The last day of classes is Monday, June 12. You have five days left.
Your productivity and focus for the next week will factor significantly in your Q4C profile score, which should be finalized on or before Friday, June 16. As you’ll read below, there is an optional assignment due on June 15 that may take longer to process, depending on how many of you complete it.
Look over each of these sections as soon as possible — at the start of class on Tuesday, June 6, at the absolute latest.
Final Exam
Here is an instructional post from May 14:
That post covers everything about the last month of school. Back in mid-May, you were given a printed copy of it to use as a checklist. Today, a month later, you were given another version:
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If you want a Google Docs version to edit, click here and make a copy. This new checklist covers only the prep work for the Aug. ’14 practice exam. You also have access to the Aug. ’16 practice exam, but we’re probably not going to need that.
By Monday, June 12, you must be able to check off every item on that second checklist, or you must be able to point to an alternative task that was given to you. For instance, if you were allowed to conference with one of your teachers instead of writing a metacognitive analysis, you can use that.
Until you have finished the entire checklist, finishing it is your primary focus. You will need it to score higher than a 4 for your final GAP score, and it is the only real way to prepare for the final exam itself.
Pareto Project
The other default work for the final five days is your Pareto Project. Any and all work done on this project factors into your final GAP score, and you will have an optional assignment next week that allows you to get credit for anything you produce.
The point of these projects, however, was always
- to give you time and space to do something meaningful; and
- to honor that time and space by emphasizing process over product.
The work can’t just be submitted to me as part of a GAP report. It also shouldn’t stop when the course does — unless you want it to stop, of course. If you want to present or publish something you’ve done, on the other hand, or if you want to share a part of your project with your classmates through a lesson or activity, this is the time to do it. To give you an example:
That’s an example of blackout poetry, the focus of one junior’s Pareto Project. Use Google to look at other examples (this is one from the Google image results for “blackout poetry” that keeps the text intact, which is atypical). The student and I talked months ago about the possibility of an in-class lesson on creating this sort of poetry, which could be a lot of fun. You could bring in newspapers, magazines, books, etc, and see what can be gleaned from them — here is a Scholastic lesson, but I might go with this step-by-step guide instead. Then it’s all in how you isolate and emphasize the words on the page. I could set that up for Thursday or Friday using the student’s suggestions, give everyone a day to bring in materials, and then run the lesson beside her. That’s a great use of one of our last days of class.
Let me know as soon as possible what you’d like to do, if it requires my help. If in doubt, ask yourself a question: What would you do with this project if there wasn’t a single grade, GAP score, or classroom connected to it?
Summer Reading
You also have the option over the next five days to begin your summer reading work. Copies of the school-wide assignment are in Room 210. You’ll find them next to the hall passes and exam folders by our door. This handout will be digitized and shared by the school at some point, too.
I encourage you to use Amazon, Wikipedia, and Goodreads to learn more about these books. The teachers you will have next year aren’t going to care if you memorize the plot or pass a reading quiz; they’re going to ask you to have invested in the text. You’ll be writing about and discussing what you read. The best thing you can do, therefore, is pick a book you might actually want to spend time with.
You also know by now that if you put this off until the last second, you’re probably going to dislike whatever you read. That’s if you read it at all, which is unlikely. So you won’t have much of an experience, at least not compared to what might happen if you take your time now to look into each choice. Do this the right way, and you will almost certainly find something you want to read. Revisiting this video will help:
Ask about the summer reading in the comments below, if you’d like me to offer feedback on the choices. If you want to talk to each other about the possibilities, use the classroom space — or maybe clear the cobwebs from your Google+ Community for these final five days.