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.
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. ↩
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. ↩