Read John Gardner’s Grendel, if you have a bit of time and an interest in philosophy and good literature.
Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism
At the bottom of the universal skills and traits of learning is this pair:
You cannot learn without organization, and the one true goal of education is the capacity to teach ourselves, which is the second word and “state of mind” there:
The most interesting thing about the quick definition provided by Google is the term “automath,” which uses the Greek root for “to learn” to give us a label for a new kind of learning. Polymath is another fun word that uses the same root.
But this post isn’t just about teaching yourself. It’s about students fighting a common enemy through convergent and divergent problem-solving. To defeat that enemy, we need both.
As a quick review:
Click for way more background than you need.
While Google and Wikipedia tells us that “most tasks in school and on standardized multiple-choice tests” do not require significant creativity, that’s actually not a helpful claim, because it devalues the importance of convergent thinking. You need precision and creativity equally to be successful.
Start, though, with what our common enemy is: standardized tests. Any standardized test, in fact, from Regents to APs to GREs. So we’re in agreement:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/04/19/34-problems-with-standardized-tests/?utm_term=.62103cdd0253
Valerie Strauss is thorough and insightful in all of her articles and essays on education, so it’s not much of a surprise that she hits 34 on this list without much difficulty. Standardized tests are just that damaging to educational systems.
Alas, we can’t get rid of them. We also can’t pretend that they reveal nothing about your learning. Even poorly designed tests teach us something about your assiduousness and self-efficacy. Well designed ones showcase critical thinking, close reading, and effective communication, among many other desirable skills and traits.
Standardized tests are still monstrous, though. They are the Grendel to your Beowulf, and you have to proceed with that in mind.
Your Assignments
You will work together to accomplish two tasks:
- Learn everything about the test: what it looks like, how much time it takes, the types of passages most often used, the skills tested, the font of the directions, etc.
- Reverse-engineer a personal plan of attack that will earn you as many points as possible when it comes time to perform.
The first one requires convergent thinking. Standardized tests pass through so many committees and focus groups that there will always be an overview, guide, and set of sample tests to study.
The second one requires divergent thinking. Your goal is to do as well as possible, which requires a keen understanding of your strengths, weaknesses, and resources.
You’ll make a decision about how much to invest in these tasks, and it’s always worth noting at the outset that you and you alone answer for that sort of decision. You can lead a horse to water, they say, but you can’t do much if the horse eats a bunch of rocks and drowns itself.
Most of you will start with a profile of the test you face. All that takes is a link to the right website, time, and the help of a teacher who has been around high-stakes tests long enough to know how to fight them. That’s me.
Below are the tests that juniors take in English Language Arts in New York State. All juniors take the Regents Exam in ELA (Common Core). Some take the College Board’s AP Exam in English Language & Composition.
Scroll down, load the website(s), and memorize the format and expectations of the test(s). Formal assignments about this will be given through Google Classroom, including ways to check your internalization of this information.
(In other words, we’ll use quizzes and tests to see what you’ve memorized and what you know. No grades, of course, but plenty of data and evidence.)
The Regents Exam in English Language Arts (Common Core)
Note: I want to believe that New York State is also interested in the etymology of “mathematics,” and that they are using it here to reference learning, not because no one checked the site’s code. Let me have that belief, please.
The AP English Language & Composition Exam
Note: The College Board uses more precise weapons to evaluate you than New York State does, but that has a lot to do with the size of the war chest. It’s also why New York State is aping AP exams as it adopts Common Core. The ELA Regents, for instance, took a lot of inspiration from the Language & Composition exam. That’s helpful for juniors taking both: You’re fighting similar monsters, at least. Grendel and Grendel’s mother, maybe?
Convergence: Test Profile
Those are the links you need for the convergent piece, regardless of course and level. The divergent work of hacking systems and figuring out how to do well will happen in class, over time, as part of our makerspace.
Organize your approach, your note-taking, and how you memorize this information. It is not enough to “present” it. You aren’t handing in a copy of something we could all look up on Google with 40 minutes and a bit of direction. You must know this.
Whenever we begin this work together in class, we’ll talk much more about what it entails. Use the space here to ask questions and get clarity outside of the face-to-face work.
Read on for some of the philosophy and background, if you’re interested in those things.
Philosophy and Background
The pairing of organization and autodidacticism started a long time ago, with a focus on how much work it takes to develop a system for both:
The unintentional insight of the first two paragraphs ended up moving the burden of learning from the teacher and his Skinner box of punishments and rewards to the student: If every assignment strengthens and demonstrates the skills and traits we care about, after all, then formative feedback is all that counts.
In terms of gamesmanship, the idea is that these tests have a logic that can be learned, weaponized, and beaten:
Read that for the “Too Many Cooks” reference, at the very least.
I read about Michael Larson and skimmed through some of the videos and the effort and preparation he put in was incredible and the focus he had during the show to not mess up once was amazing. It also demonstrated some universal traits of internalization, critical thinking, assiduousness, self-efficacy, organization and autodidacticism. Really cool.
I started reading the Medium article about standardized tests called Press Your Luck. I totally agree with the article. The main gist of it was not to remove tests but to prioritize learning over them. Seeing improvement over time in a course is better than seeing something memorized the day before a test. In APUSH, that is something I struggle with. I memorize everything I need to know for a quiz the night before and it usually stays in my head until quiz time. After, I forget everything. Seeing a good grade on that quiz means nothing more than, “I knew this at some point.” The article talked about how everything can help us learn. Having some tests and quizzes like the Onomatopoeia ones we take help us learn. Does anyone else have that same problem or tips on solving that problem?
Brendan, I don’t think the APUSH situation you described is at all your fault- rather, it’s a product of the environment you’re in. The emphasis on the class is memorization, not developing the capacity to isolate trends, not promoting essay-writing skills. The temporary memorization of information is a strategy that you’ve developed over time; you’ve discovered a need to recite information for an upcoming quiz and the easiest solution was to hold that knowledge in your head for a few days and then focus on the next topic. If the class’ emphasis was on developing skills that related to all of the historical topics, you’d probably adapt to that as well and be able to tie together all of your learning through the common link of a specific focus on certain skills. I feel like I experience the same things in APUSH as you described, and I typically try to accept that because I know that my momentary learning is all that is required for success in the class. Maybe if I had a more resilient and dedicated mindset I’d try to expand my learning on my own, but for now I’m just focused on passing quizzes and building up hooks so that I’ll be able to re-learn all of the information when it comes time for APs. (Writing this, I’m realizing that I’ve just summarized my goal in that class as going from one test to another, and it’s sending up a red flag.) I guess what I’m trying to say is that the style of learning you’ve found yourself doing is likely to be the most efficient way of meeting the expectations of the class you’re in, and that you’ll have to go beyond what the class mandates if you want to expand your skills and knowledge in that area. For me, I feel that I’ve decided not to take that extra step, to be satisfied with doing acceptably in the course without exceeding the expectations. But if it’s important to you that you’re able to attain a broader and more permanent base of knowledge, I think you can do that by going beyond basic memorization when you’re reading, discussing, writing, and studying. If you push yourself to do different things than write chapter to outlines and answer multiple choice questions, your brain will be more adapted to that kind of thinking and I imagine that you would make more progress in expanding your learning.