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Advanced Placement Ownership

By Mr. Eure AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

I spent way too long on this page learning about non-Euclidean geometry.

What You Own

Your first timed essay prompt, and our first foray into the eldritch geometry of the College Board, deals with the concept of ownership. This is not an accident. You must own your learning in this course, and you have now a post of street-corner preaching that tells you that. We’ve shifted the paradigm. It’s not going to look like anything else, especially in terms of student ownership. When it does look familiar, in fact, I’ve failed you — given into half-measures, which Mike Ehrmantraut would tell us is a bad idea.

But a full-measure approach doesn’t mean a lack of transparency or agency. Far from it. To make sense of your performance on this timed essay, you must simply¹ embrace the interstitial and grade-abated structure of the course itself. Your feedback is built into the process, with additional mentoring and proxy feedback available starting on Thursday of this week. (We’ll need Wednesday for a frank discussion of that last post.)

Only… you haven’t met your end of that bargain. For the last week, I’ve been asking questions of individuals and small groups designed to test your close reading and internalization. A few students stood out; many more students failed that test. You aren’t doing the work.

Front-Loaded and Responsive

On January 20, four days before you wrote the timed essay itself, you were given instructions through Google Classroom. Here are those instructions in full:

On Tuesday, you will write your first timed essay. We delay this in our course (most AP courses start the test prep early) in order to focus on the substructural skills that matter beyond a high-stakes test, but we don’t ignore timed work; if anything, we emphasize the gamesmanship and performative skill involved. This assignment gets right at that emphasis.

Attached below is an AP exam guide I developed, plus a more specific guide for the third-free response question. You will be writing one of these free-response essays (abbreviated as FR3) on Tuesday. You will, in fact, be answering FR3 from the 2013 AP English Language and Composition Exam. That prompt is attached below, too, as part of a collection of all free-response questions from 2007-2014. (It has yet to be updated for 2015 and 2016. Blame the small humans crawling and sprinting around my house; I have a lot less time than I used to have.)

Finally, you will find a link to a Sisyphean High Medium post that explores the idea of gamesmanship on high-stakes exam. Reading this instructional essay will give you a much stronger sense of how to approach Tuesday’s writing — and all of the other timed writing and timed multiple-choice we’ll do over the next four months.

Your assignment here is to account for your choices this weekend. When Tuesday arrives, will you have read the guides and prepared for the FR3 essay? Will you have looked at the prompt ahead of time? Will you have studied the Medium essay like you would a lecture or textbook chapter? You can and could do any of these things. Because we are grade-abated, the focus is, as always, on:

1. How you grow over time in these skills, traits, and performances
2. How you collaborate with others to improve, learn, etc
3. How you monitor and analyze your individual choices and development

Growth, collaboration, and metacognition. Approach all of our test-driven work with that in mind — and a copy of your grade abatement profiles next to you — and you’re going to maximize your potential when it comes time to take the actual test.

One quick note: I have spent time over the last few months (when I’m not chasing down those small humans in my household) developing a more streamlined and helpful version of bishop composition, the writing process that includes the DAMAGES rubric many of you have used before. I should finish the work soon. In the meantime, you have access to old version of the rubric and writing process, including versions that link up with the College Board’s essay rubric, through the central Sisyphean High site. You’ll also find embedded copies of DAMAGES and related processes within the test guides attached here.

Now to your assignment:

Write a short, insightful essay about your preparations and approach to this first free-response prompt. Account for and analyze your choices. Consider the extent to which you studied the guides, whether or not you read the prompt, and the purpose behind every one of these decisions.

You can do write this metacognitive/reflective response whenever you like, but I might suggest waiting until Tuesday evening to start, since you will then be able to fold in your experience writing the FR3 response itself. Treat the essay you write for this Classroom assignment as you would any essay: Use Paul Graham’s logic and river metaphor alongside our systemic approach to learning to say something meaningful and truthful about your learning.

I’ll pull out the two central questions embedded in that assignment:

Will you have read the guides and prepared for the FR3 essay?
Will you have studied the Medium essay like you would a lecture or textbook chapter?

The answers that many of you would be forced to give are:

Not really
Not really

But as the last post argues vociferously, these front-loaded instructions and lessons are more important than the writing itself. This is where your learning happens. This is where all feedback starts. Without a deep dive into those guides and lectures, you can’t hope to sit with me and unpack your performance on the timed essay. You simply won’t have the context or language to do that. You will instead fit the quotation at the start of this instructional essay, Dunning-Kruger effect in full force:

I tend to subscribe to a different theory on [Jason] Whitlock. What people see as his self-serving imposture is in fact little more than political and historical illiteracy, mingling with a hack columnist’s instinct for provocation… [H]e’s a low-information guy, infinitely suggestible, learning on the fly, joining in on a conversation in a language he has no interest in learning… Given his lack of intellectual curiosity, the astonishing thing with Whitlock is that he’s ever right at all.

It is possible that you, at this moment, are pedagogically illiterate, because you have not invested the necessary time in this course. You might, at this moment, be a “low-information guy,” using an outdated language to try to talk to me. What you control, however, at this moment, is whether or not that changes — whether or not you conquer any “lack of intellectual curiosity.”

The Timed Essay as Example

In order to work closely with me (or any proxy) on this timed response, you must start with this:

View at Medium.com

Bring a consistent, careful, annotated interaction to that essay. Then read both of these guides with the same consistent, careful, annotated interaction:

I hope that this step is review for some of you. That’s a good thing, and you want that kind of engineering redundancy in your studies — a backup of things, essentially. For many of you, however, this is obviously the first time you’ve truly engaged with that instructional material. Make it count.

When you’re ready, you can finally take a look at your timed essay… and set it aside almost immediately in favor of this:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2Fap13_scor_q3.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

That PDF is lifted directly from the College Board’s page of free-response material. That page has every resource you need to be ready to work directly with me. You can look over the 2013 exam, read what students had to say about Question 3, and then look at the scoring rubric and exemplars. It’s only after you’ve prepared with all of this that you’re able to benefit from my feedback.

Which brings us to your assignment:

Dedicate your class periods to this timed essay, and make sure that you are ready as soon as possible to work with me in small groups or individually on your timed response. You may ask questions about the guides, the exemplars, the lectures, etc, and I will help you. When you do seek feedback about your own essay, however, you must have a relative mastery of all this preparatory content. Do not seek feedback on your essay until you’re ready for it.

A few other notes:

When you’ve internalized enough of this prep material, you and I will be able to determine out what your essay would have gotten from an AP reader. Figuring that out on your own is much more effective than having me tell you.
That said, I will tell you what you’d have gotten. The same investment requirements apply, of course.
You won’t have physical copies of the College Board’s student essays, because we have to try to save the forests at some point. You should already have a copy of the scoring rubric (the correct one, not the one I erroneously printed in your timed writing packet).

Ask questions below.

An adverb that takes on very different connotations in this course, I know. ↩

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Tilting at Windmills

By Mr. Eure All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Picasso’s take on Don Quixote.

Q2 GAP Feedback

TL;DR | The three most important elements of this course right now are these:

Consistent, effective, respectful use of every class period
Consistent, careful, annotated interaction with all interstitial instruction/feedback/etc
Consistent, collaborative, goal-oriented feedback looping with the teacher or proxies

Assignment #1 | Pull out every adjective from that list. You should have an immediate and intuitive sense of what each adjective means, but you’ll want a more articulated definition, too. What, for instance, does effective use of every class period look like? What does respectful have to do with your use of class time?

Assignment #2 | The following document uses data from Q2 to illustrate these elements and give you direction as you move into Q3. You have a Google Classroom assignment built around this document (and the interstitial directions you are currently reading) to force you to start doing what’s required of you. Complete that Google Classroom assignment.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2FTier4LanguageandLogic.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

Maker Spaces

Where you sit in a makerspace is critical. Your use of space is critical, hence the term makerspace. Small shifts in our physical setup open up new perspectives — which is exactly what happened when I moved the de facto teacher desk to the middle of the room. Two days of observing you was enlightening¹.

From today onward, all junior classes will be allowed to sit where they like, but they must recognize the need to improve their in-class focus, interstitial reading, and use of resources. There are six desktop PC stations in Room 210, for instance, any of which would work well as study corrals. Our round tables should be for discussion, most likely without Chromebooks, or with a shared Google Document as the focus. The U-shaped conference tables should be for a different sort of discussion, probably led by a student with some proxy or atelier feedback to share. The high tables should be regularly moving into new configurations that reflect each group’s goals.

If you are in one of the juniors classes in Room 210, your assignment is to make better use of the space. I will be observing your efforts and giving you feedback on your choices. You probably want to keep the criteria for a Tier 4 GAP score in mind, too, since this is a formal assignment, and you know that those aren’t just given through Google Classroom².

Sophomores will have assigned seats, with some self-selected groups allowed to stay together. That class simply isn’t focused enough when given free reign over the classroom space. We will need to shift into more teacher-monitored group work, and individuals will need to sit where they can be held accountable for pretty much every choice.

I’m sharing these decision with everyone at once, by the way, because juniors can absolutely lose the ability to choose where to sit and what to do. There is a limit to this course’s patience, and after that limit, you must be forced to work. You’ll either develop these habits on your own or be forced to develop them. You probably know that the former is almost always more powerful and long-lasting than the latter.

Terrifying? Depressing? I’m not sure what the word is there. ↩
They aren’t always marked in metaphorical neon lights, either. The point of this interstitial reading, remember, is to force you to read slowly and carefully. ↩

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Politics and the English Language

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

From a recent Daily Beast article on Orwell. Click to read.

Clarity Is the Remedy

In searching the Internet for recent articles on George Orwell, I found an NPR story that was published more than a decade ago:

Most people these days think of George Orwell as a writer for high-school students, since his reputation rests mostly on two late novels — Animal Farm and 1984 — that are seldom read outside the classroom. But through most of his career, Orwell was known for his journalism and his rigorous, unsparing essays, which documented a time that seems in some ways so much like our own.

I used to teach Animal Farm, and you know, of course, that I’ve encouraged you to read 1984, among other novels¹. But I agree with Paul Graham and Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace and many other smart people: The surest way to ruin a student’s experience with an author is to make the student take tests and write essays about the experience. Instead, you need to recognize that there might be a reason for Orwell’s surge in popularity over the last few weeks.

Read the rest of this NPR essay from 2006, and then tackle Orwell’s essay, “Politics and the English Language,” which is embedded below and will be photocopied as soon as possible. We’re going to go slowly, but we are going to talk about politics. Everything is about politics, after all, especially lying. As Orwell said,”Politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred and schizophrenia.”

Orwell on Writing: ‘Clarity Is the Remedy’

Most people these days think of George Orwell as the author of high school reading staples Animal Farm and 1984. But author Lawrence Wright says that Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” is the piece of writing to which he most often returns.

Politics and the English Language

Reading an essay like this in a climate like ours requires some interaction. I’ll focus your efforts later in the week; for now, take notes in a way that feels natural to you.

Sidebar: If you are in AP11, plan your week around two assignments: Orwell’s essay and the timed essay you wrote a while back. All juniors should expect general feedback on grade abatement early this week. GAP scores will be posted by Wednesday afternoon.

If you want to read Orwell online, use this link:

Politics and the English Language

Most people who bother with the matter at all would admit that the English language is in a bad way, but it is generally assumed that we cannot by conscious action do anything about it. Our civilization is decadent and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse.

Remember to enable the reader function on Safari if you’re using an iOS device, which will make the text easier to skim:

It’s a little more complicated to do this on Android, but here’s one set of directions for the Chrome browser. If there’s an easier way, leave it in the comments below. The goal is to make it possible to read this sort of essay (and this sort of post) interstitially.

If you want to print your own copy, use the document embedded below. I’ll make copies for you, however, as soon as I’m back in the building tomorrow morning.

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2FPoliticsandtheEnglishLanguage1946.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

I was a little too ambitious in floating so many novels at once, but that’s the point of a makerspace: Be ambitious, make mistakes, and learn something from our failures. Don’t be surprised if we randomly spend a period discussing how to catch an invisible man, though. ↩

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Second Perspectives: Q2 GAP

By Mr. Eure All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Click to see more of Felice Varini’s perspective-warping artwork.

Trompe-l’œil Learning

At the end of the first quarter, you were given this:

The process [of GAP scoring] should be individualized. Grade abatement stresses individual learning, and it would undermine our philosophy to treat the end of each quarter as a high-stakes event. It would turn us back toward the warping pressure of the old model of learning, and none of us — teacher absolutely included — benefits from the wearying push through 140 essays, reports, or conferences.

This is still a new idea to me, but it seems more and more important as it plays out in the classroom. We can’t be a course that focuses on final artifacts over process. The experimental model — the makerspace mentality we’re trying to embrace — values results, but it shouldn’t prioritize them. The push for risk-taking and integrity is undermined by any traditional teacher-as-judge-and-jury assessment.

As always, though, your ability to provide what Tony Wagner calls “collective human judgment informed by evidence” is dependent on how much you’ve invested in the course. Your independence and individuality depend on how closely you’ve read posts like this one. I’m running out of metaphors for this — cooking still seems apt, and vaccination is never more appropriate than during flu season — but, to use a metaphor to describe using metaphors, these windmills won’t tilt at themselves.

I’d like my role at the end of any GAP process to be simple: I’m there to put you in the exact spot that lets you see yourself clearly. I help you find clarity, especially when your learning starts to seem random and unconnected, like the spatial artwork of Felice Varini:

I’m there to shed light on the evidence you’ve accrued when it looks like a pile of trash, as in the mixed-media artwork of Tim Noble and Sue Webster:

The most important step is about perspective. Varini’s artwork only makes sense if you stand in exactly the right spot. Find that spot, and the random shapes snap together:

With a bit of light in the right spot, the pile of trash transforms into this:

You need to find the necessary perspective on your body of work. The picture might not always be positive or pretty — the hammer and axe in that silhouette are a little disconcerting — so it must always be clear. The end of a quarter should be a validation and a celebration, and then it should pass quickly. If you have struggled, it should be a moment of reflection that spurs greater effort and focus — and then that, too, should pass quickly.

Q(x) Assignment

Which brings us to your GAP assignment, to be completed efficiently and insightfully and in two stages:

Google Form due before 7 AM on Wednesday, January 25
Google Classroom assignment due before 7 AM on Friday, January 27

The early morning deadlines allow me to read your responses throughout the day, which speeds along the triage process. The form can be done in class or in 15-20 minutes at home on Tuesday, January 24, so that shouldn’t be a problem. You’ll have Wednesday and Thursday to figure out how to solve the second prompt, which is over on Google Classroom.

Start, of course, with the protocol given to you last quarter. Read it again (or for the first time, if you haven’t quite realized how essential that sort of guide is). Then read or re-read the massive update to Sisyphean High that was delineated back in November. The links are below:

Grade Abatement Protocol | How to put together the evidence and understanding necessary for an accurate score.
Mind the GAP: Sisyphean High 9.3.0 | An update on the course that covers pretty much everything.

Again, if you’ve done your work this year, you’ve already seen those. You internalized enough of them to have needed only the period on Monday to jostle your brain into the right position. These links are review. If you haven’t been keeping up with interstitial instruction, however, you don’t have a choice: You need to read it all now¹.

When you’re ready, you can find your assignments over on Google Classroom. Remember:

Ask questions in the usual places.
Teach each other what you learn.
Fight the predictable, learned helplessness that comes with a difficult task.

Good luck. Let’s settle these scores, make something meaningful, and get back to our studies.

Well, you do have a choice, I guess. You could choose to be frustrated and confused and misinformed. As much as that seems to be gaining in popularity around the country, I would advise against it. ↩

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What’s In a Name?

By Mr. Eure English 10 Regents (2016-2017)

Click here for the post and podcast on names.

Overview

The skills and traits being tested and strengthened for the rest of the quarter are organization, assiduousness, and self-efficacy. You must keep multiple assignments in focus and to plan out your schedule in order to be successful. On Friday, we will pause to work on your Pareto Projects; on Thursday, we will return to your ETA essays.

Keep these assignments in mind. It will feel like a lot to juggle at first, but you will only get stronger in these universal skills and traits if you are forced to develop them.

Reading: Freakonomics, Chapters 5-6 and More

The focus of the work for today and tomorrow is an excerpt from Freakonomics, one of the more interesting and controversial non-fiction books available to us. You can learn more about its authors, Steven Levitt Stephen J. Dubner, at that Wikipedia link. You can learn even more by exploring their website, which is also embedded below.

We are reading two chapters: Chapter 5, “What Makes a Perfect Parent?” and Chapter 6, “Perfect Parenting, Part II: Or: Would a Roshanda By Any Other Name Smell as Sweet?” The photocopied packet also includes the epilogue (“Two Paths to Harvard”) and the “Bonus Matter.” The epilogue is to the entire book, but it serves perfectly as a capstone to Chapters 5-6.

You began reading on Monday, January 9, and will continue to read over the weekend and into next week. The two photocopied chapters are most important; after that, you should explore the Freakonomics website for other interesting articles, especially those about parenting, raising children, and naming. The image at the top of this post links to a podcast that you should listen to, for instance, before you load the website proper:

Because Levitt and Dubner have published so many follow-up articles, studies, and books, you are almost guaranteed to find more to read on the subject of parenting and raising children. If you need help finding more to read, however, this should be your follow-up:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2012/06/freakonomics-goes-to-school-and-teaches-us-the-right-way-to-bribe-kids/258672/

Start with the podcast on names, though. It’s available here or through the image at the top of this post.

Your Reading Assignment

Take notes that track what you find interesting, what you want to discuss, what sparks your curiosity, etc. You can write on the photocopies, in a notebook, or online through Google Drive. As you write, you should discuss what you read with your group. (If you need a reminder about what these new groups look like — and why you are in them — revisit this post.)

For now, that’s all you must do: Read carefully, take notes of some kind, and look for what’s most interesting to you. A more formal assignment will appear next week, when you will be tested on your internalization of the text, your understanding of its ideas, and your ability to monitor your reading.

This is also a unit designed to test your attentiveness to this kind of flipped instruction — the posts, links, etc, that teach you what to do before you work directly with your teachers. If you’ve gotten this far, you should click below to load a strange and often hilarious website that relates to our reading:

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Unspoken Rules

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

Our primary learning goal this week involves your new groups:

New Groups

That post explains why assigned groups have become important for a nontraditional space like ours. This week is the experimental step — the test of what those groups can do, with time set aside to debrief and adjust on Thursday and Friday.

The secondary learning goal this week is to analyze an author’s writing in a unique way. You’ll have an article from The New York Times that was published on Thursday, January 5. Specific instructions for analysis will be given on Tuesday, after you’ve had a day to interact with the text as you normally would.

We also have a tertiary goal¹: to extend and apply the text’s ideas to our current work, including the online components of your Pareto Projects.

Monday

Start by reading the article:

Rules for Social Media, Created by Kids (Published 2017)

Another group of seventh graders (of mixed gender and in a different community) told me the rules regarding how many pictures to post from an event. There was a sense of what was acceptable and what was not.

Work with this text however you normally would². You can take notes, annotate the printed copy, click on hyperlinks, have discussions — anything goes. We’ll use whatever you choose to do as the basis for reflection and metacognition later in the week.

Tuesday

Remaining in your current seats — that is, wherever you normally sit during a class period — spend Tuesday analyzing the text. Commit as much of that analysis to writing as possible. You need written work for Wednesday. Use these prompts:

How does the ol’ rhetorical triangle break down in this text? More specifically, what can you tell about the audience of this text, especially compared to you? I think we can make a meaningful distinction between the intended audience and you, the actual readers of the article.

Beyond the rhetorical triangle is the style of this piece, specifically its tone. What is that tone? Make a distinction between tone that is backed up by language and logic in the text and a reader-projected tone. The latter is a tone that isn’t actually present. We often hear what we expect to hear, not what is actually written.

Finally, what can you, the reader, do with this? I would call this practical redirection. Are there other unspoken rules for social media? And since the answer is obviously yes, which ones matter to our studies?

Wednesday

Get into your new groups as you enter the classroom. Find space to work with these two or three other students, and then figure out how best to share your writing and thinking from Tuesday. Then work together to revisit the text and refine your responses.

If done correctly, this day will see you editing whatever you typed on Tuesday. You’ll have a record through Google, which monitors every change like a benevolent Big Brother, of how you incorporated your new group’s feedback.

Thursday

On Thursday, sit again with your new group. I imagine that many of you will need the extra period to finish Wednesday’s assignment, so that will be first; then you’re going to start reflecting on the previous three days. Consider how your new group meshed, how well you worked together, and how different the experience was compared to your usual chambered work.

Your assignments over the next few days are (1) to submit the text-based work you’ve done, and (2) to write metacognitively and reflectively about the group work, focusing on collegiality especially among the many other GAP skills and traits.

You’ll receive Google Classroom assignments for both of those. Expect the text-based work to be due on Friday; the metacognition will probably have a due date of Monday night.

Friday

Friday’s lesson will be determined midway through the week. As always, pay attention to the interstitial hubs of the course for information.

Mostly so I can use the word “tertiary,” which is one of my current favorite words. ↩
With emphasis on the imperative verb there: Work with this text. If your normal approach is to ignore an assignment, try something outside the box. ↩

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New Groups

By Mr. Eure All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

TL;DR: Let me know if these new groups create any serious interpersonal problems, and then expect to use them in class.

The Stuff of Growth

Back in September, we watched Ken Robinson’s speech on education. You can revisit our discussion through the first part of this corner of Sisyphean High, but we’re talking today about his idea that collaboration is the stuff of growth and that most great learning happens in groups.

The complication arises from how you form those groups, and through the end of 2016, you had almost total control over your collaborative setup. A few class periods were rowdy or unfocused enough to force assigned seats, but never for more than a day or two.

The shift we’re about to make is not an indication that you failed, individually or collectively, to work well in your self-selected groups. Some of you proved Ken Robinson right every day. Instead, this is a deliberate effort to change the classroom space, which has begun to stagnate in recent weeks. You sit in the same places and work with the same folks, and you’ll all benefit from a test your ability to collaborate outside of your circle of friends.

UPDATE, 1/11 | Your groups have been adjusted. You can access the new copies through Google Classroom. Look for the update from January 10, which has a PDF attached. These updated groups are smaller and should prevent the interpersonal problems that were brought to my attention.

If you have any more concerns, juniors should look to the metacognitive and reflective writing outlined in this more recent post. Sophomores can bring their concerns directly to me or Mr. Looby. The goal is to improve, using the resources of the room as effectively and efficiently as possible. Remember:

View at Medium.com

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Pareto Project: Process Update

By Mr. Eure All Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 10 Regents (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

The most obvious changes below are to the calendar for your Pareto Projects, but you will need the definition of a “process update,” too, to help you plan for those checkpoints.

Calendar Update

In the last version, the checkpoints occurred roughly every three weeks, but not on the same day of the week. That has been changed so that a process update happens every other Friday. In English 10, we will almost certainly set aside the period on those dates to work together; English 11 and AP students should not anticipate having that class period, however, since we will be using that time for exam prep.

You can load the updated Google Doc version of the calendar by clicking here. If you’d like to download and print a version, you can use this PDF copy of version 2.1:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2FParetoProjectCalendar.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

Process Update

For all students, these biweekly updates should follow a similar format:

PARETO PROJECTS | Click that link to load the home of our eventual/hopeful Pareto Project publication. Your assignment for every required update is to write an essay that could hypothetically be published there. That essay should be a short, insightful response that blends the answers to three questions:

What have you accomplished so far for your Pareto Project?

What have you learned so far?

What’s next?

Answer these in a way that makes sense for your project. Include whatever images, links, digressions, etc, you want. You will not automatically be published, and many of you haven’t yet set up a Medium account. That’s okay. The metacognitive stuff is more important, so it matters most that you monitor your progress and find something insightful to say about it.

When in doubt, use the instructional posts that are available online. Delving into those posts will hone your close reading ability, and you will get better at communicating your questions and concerns only if you’re fully informed.

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Tuesday, 1/3 – Wednesday, 1/4

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

Today and tomorrow are transitional periods for us. First, you need to finish the work that was assigned two weeks ago. Then you will write short essays that chronicle your progress toward your Pareto project goals.

Transition #1: GAP Self-Assessment and “Unto the Breach”

Use Google Classroom and the following instructional posts to review and, as necessary, to complete the last two formal assignments:

Pareto Principalities

Unto the Breach

If you submitted writing, this is an opportunity to revisit and revise. Either way, a day spent looking at where you were two weeks ago can help you to generate evidence of all sorts of important skills and traits.

Transition #2: Pareto Project Update*

Load the following document:

[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2017%2F01%2F2017StartParetoAnalysis.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=600px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]

There is a prompt at the start of that document. It will be cross-posted to Google Classroom at the end of the day tomorrow, at which point you will be able to upload a copy of your response for archival and evidentiary purposes. Until then, you must determine what to do by reading carefully, asking questions, and collaborating with your peers.

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