Instead of Pavlov’s dogs, here’s a video about Schrodinger’s cat.
Unlearning Lessons
Today is Thursday, November 17. For the last three days, you have taken stock of yourselves through various lessons and assessments. As a result, you have a wealth of evidence to consider. You also have to unlearn two dangerous lessons.
First, consider what you were asked to take home after finishing Tuesday’s diagnostic test:
- From Most Likely to Succeed: a section on teaching English
- From Most Likely to Succeed: a section called “The Opportunity Cost”
- An excerpt from a Paul Graham essay
You weren’t given a deadline for this reading. It’s your responsibility to find the time to read all three documents, because they provide you some context for this class, whether you are a senior challenging yourself in AP or a sophomore still wondering whether this high school thing is worth it.
So these documents will tell you why it matters if you know, for example, what “assiduousness” means. The terms we use give shape to the work we do, and this work is the work of the world — the work valued by the 21st century, including the people who will eventually hand you that college acceptance letter or job offer. When we read literature, it won’t be to ruin it the way it was ruined for Paul Graham; it will be to learn empathy and to develop a better understanding of the world, because those traits lead to a better life. When we write, it won’t be to earn a grade; it will be to clarify our thoughts, because that makes us better human beings.
The second dangerous lesson to unlearn is about “failure” on a test like the one you took on Tuesday. Of course it matters if you couldn’t remember ideas covered repeatedly throughout the first quarter. It matters more, however, that you now improve — and that’s why there is no grade or grade book in this course. That test was a diagnostic. It might spark a revolution in your work ethic or another branch of our main skill tree. It might further validate your hard work from Q1. It might shine a spotlight on the need to strengthen your memory. That’s the point: To individualize what happens next.
You need to let go of the Pavlovian part of yourselves, because that part of you wants a treat when it does well. It expects a shock when it screws up.
Pavlovian Part 1
Most of you have been institutionalized. You have confused clarity with simplicity. When you are given complicated directions, you give up almost immediately and become frustrated. Over the past few days, student have
- called the work “stupid” after a cursory read;
- argued that an assignment wasn’t given, despite evidence to the contrary;
- claimed that Snapchat isn’t distracting during class, despite evidence to the contrary;
- given up and fallen asleep.
Every choice you make matters, and you can choose to embrace what we’re doing in here, which is to prepare you for the rest of your life. That’s why you were given those excerpts and essays this week: to show you that we are about more than turgid literary analysis and test-driven busywork. This stuff matters.
But you lack grit, many of you. You lack that particular kind of assiduousness that allows you to cope with difficulty. Until you develop that trait, you will never improve. No one can force you to be patient. No one can make you resilient. If our goal was for you to vomit out an essay that I would then mark up with that red-pen pathology so unique to English teachers, sure, we could force all of you to the goal line. But you’d learn nothing, least of all the grit necessary for success.
That doesn’t mean that you can’t change your future in here, however, and that plasticity may be the most important lesson this week. Since change starts with an inventory of sorts, that’s your assignment: to do an inventory of the evidence you’ve generated this week.
It’s not enough to have completed the work, of course. It’s one thing to be succinct, to think that less is more, but reflective and metacognitive writing benefits from length. More is more, in most cases.
Which means that you need to consider the quality of your work over the last three days, too. What did you learn from Monday’s writing? What did Tuesday’s diagnostic teach you? How do you plan to utilize Wednesday’s insight in the future? Consider, too, the substructural skills and traits of grade abatement. Think about your organization of resources, your reliance on peers and peer feedback, your amenability to explicit and implicit feedback, and so on.
Pavlovian Part 2
Students who earned an 8 or 9 in Q1 are in a slightly different position: You need to teach others how to learn, how to generate evidence, etc. And you cannot be arrogant or condescending, even for a second; being either is evidence of a 4, if you want to look at it through the lens of GAP scores.
Read this older addendum to the grade abatement process:
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What you do is all that matters. That idea was clarified in Section X (“Faking It”) of this essay, too. Be collegial and supportive. Share your understanding. Take pride in your accomplishments, of course, but separate that pride from egotism. From that hyperlinked essay:
There is no game to play and no gamesmanship to lean on. This course does not care how naturally gifted you are. It does not care if you play sports and play them well. It does not care what your parents think of you. It does not care what you look like, how charming you are, or how much latitude you have been given throughout your life to do what you want. It cares only about what you do.
Today’s Assignment Again
Since we got sidetracked from today’s assignment for a bit, I’ll clarify what you must do:
Your assignment for Thursday is to spend 30-40 minutes writing about your progress toward a top-tier GAP score in Q2. In just three days, you have created a small body of evidence. What does it look like? More importantly, what do you need to do now?
In the future, you won’t have many formal assignments that require you to be metacognitive and reflective to this degree. Instead, you will need to find time every week or so to think and write like this on your own. We might take a class period here and there to revisit and refine that metacognitive and reflective process, or to talk about the protégé effect and its impact on your learning, but that would be no different from taking a period to talk about organization or timed writing or critical thinking. We’ll deal with skills and traits as necessary.