Year: 2017

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Summer Reading

  By AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018)

Section I: Where We’ve Been

Summer reading isn’t new to any of us, and it’s worth looking briefly at how it’s been approached in the past:

Summer Marginalia

In the “Some Context” section of that post, you’ll find links to a half-dozen versions of summer reading for a class like yours. And it really does provide context: For years, we’ve been trying to stave off the atrophy of those summer months by engaging you in high-level, high-interest work. A makerspace like ours would obviously take on as one of its problem-solving tasks the issue of summer reading. We have to think divergently about those months away from the classroom, the importance of reading, etc, in order to hack the experience.

Peruse that old post first, noting that “peruse” can actually mean two opposite things at once. Then move on to the actual assignment for this year’s summer reading.

One more thing: Toward the bottom of that post is a section on Reddit, an online resource that still exists for you, albeit in a kind of stasis, and I invite you to consider whether that might help this year. Reddit offers functionality that no other interstitial resource will, and it hasn’t been folded properly into Room 210 yet. (We experimented with it before in our old classroom, which wasn’t outfitted as a full makerspace.)

Section II: The Language of Composition

For those who need it, here is a direct link to the summer reading for AP English Language & Composition.

The purpose of this assignment is to make those who complete the reading more knowledgeable and skilled than those who don’t. Armed with the knowledge and skills from the summer reading, motivated students can take the lead in many lessons and assignments throughout the first half of the year. The fourth tier of profiles requires students to add exactly that sort of value to the learning environment.

These same motivated students can generate plenty of metacognition by attempting to link the summer reading to our work over these first few weeks. But there will be no explicit lesson that does this for you. Instead, you are expected to develop your own conclusions and connections. When you compile evidence to substantiate a higher profile score, this sort of self-sustained analysis is incredibly valuable.

If you are one of the inevitable group of students who did not complete or only partially completed this work, there is no penalty for acknowledging that truth. Consider what would happen if a student transferred into this AP course after the beginning of the year, or what would happen if a student moved to the district well into the school year: This summer reading could not be realistically assigned on top of whatever current work we have to do. Those new students would need to rely on their peers to make connections and learn those basic concepts along the way.

Put more simply and generally, this is your first example of how much more important self-assessment, collaboration, and growth are to us than any kind of perfunctory performance. Your summer reading will help you, if you did it; if you did not do it, pretending otherwise or rushing through it while juggling many other responsibilities will have exactly the opposite effect that we want.

So you are strongly encouraged to take a bit of time this week to write thoughtfully about what you completed, what that reveals about you, and how you plan to adjust now.

Section III: BHS Summer Reading

Now to the formal assignment, starting with this form:

You need to recognize right away that there is no penalty for acknowledging failure here, nor is there a reward for stating that you really did finish your chosen text. What you enter here is data to be discussed and analyzed as we move forward — nothing more, nothing less.

That is not to say that your choices did not matter. They mattered very much. As a student assigned one of these books, your decision tells us something about your relationship to reading and learning. It doesn’t tell us everything, however, and punishing or judging you is no more helpful right now than praising you. What matters now is the meaning you mine from those choices.

And that’s because we are really talking about your reading life. (Later, we will talk about your writing life.) For the last few months, most of you had no classes, no homework, and no immediate repercussions for your reading choices, whether you read nothing or spent each and every day reading something.

It’s that “something” that will open up the conversation. Reading does not just mean reading books, although we will emphasize the importance of literature in a moment. Your reading life includes every scrap of text you decode, from text-message conversations to Internet forum threads to fan fiction. All of that text does something to you. It increases your knowledge, shifts your perspective, opens up your emotions. Maybe it distracts you or just kills a couple of hard-to-kill hours.

One of our central goals this year is to give you an awareness of what your reading life looks like so that you can make more impactful choices. To a lesser extent, that means pushing you to experiment with more literature, but the most important aspect is your self-awareness — your constant, critical thinking about yourself. What do you read? What could you gain by changing what you read?

Again, there is no risk/reward when it comes to the facts of what you did this summer. That can’t be overstated. But we will also learn this year that not every perspective, opinion, text, etc. is equally important or meaningful. Literature does something that no other kind of reading can do:

That is the video you need to watch carefully in order to write the required response detailed in your summer reading questionnaire. (It is also detailed on Google Classroom.) You may have read a book that doesn’t quite fit this definition of literature, but you can connect any meaningful reading experience to the ideas in this video. You can talk about those ideas, even if you haven’t experienced them through your recent reading life.

Ask questions about the assignment below. To talk to each other, consider that old subreddit, Google+, and any other interstitial possibilities. Start in class, though, with a concerted attempt to use our space to learn and then to write together.

One more thing: I haven’t read it over again, but I have a feeling that there might be something worthwhile in this three-years-old post on literature in our classroom:

View at Medium.com

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How Feedback Should Work

  By Grade Abatement, Space Explainers, Triage

As you submit assignments, the limbic system of your brain may skitter to life and wonder when you’ll “know how [you] did.” That part of you, conditioned by years of formal schooling, will want a number. It might recognize grade abatement as an attempt to eliminate the toxic stamp of grades on each assignment, but it won’t immediately understand how we can upend the traditional feedback model entirely.

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A Glass Case Full of Lost Treasures and Fossils

  By Feedback, Grade Abatement, Space Explainers

This is a lightly edited repost of instructional material from May of 2017. It has a little more universality and a little less class-specific feedback.

Shrapnel

The focuses of this instructional post are in-class focus and feedback. The impetus is that it is never too early to warn you against straying from the path. We shouldn’t wait until the spring to discuss poor decisions; we should talk about it now, at the end of the first week, before any bad habits metastasize. The worst habits, like wasting class time and ignoring instruction, will slowly poison you.

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Orientation in Four Parts

  By All Junior Classes (2017-2018), AP English Language & Composition (2017-2018), English 11 Regents (2017-2018)

Part 1: The Occasional Bottomless Abyss

By the time you graduate from high school, you will have spent around 2,340 days in public education — about a third of your life up to that point, depending on how the hours are calculated. You might remember how it started:

http://www.theonion.com/article/6-year-old-stares-down-bottomless-abyss-of-formal–2510

That’s from The Onion. It’s satire, although some people don’t always get the joke. In our course, we’ll occasionally look at satire as one of the only ways of dealing with unsettling or upsetting stuff — here’s another, more recent Onion article on schooling, for instance, that speaks to some of the systemic problems we face.

You’ve been doing this for a while, though, and are close to the end of the experience. You’re used to those systemic problems. The first day of school, with its flurry of handouts and icebreakers and generally miasmic exhaustion1 is familiar to you.

This course requires you to pay attention from the opening bell. We need to look at education — at your education — from a fresh perspective. Start with this video, which animates a TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson:

That video was the initial inspiration for what you will experience this year in our classroom. That’s the philosophical crux, to give you another word worth knowing.

Part 2: The Syllabus

You’ll notice that this post addresses all of you, whether you are enrolled in AP Language or English 11. Each class period is separated on Google Classroom, which we’ll cover momentarily, but this digital space is shared in the same way our physical space is shared.

This is by design. All English Language Arts instruction addresses the same universal skills and traits, and we help you hone those skills and traits through the Humanities. There is a lot to gain from observing what your peers do, hearing their questions, exchanging ideas, etc, so this website expands your ability to do that.

The physical space is known as a makerspace. Load your course syllabus below to learn what that means2. Start with the always up-to-date Google Doc version of it:

Read this syllabus as soon as possible. It hits some of the notes you’d expect from one of these things, but the tune is quite a bit different. Pay attention to those differences. It’s not the last time — not even the last time in this post — that the music will take some getting used to.

Part 3: Starting Up the Feedback Loop

As the syllabus tells you — as every instructional text will tell you, repeatedly — running a makerspace does not mean you’re without deadlines, homework, feedback, etc. Far from it. That’s why Google Classroom is indispensable to us: It gives you formal assignments, due dates, and requirements, all neatly linked to instructional posts.

To register for the right section to see those assignments, use the appropriate code:

  • Period 2 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — vz2wur
  • Period 3 [English 11] — ev8f5c
  • Period 8 [English 11] — uv8afx
  • Period 9 [AP Lang. & Comp.] — jr3ypu

Assignments and updates will appear in the stream. The resource section has a copy of the syllabus and other critical documents.

Now, feedback works differently in a makerspace, so you won’t receive scores through Google Classroom. Instead, we use the intricate and intuitive machinery explained here:

Mongering and Congeries

That post is essential reading. If it isn’t part of a formal assignment during the first week, it will be before the first three weeks have passed.

Part 4: Clarity from Effort

As you complete your first assignments and work with me and your peers, you will experience firsthand what the typical day in here looks like. You will see what each part of the interstitial classroom is for and learn more about how grade abatement functions. You’ll begin to learn what the interstitial classroom and grade abatement are.

In other words, you learn by doing in here. You also learn by reading lots and lots of teacher-written essays and posts. To help clarify what a typical day looks like, for instance, you can read this essay:

Circadian Dynamics

This is the basic idea of how each day’s period works. The background lessons and texts are provided outside of class, which frees us up to do more with these brief 42 minutes3. We might circle up some days; we might talk in groups or meet individually; we might take practice tests or take a shot at timed writing. Without grades, there is enormous freedom to do what is needed, and you will direct most of the lessons yourself.

Your job, then, is to know what you are doing each day and to waste no time in doing it. That is the most important part of this course, so it gets a rare bolded font: When we are together in our classroom, you must be ready to work.

The interstitial/online elements are there to support this (and to make the Sisyphean grind of high school a little more manageable). Grade abatement is there to free you and empower you. Still, technology is only a tool. There is no replacement for the learning that occurs through discussion and collaboration when you share a learning environment with someone.

This essay explains more about how crucial our face-to-face work is:

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

(It also lets me reference Wu-Tang and Grindhouse kung-fu movies, which is important stuff.)

If nothing else, I want you to be able to answer these two questions each and every day:

  1. What are you working on?
  2. How can I help you?

If you can’t answer either, that will be an issue, because you will always have work to do. If you believe you’ve discovered a day without work, let me know. I’ll redirect you. During the first week of school, for instance, you might need time to go over the syllabus with me. You might need help setting up your Google account. Or you might know that you need to do your first writing assignment in class, because you won’t do it at home.

You face no risk right now, so ask questions and try things out. The more you experiment and the harder you work over these first few days, the easier you will find it to begin generating evidence for your grade abatement profiles — a concept that will be second nature to you soon enough.

We’ll end this first post4 with an essay on what it means to take risks like this:

Molecular Learning

Welcome to Room 210, and to Sisyphean High.

  1. That word, miasmic, is a really good one for far too many school-related situations. I first encountered it in this review of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, which was part of a unit on horror movies and censorship years ago. It’s a particularly smart look at horror cinema, but it’s the use of language that made it worth teaching in the classroom. ↩

  2. When I compile these notes into a more formal essay, I’ll give you that, too. I’m still figuring out what different social media and websites are most useful for when it comes to helping you all. ↩

  3. The essays haven’t been updated to reflect our new schedule, mostly in an effort not to lose the Wu-Tang allusions. I suppose we could go with the answer to life, the universe, and everything, though… ↩

  4. Which is much, much longer than most posts for a particular unit or lesson will be. This one has to be as dense as possible, because you need a few dozen chances to realize the most important truth: This course is different, and only by leaning into those differences will you be successful. ↩

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The Albatross’ Skeleton

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

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!

  1. 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? ↩

  2. Fleeting, sugary energy, yes, but energy nonetheless. ↩

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Update: June 8

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

This is an update to our last post, which more precisely covers what you should be working on at the end of the year. There are copies of that post available for anyone who might benefit from a printed version1. If you find yourself idle or distracted for more than a moment, use that to refocus.

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.

  1. 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. ↩

  2. 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. ↩

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Aged Paper

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

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:

The Harrow: ELA Regents Prep

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:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F06%2FReadersResponseEssayv3.1.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

 

Pareto Project

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

  1. to give you time and space to do something meaningful; and
  2. 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:

  1. What important and meaningful problems are we solving in an English classroom?
  2. 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.

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Aged Paper

  By English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

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.

Final Exam

Here is an instructional post from May 14:

Lights and Tunnels: RE10, Part 2

That post covers everything about the last month of school. Back in mid-May, you were given a printed copy of it to use as a checklist. Today, a month later, you were given another version:

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If you want a Google Docs version to edit, click here and make a copy. This new checklist covers only the prep work for the Aug. ’14 practice exam. You also have access to the Aug. ’16 practice exam, but we’re probably not going to need that.

By Monday, June 12, you must be able to check off every item on that second checklist, or you must be able to point to an alternative task that was given to you. For instance, if you were allowed to conference with one of your teachers instead of writing a metacognitive analysis, you can use that.

Until you have finished the entire checklist, finishing it is your primary focus. You will need it to score higher than a 4 for your final GAP score, and it is the only real way to prepare for the final exam itself.

Pareto Project

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.

The point of these projects, however, was always

  1. to give you time and space to do something meaningful; and
  2. 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 junior’s Pareto Project. 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. This handout 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. Revisiting this video will help:

Ask about the summer reading in the comments below, if you’d like me to offer feedback on the choices. 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.

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AP11: Anti-Procrastination Protocol

  By AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

This static page has been up since May 5:

The Harrow: ELA Regents Prep

Today is May 30. In addition to that exhaustive instructional post, these Google Classroom instructions were posted on May 10:

On Monday, May 22, you will need to return to this Google Classroom assignment, whether it’s buried in a hundred updates or not, and attach copies of everything you’ve done to prepare for the Regents Exam. The only thing you won’t attach are the handwritten, exact copies of anchor papers. Everything else requires you either to scan or photograph or copy your work. You’ll need it all organized and uploaded here, online, as an archive and checkpoint on May 22. We can then safely ignore it for three weeks or so, until the week of the Regents itself.

The full instructions were edited on May 15 to extend the deadline to May 25. The specific requirements remained clear, as did the 11-part checklist for your exam-driven folders.

Well before May 30, which is today, you should have filled a folder with exam-specific data and analysis. You should have uploaded the indicated “archive and checkpoint” through Google Classroom. Those artifacts should have been ready for review on Thursday, May 25, at the latest.

Your statistics:

  • No. of prepared folders: 0 (out of 67)
  • No. of online archives: 27 (out of 67)
  • No. of complete online archives: 15 (out of 67)

The lack of hard-copy folders is one thing. The directions are clear, and the checklist says “printed copy” or “handwritten” nine times; you are absolutely responsible for missing that. But I can look at the 27 online submissions and see what work was done. Some of you even scanned the hard copies, which was helpful.

Again, it’s okay to miss details. It’s not okay to miss entire sets of directions, deadlines that were already extended once, exam-specific requirements, etc.

Mind the GAP

Your GAP scores for Q4B will be online before midnight tonight. The formative work for this Anti-Procrastination Protocol assignment was part of Q4B, because that’s when you worked on it, which required me to wait until now. It’s the process that matters, which you know. You just finished responding to an instructional post on in-class focus and feedback.

More statistics:

That response was due on May 26. Again, today is May 30, and without feedback from you, I can’t complete the loop and help you. And that means you lose out later on:

That’s why we do what we do, and the last one is just a few days old. Perhaps they are worth a discussion? At the very least, those of you doing the right thing need to know that it will pay off. It’s not just that the final grades in here are based on those real-world skills and traits, but that you are developing the habits of mind that will translate into long-term success.

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Poetry Practice: Update

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Update: Google Form Resubmission

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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.

Start with the end-of-year post for your course:

  1. Lights and Tunnels: AP11, Part 2
  2. Lights and Tunnels: RE11, Part 2

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:

  1. Scroll through your course’s post until you find the section labeled HOW TO STRIP POETRY OF ALL ITS BEAUTY.
  2. Consider the quoted metaphor about rose petals and spectrometers.
  3. 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.

  1. 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. ↩

  2. 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. ↩