There is context at the top of the form itself, but it’s most important that you acknowledge this: There is no penalty for having failed to do the summer reading. There is also no reward for saying you did do it. This form is gathering data about your choices, and we will analyze and discuss those choices, good or bad, as we move forward.
That is not to say that your choices did not matter. They mattered very much. As a student assigned to read two of these books, your decisions tell us something about your relationship to reading and learning. It’s more useful to focus on that than to judge or praise you. What matters now is the meaning we can mine from your choices.
What w are really talking about is 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, even if 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. We will discuss your possible focuses for writing in class.
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.)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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:
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:
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:
(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:
What are you working on?
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:
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. ↩
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. ↩
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… ↩
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. ↩
