Category: Project Resources
From a 2024 overhaul of the most-accessed posts on project-based learning, when those posts are not discretely about reading or writing.
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Pareto Projects: Getting Started
Quick Links:
This post is for any student starting a new project, rebooting an old one, or joining the makerspace midway through the year. Passion projects, which are called Pareto Projects in this space, often go through changes over time — and they remain, regardless, an important part of student growth in a Humanities makerspace. This is why they are emphasized as early as the course syllabus and as late as the final exam.
Senior Talks
Download a copy of the complete guide here: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-senior-talk. Download an updated copy of the final guide to presentations here: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-final-guide. For a combined and collated copy of all materials, use this: https://tinyurl.com/senior-talks-full-serif.
More resource links are embedded below in this interstitial instructional post. Review all directions and requirements. Up-to-date information and feedback will be posted to Google Classroom.
Addressing an Audience
This is a modular project about writing for a specific audience. It can be modified to replace other writing tasks at the end of the school year. It can be used as enrichment, too — personally and in terms of your final profile.
The default assignment is to write a commencement address for your high school graduating class. Additional options are listed after the flipped lecture and default directions.
Conscious and Alive in the Adult World
Let’s talk about writing a commencement address for your graduating class. One of the best models for this kind of speech is David Foster Wallace’s 2005 Kenyon College address, which is beloved and celebrated for its message:
Research-Driven Essay
A Larger Intellectual Landscape
The idea of an “intellectual landscape” for your writing comes from an article on Common Core and the state of public schools:
In pre-kindergarten, for instance, students should learn to form an opinion about an experience or a text. By first grade, they should be able to give reasons that explain their opinions. From third grade to sixth grade, they should learn to structure their arguments in an essay. And as they move through junior high and high school, students should learn to map their ideas onto a larger intellectual landscape and make the crucial move of acknowledging and engaging opposing arguments.
Throughout it all, students learn that arguing is not synonymous with fighting — its primary goal is not to destroy contradicting viewpoints, but to engage them in a way that reveals hidden dimensions of a problem.
~Gerald Graff & Steve Benton, “Great Teachers Can’t Save America’s Schools”
The term for for this kind of engagement with other viewpoints and ideas is dialectical, which you should understand as a push away from exposition and toward argumentative discourse.
Self-Prescribed Literature Project
A Little More Wisdom, Goodness, and Sanity
This project uses the word prescribed, not assigned, to describe your reading choice, which echoes this metaphor:
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.
This quotation also appears in our makerspace’s reading guide, where the key word is tool, as in a tool for our makerspace. Literature is a way to solve problems and create meaning. Reading is perhaps the best tool we have for learning in a Humanities makerspace.
Senior Projects Overview
Menu of Choices
Here are the projects assigned required for 2024:
- Senior Success Project | Originally exit-ticket TED Talks, now evolved to be part of the district’s Success Project focus.
- Self-Prescribed Literature Project | Student-driven reading in Q3 or Q4 that most often culminates in a reader-response essay.
- Addressing an Audience | Began as an emulation of commencement addresses; now most often a letter-writing project.
Here are two other projects that are often adapted or folded into the second semester of senior:
- Pareto Project | One of the options for building toward a final project.
- Research-Driven Essay | Most often incorporated into the final project.
Read on for other updated materials and a rundown of the projects.