*Image from Garfield Minus Garfield. Its message ought to be obvious: Read this post very slowly.
SWOT Post-Writing
Starting today, and using the SWOT analysis given to you last week, you will answer the following prompt:
Spend a significant amount of time reflecting on your process. Then tell the story of that writing process, start to finish, viz.
- your use of class time;
- your collaboration with your peers;
- any questions you asked your teacher;
- your use of other resources, like the Internet; and
- especially your overall sense of how that writing process unfolded.
Before we can analyze how effectively you wrote, we must have a sense of how you, like some sort of ersatz Frankenstein, brought the response to life.
This is the first step of the post-writing protocol we use whenever you produce a piece of writing. It applies to a SWOT analysis as much as it will apply to your first full essays, and is just one of the writing tools you will learn to use as part of this makerspace:
Opens in Google Drive
The rest will be introduced and practiced over the next few weeks. For now, you are being asked only to write a process reflection. You still need the entire post-writing directions:
Post-Writing: Guide
When you load the modified template given to you in Google Classroom, you will see space only for Step #1.
Step #1: Process Reflection
Start by collecting your work. As necessary, print a copy of your responses. Then turn off your devices and look at the product(s) in front of you. For the moment, you are assessing exactly what you have — no more and no less.
In this first step, you are also analyzing the extent to which you meet the criteria for a fourth-tier GAP score. This is not, however, a completion check. Some of you will have negotiated a slightly different assignment by speaking to your teacher; that meets the threshold for a “student-generated feedback loop,” which is a significant part of these higher profiles.
Many of you, unfortunately, will not have completed your assignment, and you will not have spoken enough with your teachers to excuse that lapse. You will have wasted time in class and failed to complete the work at home. These are the facts. They are part of the evidence that we must process in order to improve your work ethic.
For now, any of you who do not have a finished assignment or a clearly articulated alternative track are locked into the third tier of GAP scores. You can unlock passage into the fourth tier through renewed assiduousness and a kind of academic makeover — a significant change in attitude and approach that will create a more assiduous and invested version of you.
If, however, your habits do not change, that is a failure to take this feedback — what you are reading right now — and apply it. At that point, you are likely locked into the second tier of profiles. You can see the logic for this by reading the first tier again and noting its focus on amenability and improvement:
GAP Tiers
After you’ve taken stock of your work ethic and time management (among other things), you can use those observations to produce an answer to the prompt. You are, as the directions suggest, telling the story of your learning: a short and hopefully edifying narrative about how you have approached this class, especially over the last week or two. (You’ll want to define “edifying” before you begin.)
This writing response shouldn’t just address the past, however; the purpose of the SWOT analysis you were assigned is to prepare for the future, and you will need to write about that, as well. Before our next class, you need to have produced a piece of writing that connects what you’ve done to what you will do.
There are no other formal requirements. You can write this response by hand or type it. If you choose the latter, you will need to print a copy before arriving to our next class, and you’ll need to attach it somehow to the Google Classroom portion. We will run a kind of triage on these responses before we begin our next unit.
Preview of Next Unit
For you, that next unit will include a focus on emulation-through-analysis (ETA) work. We will use the three essays you’ve read to fuel a full-class discussion, and then you will analyze one of those essays in order to emulate its rhetorical strategies. There will be an additional post here and/or on Medium about reading itself.
More important to you, at least right now, is that this week is a test. By the end of it, and certainly by the end of next week, we will know much more about you as a student. We will certainly know if you can parse complicated directions, navigate an interstitial classroom, budget your time effectively, advocate for your own learning, and so on1
We have one additional essay (appropriately called “The Age of the Essay”) to read, analyze, and fold into everything else we’ve learned this year; you can preview it here, if your curiosity overtakes you. We will use Graham’s text to differentiate between digital and analog annotations, to discuss your writing habits, and to set up your first full essay assignment, which will also be when you to experience the makerspace in full.
You can begin thinking about that first essay, too, if you like (and are capable of multitasking more than most). We are going to use the “find a river” philosophy to write about your own journey, with “journey” used to invoke the summer reading, Enrique’s Journey. This will be a personal narrative conceived and iterated through the tools of our course.
There might even be something this week that looks like a traditional test — a diagnostic of how much of the language and machinery of this course you’ve studied and internalized since June of last year. I think we would call it DDT, which could stand for data-driven test or doki-doki test, since that was the onomatopoeia chosen by your predecessors. DDT is also pretty good/bleak historical analogy to traditional testing: ostensibly a way to help, but really just a lot of poison. ↩