Like the last post, this one is about choices and consequences, but it’s more focused on that all-important 36th chamber, or what we do between the bells.
For most of the year, we focus our in-class time on a different kind of feedback: lots of circulating of ideas, grouping and regrouping students, etc., all built around ongoing, collaborative tasks. It’s a makerspace, with all the shifts that suggests.
The end of year dictates a lot more summative feedback, including more summative notes on your final projects, essays, etc. There are also exams to study for and final grades to compile.
Now consider how many deadlines, toward the end of a school year, fall on or around the last day of classes. This shifts the focus away from what you will take with you — the skills, traits, and habits that will help or hurt you next year — and toward what you did, fortunately or unfortunately, as assessed by rubrics and final grades and so on.
This changes the day-to-day shape of the period, at least for the last 13 days or so1. Most classes experience similar shifts — more review, more presentations, in-class finals that span several days. It’s not unusual.
So you might see the teachers in this space spend an entire class period with one student, because she needs that much face-to-face help on her college essay.
You might see one of us spend a period hunched over a computer screen, because we’re adding feedback to the first draft of a book a student submitted that day for his Pareto Project.
You might see us meeting with a small group in a corner of the room for 30 minutes, because we need to walk them through a practice exam posted to Castle Learning.
None of these is that different from the normal makerspace setup, but it does preclude the kind of responsive redirection you’re used to. In other words, we’re not correcting your in-class focus unless it bubbles over into disruption or disrespect. Your choices are your own. That’s why you have such an exhaustive set of resources to guide you:
This is also the return of the return of the fatal flying guillotine. The onus is on you, the student, to make the right choice. If you can’t self-regulate, and if the vast number of failsafes fail you, and if the intrinsic and extrinsic motivation of the profiles fails you — well, then you’ve failed yourself.
This is the end of the year; you are now what you have repeatedly done, especially in these last few months. If you recognize deficits or gaps, it will be your responsibility to correct them before next year, wherever next year finds you — in college, in a job, in your senior year, etc. It might be best to focus on starting new habits that will carry over into next year.
Make absolutely no mistake here: You can and should reach out for clarification about anything you get in terms of summative feedback, from final exam scores to final GAP scores to final Pareto Projects. You can — and will — receive the same level of feedback as always. But in the last few days, you get out of this space exactly what you put into it. That’s not unique to a makerspace, but it may feel more in focus in a makerspace. The liminal stuff is given more clarity.
So it’s down to you. Recognize what that looks like.
That’s an arbitrary number, although it is exactly the focus of these organizing posts in 2019: English 10, English 11, and AP English. ↩