On losing one’s head, you can’t do much better than the original “Sleepy Hollow.” Oddly enough,clicking this image will just give you the origins of the word “desultory.”
TL;DR — Q2 is when we pick up the pace, so to speak, in AP. Use your developing insight into Paul Graham’s essay to help you analyze, in the way that we value analysis, the texts and emulative work in this folder. You must work collaboratively and interstitially. Every choice matters.
Emulation-through-Analysis
The idea of emulation-through-analysis, or ETA, writing is embedded in the Spitting the Atom post you’ve now seen a half-dozen times. You can only emulate art that you’ve broken down into component pieces. Writing is the most essential art for the Humanities; it requires a granular understanding.
The Q&A post on Paul Graham is a version of ETA work. It walks you through the actionable parts of Graham’s essay, focusing on the metaphors and analogies that develop his argument. In AP, you must now begin to look more deeply and more critically at every essay you are given, which means that Graham should be background for what comes next.
ETA work is convergent, for the most part: There are wrong answers, because you are looking at how the writing is put together. You can misidentify a rhetorical strategy, misinterpret a stylistic choice, and misread the purpose of an essay. It takes expertise to suss this out. That starts with your teacher, but you must be autodidactic and collaborative, too.
Use the interstitial tools of the course and the Internet’s vast resources to learn whatever you can from this post. Maintain your focus on this question: What can we create with this?
ETA Blitzkrieg: Alligators of the Mind
This folder will be shared again when we write our first river-inspired essay:
Alligators of the Mind – Google Drive
Required and “optional” reading for a study of violence in fiction, censorship in schools, and the nature of obscenity.
You saw these materials almost three weeks ago. This post focuses on the ostensibly optional reading1:
Google Docs versions of these texts are in the folder. If you’d like to read the original texts where they were published, use Google to search for the title and author.
The ETA framework for these three texts teaches you rhetorical strategies that can be used your own writing. There are also framing questions on censorship that could be used to generate a focus for that writing. There are, respectively
- 22 specific strategies and techniques, plus a look at seven overall strategies;
- 30 specific strategies and techniques, plus a look at 11 overall strategies;
- 21 specific strategies and techniques, plus a look at seven overall strategies.
There are two versions of that ETA document in the folder, too. Use Google to learn about techniques, terms, and strategies, and focus in class on talking to me about what you are learning.
Self-Control and Foresight
You received all this on October 30. Two or three weeks is more than enough time to read the essays in preparation for a fast-paced look at emulation and analysis. If you didn’t read ahead, that speaks to your organizational strengths and weaknesses, and you need to reflect and be metacognitive about the guillotines flitting about:
As I’ve said before, that post will never not be relevant. You are in Q2 now, which serves mostly as a threshold for us to start expecting the most from you, a student in a college-level Humanities makerspace. You have vast, unique resources available to you, and a framework that invites and rewards risk. You must be better than the average.
Use the comments here to talk about any of this, but especially to work on the ETA questions for the optional (read: not really optional) reading.
You now know that “optional” is an invitation to do “more than just what is required,” and that is language from a GAP 8. This work is “optional” only if you are comfortable setting your ceiling for learning, growth, and scoring at a 7. ↩
After reading the first segment of this post, I’m interested in seeing what experiences you all have with Emulation Through Analysis in general. For instance, what steps do you find to be essential to accumulating knowledge from texts? For me, the biggest surprise came when Mr. Eure asked us to break down The Age of the Essay in terms of actionable language- because I realized that we often have a tendency to analyze and discuss texts in a more abstract context.
I also found that Splitting the Atom gave me a sort of reassurance about the kind of work I’m doing in class. (I tend to start by reading and rereading posts and key texts (annotating for purposes of internalization as necessary), then discuss it in a group, then reflect on it, then jot down some notes about my intake from the text in my metacognition folder.) When I thought about this in the context of Splitting the Atom- which suggests that we need to break down texts for meaning and then reassemble them so that we can internalize and apply them- my process seemed a lot more worthwhile. I found that the discussions I do and the annotations and close readings that are the first step in my process of analyzing a text are centered on breaking down meaning. Thus, my usage of reflective writing is to pull the layers of meaning back together. I feel that redefining my work by separating it into these two steps helped me see the purpose of what I’ve been doing so far.
Finally, I think it’s worth noting Mr. Eure’s word choice in the ETA segment of the post above: how writing requires a “granular” understanding. I interpreted this as an assertion that we have to break down writing to a small enough (but not too small) level in order to use it. I feel that if we don’t understand writing at a very basic level, it’s impossible to apply it to something else- both because application requires a higher level of understanding than recitation and because in every new context, writing tools have to be applied differently: if we only understand the use of language when it is in broad pieces, we can’t assimilate that understanding into a smaller setting. However, I’m curious how you all define “granular understanding” and what you got from that description of ETA.