From the movie adaptation of a seminal text on the importance of education.
Reminder: Final Triptych
Actually, it’s less a reminder than a reanimator. We’re all a bit dead on our feet by June. There’s more than the course’s final triptych to consider, too.
1. Summer Reading
Read the post covering your 2018 summer assignments. Start the work now, even if you only consider your choices. Your work ethic is going to atrophy by August; you need to exercise it regularly.
Of course, you should only focus on summer reading if you’ve truly finished up everything required of you for this year.
2. Junior-to-Senior Jumpstart
This, too, should only be your concern when and if you handle the rest of your responsibilities, especially in this class. Time will keep on keeping on, though, and in two weeks, you can start to consider some of the bigger stressors of the fall of your senior year:
- Asking for letters of recommendation
- Drafting the college essay
- Completing the Common App
- Completing your Junior Autobiography
- Organizing an online portfolio of writing, art, etc.
If you can dedicate some time to these over the summer, the fall will be much less stressful.
3. Pareto Projects
The goal was always to grapple with the soritical paradox of most projects and final exams. That’s a way of saying that these projects should involve work you take with you into the summer, into next year, etc., because the work is meaningful. Any arbitrary end date ought to exist to prompt feedback and validation, not to truncate your progress so we can assign it a score.
Share anything you want to share through the Google Classroom assignment created this morning. I’ll populate a Google Site created for this purpose, and we’ll see how much feedback and validation we can gather from the rest of the district and community. Unless you’re a senior (and probably even then), this kind of community feedback will matter as much in July and September as it will next week.
4. Final Essay
The retrospective consideration of your writing life is due on Monday, June 11. Late work affects your profile — of course it does — but it is more important to write meaningfully than to compromise your insight through a last-second rush job.
It’s possible that some of you did not organize your time well over the last three weeks. If so, you should take a few extra days to write this retrospective. Get through the Regents Exam first. Make sure you’ve done what you needed to do for your Pareto Project. Then carve out the necessary time, starting after the Regents Exam on June 12, complete your final essay.
The prompt is in the “Final Triptych” post and on Google Classroom. You should submit your response on Classroom, unless you are using Medium or another site to publish; in that case, you can link directly to your essay.
Note: Some of you negotiated an alternative subject for this final essay. That deal still holds. Submit your response to Google Classroom.
5. THE Regents Exam
By now, you should be deep into this prep. You ought to have finished it, really, since doing a complete practice exam right before taking the real exam is a surefire way to court burnout.
As necessary, the exam posted to Castle Learning is the best use of your remaining time. It has the metacognitive work built in. Load your account and work through the multiple-choice and writing. Refer back to your notes on these posts:
To a significant extent, the Regents Exam reflects your preparation more than your talent for writing, reading, and thinking. Weak work ethic leads to low scores; strong work ethic leads to high scores. If you work hard, even at this late hour, you will do well. The data will tell us your story.
In fact, you might consider everything happening now as another chance to tell a story about yourself. It can be a story of continued investment and insight, of apathy and entitlement, of perseverance and turning points — all narratives stitched together from the choices you’ve already made and the choices you will eventually make. Create something meaningful.