concept. Revisit projects you created earlier this year, in previous years, for other classes, and so on.
Regardless of what you think you’ll do for this project, spend as much time as possible this week simply exploring. The best way to find a topic is to read, watch, and listen to as much as you can.
To help, here are some video essays chosen to help you think divergently about topics and what you do with them. Look at them for potential final products, sure, but focus also on the insight in each one.
First, a series of literature-based video essays from Storied and PBS Digital Studios. You can load the entire playlist of It’s Lit here, or sample the earliest video in the playlist:
Lindsay Ellis, one of the people featured there on PBS Digital Studios, has her own channel, and there is a playlist of 35 video essays there. The most recent video there is about Cats, and it deals intelligently with what a musical is, how an adaptation works, and why Cats was such a failure as a movie:
You might also enjoy Polygon’s Brian David Gilbert, who has a terrifically insightful series of video essays exploring video games. Each video turns its original concept into a discussion of societal, philosophical, existential topics. This video, for instance, teaches the monomyth and hero’s journey:
Every episode of Unraveled is excellent, especially if you are looking for atypical topics to pursue.
You might also want to try your hand at a video tutorial of sorts, like the WIRED series that explains concepts through five levels of complexity:
You could try to do something similar. WIRED also has an excellent process analysis of beatboxing that is posted outside of the 5 Levels playlist:
Process-analysis projects can be an excellent way to explore something you are passionate about, good at doing, and able to teach others.
Ask questions about these examples or any other aspect of this week’s work in the comments below.
