Probably the most traditional of all the traditional focuses in an English classroom is learning how to read. It doesn’t matter if you’re in a grade-abated makerspace or listening to a lecture on 13th-century poetry; it all starts with how well you can decode text and understanding its meaning.
This course forces you to practice reading as a slow and deliberate act. That’s why you have posts telling you what to do, instead of a traditional 42-minute lesson. It’s why those posts are much more complicated than a handout or embedded video. It’s why we don’t review directions and other materials at the front of the room1.
You must dedicate yourself to reading in here, and it has to happen well before you’re studying novels and poetry and all the other expected stuff of an English course. It’s about the skill of reading. You learn by doing — “We learn what we do,” Dewey said — and you only get better at a skill through practice.
What I also know after a few years of doing this — first through traditional, performative lessons, then through student-centered lessons, and now through makerspace work — is that you will seek out shortcuts when it comes to more difficult reading. It’s how we’re all wired: If everything else is equal, we look for the fastest route to the goal. So if you’re asked to read a poem or novel closely, you just might hop onto the Internet and ask it to help you.
In here, there is no summary of the instructional posts. You have to read them, and you have to read them carefully, or you will not know what to do. You won’t improve the skill of reading, either, and the deficit will spiral. The same is true of guides and handouts. They are the teaching, which means they can’t be treated as checklists or overviews. The Pareto Project guide, for instance, is written to teach you slowly and deliberately about many things related to the project itself.
If this is tough at first, it’s because you need to get stronger. It gets easier as you gain strength. You have to develop more than a habit of mind; you also need some sinew and muscle to move you through the work.
On Habits of Mind
Now, the tone of that first section is mostly matter-of-fact. There’s no judgment or disappointment, just encouragement to tough it out until you get better at the all-important skill of close reading.
The tone in this section will shift slightly to be more critical, both as an explicit model of how to use tone and because you need something more critical2. These instructional posts exist to help you strengthen your reading skills, yes, but they also exist to fight a particularly dangerous reflex: learned helplessness.
Learned helplessness isn’t unique to you, your age group, the year 2017, etc. It’s human nature to want things to be easier than they are, and it’s human nature to adapt to what we’re given. The educational system was built to spoon-feed students information, and it will take many more decades of reform to undo that ethos. Students are used to the spoon.
There’s no spoon here3. You need to be resilient and tough. You need to be okay with the feeling of being a little lost. Everything has been built for you so that hard work and focus will teach you what you need — from how to read more carefully to how to get organized to how to write essays.
Learned helplessness makes confusion and uncertainty much worse. But if you feel lost in this room, you can trust that there’s a route forward. There’s a map. There are even people who will read the map with you. They will help you figure things out.
But they won’t read for you. They won’t do the work for you. You have to help yourself first.
In old maps of the uncharted world, cartographers would sometimes use the phrase terra incognita to indicate the unknown. There’s a bit of a myth that this sometimes took the form of “Here be dragons,” which is, even if it’s untrue, still much more interesting:
It meant that there were dangers in those unknown waters. In here, the sections you haven’t charted yet have no monsters in them. Or if there are monsters — I probably shouldn’t assume; they say that makes monster food out of you and me — you’ll know how to fight them. You’ll have allies.
The point: If it’s true that some of you have learned helplessness, you can also unlearn it. You just have to be willing to struggle.
While you think about that, here’s a video remix of the Reading Rainbow theme song from PBS:
Well, that and the fact that we don’t have a front of the room. ↩
It’s also important to show you that “critical” doesn’t mean “insulting.” Pointing out flaws can be ameliorative, which means to make something better. ↩
Today was the last day of classes, and tomorrow starts your final exams. As always, if you have questions or concerns about what to do, you should email me or leave a comment on this post. I will get back to you as quickly as possible.
At any rate1, let’s run down our work, one last time.
Regents Examination in English Language Arts (Common Core)
Juniors and seniors taking this exam should arrive to the gym no later than 8:00 AM on Wednesday, June 14. If you are in a separate location, make sure you know where to go before arriving to school on Wednesday. The exam begins at 8:15 AM, and you must be there on time.
Note: The original calendar for final exams had 9:15 AM, not 8:15 AM. The Regents begins at 8:15 AM. Set your alarm. In fact, here is a checklist in all caps:
DATE: WEDNESDAY, JUNE 14
TIME: 8:15 – 11:15
LOCATION: GYMNASIUM
If you are taking this test in a special location, or if you have extended time, you have already been given that information. Let me know if you are uncertain.
Review this post and your exam folder at some point Tuesday. Set aside a pen and pencil; you absolutely must have a pen, but I suggest bringing both. Your teachers will be in the gym to help you get seated and organized. The usual rules will apply: no cellphones, no bags, no papers or folders aside from the test itself.
Another note: Your teachers always bring candy to give you some energy2 and to celebrate the end of high-stakes English testing (for this year, at least). If you have a preference, leave a comment on this post, and I’ll see what I can do. Otherwise, I will put the decision in my four-year-old daughter’s hands, which means you will get something with Shimmer and Shine on it.
GAP Q4C Scores and Final Averages
Tonight is the deadline for most of you for the final GAP process. Submit your evidence and self-assessed scores, just as you always do. If you would like to share any Pareto Project work, contact me, and we’ll fold that into the scoring discussion. If there is anything else you believe is pertinent to this final cycle, make sure to attach it or share it directly.
Final exam note: If you are one of the students tackling the reader-response essay, that final essay is due by Friday. All GAP scoring and final grading will be held until that point. I’ll keep reminding you as the deadline gets closer, because there aren’t any extensions on this assignment. If you are required to do it, you have until Friday.
I will get the GAP score that fits your evidence and performance into Infinite Campus as soon as possible. When you receive that score, run the usual reflective protocol, and then reach out to discuss any concerns. If you want to conference with me, send an email to set that up. I’ll work around your schedule.
Computers are fickle creatures note: Because there were three seniors spread across your juniors classes, I was required to finalize grades on Friday. This does not mean that your current grades are final. How could they be? I am sure that there was a way to finalize just those seniors grades, but I could not find it, and all of my imprecations failed to make the computer work any differently. Again, your grades are not final, despite what the machine tells you.
Miscellanea
1. Outstanding Books
Where the adjective means both “very good” and “unresolved.” This is for anyone who still has a copy of 1984 or One Hundred Great Essays: Bring that book back in to me before the end of the school year. If I’m not around, you may drop it off on my desk in Room 210. I will take care of signing it back in and filing it away.
As always, if you fail to return a book you signed out from the school, you are responsible for the purchase price of the book. We’d always rather have the books back, though. Please return whatever you have.
2. SUMMER READING
You should already have a copy of the summer reading for BHS and any college-level courses you’re taking. If not, I’ll leave copies in the same place in Room 210 through the end of final exams. Copies of the assignments will be posted online, too, if they haven’t already been uploaded. Look to the high school’s main website for more information.
3. ROOM 210
The makerspace will be open periodically during the next two weeks. You are welcome to stop by before or after exams. In addition to copies of the summer reading, I’ll keep copies of all exam and GAP materials on the bookshelves. Let me know if you need anything.
Any further updates will be posted on Google Classroom. Good luck with your final exams!
Well, not any rate. It is always at the most desultory and uncomfortable rate possible. That is the rate. Think about it: The school has collected your Chromebooks the day before final exams start. Hopefully, you have a phone or tablet or other device on which you are reading this, because it’s a little late to shift entirely to a paper classroom. Ten months of flipped and interstitial instruction and feedback, and you lose your computer right before exams. Is there a more perfect example of public education than that? ↩
Fleeting, sugary energy, yes, but energy nonetheless. ↩
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. Then recognize that this is the worst time to give in to apathy and atrophy.
ELA Regents Exam
Continue to do Regents Exam prep as necessary. All formal deadlines for the work have passed; at this point, you should prepare based on your individual needs. Refer back to this instructional post:
That has all the resources you need. You can also lean on me to get further practice, feedback, and advice.
RE/AP11 Final Exam
The reader-response prompt shared with you on May 25 is another option for you over these final five days. Obviously, if you were assigned this as a final exam requirement, you have no choice; you must finish your response by the deadline. It is a good prompt for everyone to consider, however, and certainly a fallback for anyone uncertain of how to spend their time.
If you are interested in dedicating some of your time to this work, talk to me in the comments here or in class. The prompt leans heavily on autodidacticism, but not to the exclusion of direct feedback. Here it is in full:
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. This will be posted later.
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 of your Pareto Projects. 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. If you are taking AP Literature & Composition or DCC, you have an additional assignment. Those are labeled. All of this material 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.
In the meantime, I’m curious about what you’ll do with the following excerpts about reading. They are distinct in tone and perspective. The first is from one of Franz Kafka’s letters:
Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn’t shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it? … We’d be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we love ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any human presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe.
The second is from The Autobiography of Malcolm X:
I have often reflected upon the new vistas that reading opened to me. I knew right there in prison that reading had changed forever the course of my life. As I see it today, the ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive. I certainly wasn’t seeking any degree, the way a college confers a status symbol upon its students. My homemade education gave me, with every additional book that I read, a little bit more sensitivity to the deafness, dumbness, and blindness that was afflicting the black race in America. Not long ago, an English writer telephoned me from London, asking questions. One was, “What’s your alma mater?” I told him, “Books.” You will never catch me with a free fifteen minutes in which I’m not studying something I feel might be able to help the black man…
I told the Englishman that my alma mater was books, a good library. Every time I catch a plane, I have with me a book that I want to read, and that’s a lot of books these days. If I weren’t out here every day battling the white man, I could spend the rest of my life reading, just satisfying my curiosity — because you can hardly mention anything I’m not curious about. I don’t think anybody ever got more out of going to prison than I did. In fact, prison enabled me to study far more intensively than I would have if my life had gone differently and I had attended some college.
You could do a lot worse than reading Kafka and Malcolm X this summer, by the way, and that would be quite the interesting pair to bring to the beach. As a point of comparison, revisit this video about why we read literature:
Ask about the BHS or course-specific books in the comments below, and I’ll offer whatever feedback I can. 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.
Makerspace Shenanigans
That’s a lot to choose from for five days, so you really don’t need another choice… but this option takes us back to the first thing you ostensibly read, when the syllabus was given to you back on September 6. You should be using the space at this point to ask questions and solve problems. That was the point of most of the recent posts, especially the ones on the end of the year. Of course, most of you able to choose this option already have, which makes the following text — edited lightly from that first-day syllabus — just a bit of validation.
We are a makerspace. It’s a term rarely used in an English classroom, and you’ll understand why when you revisit this clip:
That scene from Apollo 13 presents the traditional makerspace experience: A group of like-minded and similarly trained folks are given tools and components, confronted with a problem, and then asked to collaborate to solve that problem.
These engineers pour out a box of components onto the table, and then they experiment in order to do something important and innovative. In most makerspaces, the components that are poured out (metaphorically speaking) are physical — even if they are as tiny as DNA:
From WIRED: “Cow Milk Without the Cow Is Coming to Change Food Forever”
Trying to hack DNA to create cow-less milk requires the same general kind of makerspace thinking that it takes to save a bunch of stranded astronauts. Both examples involve science, and that’s the usual focus of a makerspace: Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math. When Art is included, they call this STEAM education.
To adapt this for English, we ask two questions:
What important and meaningful problems are we solving in an English classroom?
What components do we pour out onto a table to help us solve those problems?
Well, the problems we face are the universal ones: What does it mean to be a human being? What does it mean to live in a society? What are our beliefs? How do we want to live our lives? We face the problem of metabolizing anxiety and processing grief, of love and hate, of carving meaning out of the rock in front of us.
Like any makerspace, we must experiment to try to solve those problems. We have to think outside the box. Sometimes we have to destroy the box and build a better one. In an ELA makerspace, however, the tools of experimentation aren’t robotics, circuits, or 3D printers, but a set of universal skills and traits, which we fold into a course in the Humanities.
If that makes sense to you, good. You know what to do, and you know how to fill these five days. As always, I’m here to help.
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.
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:
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.
Part 2 of a two-part series that probably isn’t going to be renewed for another season. Advertisers are pulling out.
Regents and Final Exam Work
As discussed in the last post, the final exam will be given only to students in danger of failing the course. If you are one of those students, you will know by the end of this week, and you will be given the final exam prompt on Monday, May 22.
If you have kept up with assignments over the last few weeks, you have a completed, annotated, and deconstructed practice Regents Exam in a folder in Room 210. If your folder is incomplete, that’s your focus until it is complete. Grade abatement will take the missing deadlines into account, but you should worry more about the exam on June 14. We will return to these folders in June, when we’ll need to review and arrange your mental architecture for the exam itself; and while it might not be the entrance exam at Oxford, the Regents needs to be taken seriously. The exhaustive context and directions remain where they have been.
The folders will be reviewed for any serious areas of weakness, and then I’ll talk to you individually and in small groups about what you might need to do before June. All of you will be practicing multiple-choice questions on poetry, however, which is why that gets its own section here:
How to Strip Poetry of All Its Beauty
Well, not all its beauty. We’re not quite at what David Foster Wallace called “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty,” although that may be simply because the Regents isn’t precise enough a tool.
Regardless, the data from our first batch of multiple-choice questions suggest that you need help analyzing poetry. The data always suggest that. Perhaps that’s because you shouldn’t analyze poetry unless you plan to emulate it — to become a poet yourself, that is. I’ve tried to parse the logic that gets us anywhere else:
Whether or not multiple-choice questions on a timed, state-designed test are authentic or valid, however, or helpful in any meaningful way, you have to get them right. So we will practice.
You’ll get a packet of poetry and multiple-choice questions at some point this week, after you’ve had a day or two to look over recent assignments and metabolize that post-prom letdown1. You’ll have time to answer those questions and talk about the poetry, and then I’ll post a Google Form to give you the right answers and generate group data, just like we’ve done before.
Other Work
We’ll continue our Pareto Project work on Fridays in the iLC. I’ll use the data from this form, which has been formally posted to Google Classroom and embedded in an earlier post, to determine what happens next, and that will dictate some of our time together before the end of the year.
Otherwise, what we’ll do is true makerspace work: work that is generated in the moment through questioning and observation and curiosity. I’ll push you to write certain essays and read certain texts. It will be very much about exploration, creation, and the learning that goes with it. So the work won’t have a post here online, nor a Google Classroom assignment. It will be work that is folded into the grade abatement process and made authentic by the understandings we’ve developed over the year.
In other words, when we aren’t grappling with tests and their interior logic, we’ll be seeing what sort of happiness we can carve out of the rock in front of us.
Even if you didn’t attend the junior prom, there’s a post-prom letdown. When the mob that surrounds you feels one way, it tends to put something in the water. ↩
Part 2 of a two-part series that probably isn’t going to be renewed for another season. Too much stunt casting, the critics say.
AP Post-Exam Work
Now that you’ve had a weekend to decompress from the hadal pressure of AP exams, you might want to head over to Google Classroom and complete the reflective/metacognitive document prepared for you. When you open the assignment, you’ll get a file with your name automatically added. You’ll see boxes that will expand as you write in them, and you’ll intuit from the first part of this sentence that you should write enough to cause them to expand.
Your prompt: Write about each of those elements of the exam. In your writing, say something insightful and meaningful and worth the effort of pulling it out of your mind and making it permanent.
Now, in the first paragraph there, I’ve said that you might want to head over there to reflect/metacogitate1 on the exam, because this assignment isn’t “required.” And that word is in quotation marks to draw your attention back to the language of the upper-tier profiles. This post-exam work is the “more than just what is required” in the GAP 8. Failing to write something meaningful here doesn’t necessarily keep you from that GAP 8 or 9, and there may be a reason that you can’t fit this kind of writing into your week. See what you can do, though.
Regents and Final Exam Work
As discussed in the last post, the final exam will be given only to students in danger of failing the course. If you are one of those students, you will know by the end of this week, and you will be given the final exam prompt on Monday, May 22.
As for the Regents Exam: The exhaustive context and directions remain where they have been, and you should know exactly what goes in your manilla folder. We will return to these folders in June, when we’ll need to review and arrange your mental architecture for the exam itself. While it might not be the entrance exam at Oxford, the Regents needs to be taken seriously, especially by AP students.
Even before your folders are submitted for review, I’ll talk to you about serious areas of weakness. I’ll also probably ask you to do the poetry prep that the RE11 students are doing. I wouldn’t want you to miss out on this, which is the subheading for this part of the Regents Exam:
HOW TO STRIP POETRY OF ALL ITS BEAUTY
Well, not all its beauty. We’re not quite at what David Foster Wallace called “the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty,” although that may be simply because the Regents isn’t precise enough a tool.
Regardless, the data always suggest that you struggle with multiple-choice questions on poetry. Perhaps that’s because you shouldn’t analyze poetry unless you plan to emulate it — to become a poet yourself, that is. I’ve tried to parse the logic that gets us anywhere else:
But we will practice, in all likelihood. There will be a packet of poetry and multiple-choice questions at some point, and you’ll have time to answer those questions and talk about the poetry, and then I’ll post a Google Form to give you the right answers and generate group data, just like we’ve done before.
Other Work
We’ll continue our Pareto Project work on Fridays in the iLC. I’ll use the data from this form, which has been formally posted to Google Classroom and embedded in an earlier post, to determine what happens next, and that will dictate some of our time together before the end of the year.
Otherwise, what we’ll do is true makerspace work: work that is generated in the moment through questioning and observation and curiosity. I’ll push you to write certain essays and read certain texts. It will be very much about exploration, creation, and the learning that goes with it. So the work won’t have a post here online, nor a Google Classroom assignment. It will be work that is folded into the grade abatement process and made authentic by the understandings we’ve developed over the year.
In other words, when we aren’t grappling with tests and their interior logic, we’ll be seeing what sort of happiness we can carve out of the rock in front of us. You are expected not just to understand all that metaphorical talk, but to know how to put it into practice. That is the real test at the end of the year: Do you know what we’re really trying to do in this course? Can you do it?
The end of the year starts on April 19, when we return from spring break. We won’t see another day off until the end of May, and you’ll have final exams a week later.
This calendar is meant to be printed and filled in according to your needs. Note the dates of each panel of your Q4 GAP triptych, as well as the Fridays you’ll be in the iLC. All other assignments, instructions, and feedback will be posted here and on Google Classroom, as always, and we will spend April 19-20 setting things up1. I’ll share a copy of the calendar through Google Classroom, too.
The Non-Denominational Evil Spirit in the Details
You’ve gone over a month without an instructional post here, and not just because of the two weeks we’ve had off for spring break. We’ve been using offline resources to work on grammar, and we won’t be posting copies of those resources to the website. Instead, you’ll continue to work on the “Grammar as Rhetoric and Style” sections that were photocopied from The Language of Composition, the textbook kept on the bookshelf in our classroom. As necessary, I’ll scan those assignments and post them on Google Classroom, where they’re permitted2.
What we’re going to do with these GARAS exercises is apply them. Here’s a slightly edited copy of the assignment given through Google Classroom on April 7:
Grammar as Rhetoric and Style: Week 1
The goal is understanding and application. You should learn by doing, and you should also ask for redirection and feedback from your teachers. Take your time in class to study the lessons, complete the exercises, and receive feedback from your teachers about your understanding and application. Do not rush.
Part 1: Direct, Precise, and Active Verbs | Read the explanation of direct, precise, and active verbs in the photocopied packet distributed in class. Take notes that help you to internalize the concepts and terminology. Then complete Exercises 1-3 in their entirety. You may write the answers by hand or type them online, and you may work alone or in groups. If you choose to work in a group, work in a shared Google Doc, so we can track through your revision history each member’s contributions.
Part 2: Concise Diction | Read the explanation of concise diction in the photocopied packet distributed in class. Take notes that help you to internalize the concepts and terminology. Then complete Exercises 1-3 in their entirety. You may write the answers by hand or type them online, and you may work alone or in groups. If you choose to work in a group, work in a shared Google Doc, so we can track through your revision history each member’s contributions.
If you didn’t finish those exercises, that’s your job this week. We’ll pause on Friday to talk about your Pareto Projects in the iLC, but by that point, we’ll already have moved on to the your next writing assignment, and your efforts from April 3-7 are part of this quarter’s first GAP score. You might already need to make up a lot of lost ground.
Regardless, you’re going to write creatively in order to practice these two lessons. You’ll select a prompt, write a response by hand, and then type up a revision that employs what you learned from Part 1 (direct, precise, and active verbs) and Part 2 (concise diction). You’ll have to identify where and how you’re using grammar as rhetoric and style.
That self-analysis and metacognition will be formalized later. For now, you can start writing whenever you’re done with the GARAS exercises from before break. Head over to the site we used on March 27 to start this focus on grammar:
http://www.writersdigest.com/prompts
Choose any prompt from there that you haven’t chosen before. Keep in mind that your goal is to gain more control of grammar in context in order to be a more effective writer overall. Let us know what you’re working on, and we’ll help you as you go. Ask questions here, in the comment section, as necessary.
This includes finalizing Q3 GAP scores and reorganizing our physical space. We’ve had almost two weeks to atrophy, so we’re going to need two days to start moving again. ↩
One of the authors, Larry Scanlon, was a teacher in Brewster for three decades, by the way, which is a cool thing to note. ↩
The end of the year starts on April 19, when we return from spring break. We won’t see another day off until the end of May, and you’ll have final exams a week later.
This calendar is meant to be printed and filled in according to your needs. Note the dates of each panel of your Q4 GAP triptych, as well as the Fridays you’ll be in the iLC. All other assignments, instructions, and feedback will be posted here and on Google Classroom, as always, and we will spend April 19-20 setting things up1. I’ll share a copy of the calendar through Google Classroom, too.
The Non-Denominational Evil Spirit in the Details
For the next two weeks, you are going to work on the practice Regents Exam you began before break. You should already have Part 2 finished, but you’ll now get a few days to correct any lapses there. Next up is Part 1, which asks you to read passages and answer multiple-choice questions, and Part 3, which requires a couple of paragraphs of rhetorical or literary analysis2.
You have until Monday, April 24, to finish Part 1. Copies of the practice exam are available in our classroom, and you’ll remember that our goal is to understand the test, not just take it. You will use the rest of the week to answer all of the multiple-choice questions, and then you’ll record your answers. In fact, I’ll prepare a Google Form that will require you to record how you answered each question. You’ll have the correct answers provided in class, which we’ll use to start hacking and reverse-engineering the logic of the test. The Google Form assignment will let us plan out group work and individual feedback going into next week.
One other note: On Friday, you’ll have time in the iLC to revisit your Pareto Projects. Remember that those projects are built for 20% of your time, with the other 80% dedicated to test prep — until May, at least, when we’ll reorganize ourselves around something else. You need to use your time in class effectively, which means working on this Regents Exam for a few days.
This includes finalizing Q3 GAP scores and reorganizing our physical space. We’ve had almost two weeks to atrophy, so we’re going to need two days to start moving again. ↩
Brief, perfunctory analysis, at that. The real difficulty of the exam lies in the essay, which you’ve now ostensibly deconstructed, and the multiple-choice section. ↩
The end of the year starts on April 19, when we return from spring break. We won’t see another day off until the end of May, and you’ll have final exams a week later.
This calendar is meant to be printed and filled in according to your needs. Note the dates of each panel of your Q4 GAP triptych, as well as the Fridays you’ll be in the iLC. All other assignments, instructions, and feedback will be posted here and on Google Classroom, as always, and we will spend April 19-20 setting things up1. I’ll share a copy of the calendar through Google Classroom, too.
The Non-Denominational Evil Spirit in the Details
We’ll start with the multiple-choice section of the AP Exam. You have until Monday morning to finish Section I of the 2016 exam, which has been photocopied for use in the classroom. I’ll prepare a Google Form that will require you to record how you answered each question. You’ll have the correct answers provided in class, of course, in order to start hacking and reverse-engineering the logic of the test; the Google Form assignment will be given so I can plan out group work and individual feedback going into the week of April 24.
You will be given 60 minutes for this part of the exam when the real thing tentacles its way into our lives on May 10. You can break those 60 minutes into 15-minute chunks, one per passage, or attempt the entire hour in one go. If you need more than 60 minutes to finish, take it, and then mark down how long you needed past the allotted time. We’ll work on speed as necessary.
Next week, you’ll write Section I metacognition and process analysis. I’ll work with you on breaking down the logic of each passage, question, and answer choice. Meanwhile, you’ll answer the rest of the free-response questions from Section II, and I’ll give you more tools for deconstructing and analyzing the kind of thinking, reading, and writing the exam demands of you.
I’ll post an update to the free-response guides and this essay on high-stakes gamesmanship before April 24, too. There’s no need to overwhelm you this week; as the footnote earlier says, we all need a few days to get back into fighting shape. Use Wednesday to reorganize and refocus, Thursday to do what you do best in the classroom, and Friday to figure out how you’re going to schedule in your Pareto Projects over the next three weeks.
Oh Yeah, Those Pareto Projects
Scroll through the instructional posts from before break, and remind yourself that we’ve already revisited/rebooted/retooled/etc these projects. Your job now is to figure out what 20% of your time looks like before AP exams. I’m going to suggest that you skim the writing you did back on March 2, after you’d read this post:
How does the project look now, nearly two months later? More importantly, how can I help you on Friday to position yourself so that you can best continue the project over the next two months?
This includes finalizing Q3 GAP scores, revisiting the BHS/China makerspace exchange, and reorganizing our physical space. We’ve had almost two weeks to atrophy, so we’re going to need two days to start moving again. ↩
This is a not-so-subtle reminder that (1) you have been preparing for the exam since September, and (2) your comfort at this moment depends in large part on how much of this reading you did back at the start of Q3. There are no surprises in here, except for the surprise that I am going to spend three weeks doing more or less nothing but test prep, with Pareto Projects folded in to keep me from getting lost in gamesmanship. ↩
Your course calendar tells us that we’re a couple of days away from the second GAP score of Q3. As you read this post, especially the GAP protocol, keep in mind that your organizational skill is the concrete on which everything else is built. Make time for all of this, in class and at home, and never lose sight of the purpose of what we do and what you’ve been assigned.
And think about pushing some of your peers to stay focused during the period. Even a day or two of renewed focus is enough to shift the GAP score up a bit, and the alternative…
Clear and Unyielding
As you read the following essay, replace every reference to teaching with a reference to you, your learning, and what it takes to evaluate yourself through grade abatement:
A copy of this will be provided in class, too, to facilitate your reading of it. Take the time to see past the superficial audience — teachers — and into the universal insight on display here. To help, start with the pull quotes from the article. Here they are, with the language altered so that they reference student learning and GAP scoring, not teaching:
You talk enough dirt about yourself and [teachers and peers] will start to believe it.
I’m as guilty as anyone of distorting my [learning]. When talking to [peers and teachers], I often play up the progressive elements.
As an aside, any time you edit the original text of a quotation, use brackets. In this case, it shifts the nouns and pronouns so that you can apply them directly to yourself.
The first of those pull quotes is always a concern: You must avoid downplaying your success, especially when collaboration and collegiality are vital to our work overall. You need to develop confidence, which isn’t quite as difficult as you might think. The second pull quote is part of one of the most important paragraphs, because it deals with a more common problem: ducking the ugly truths about our own progress. Here it is with the language altered again:
I’m as guilty as anyone of distorting my [learning]. When talking to [peers and teachers], I often play up the progressive elements: Student-led discussions. Creative projects. Guided discovery activities. I mumble through the minor, inconvenient fact that my [learning] is, at its core, deeply traditional. I let my walk and my talk drift apart. Not only does this thwart other [peers and teachers] in their attempts to honestly evaluate my approach, but it blocks my own self-evaluation. I can’t grow properly unless I see my own work with eyes that are sympathetic, but clear and unyielding.
The bolded sentence is critical. This is where you all are, two-thirds of the way through the third quarter of the year: in need of “eyes that are sympathetic, but clear and unyielding.” If, at its core, your learning remains deeply traditional, you must account for that.
Start here: What does traditional learning look like in your life? To what extent do you “play up the progressive elements” of your learning, especially during GAP scoring? To what extent is the core of your progress “deeply traditional,” and how can you remove that obstruction?
Answer these questions in conversation and in writing. Focus on insight. Then use that insight to inform the GAP scoring assignment outlined below.
GAP Scoring: March 10, 2017
First, though, let’s test your self-control, close reading, and self-awareness. Do not complete this form until Friday during your class period:
Again, do not complete that until Friday, March 10. Don’t complete it in its embedded form, and don’t complete it through Google Classroom. You still have two days to generate evidence for your GAP score. You have another post assigned to your class that deals with your recent writing work, a reboot of your Pareto Projects, and plenty of good and bad decisions made during those all-important 39 minutes. Give yourself 48 hours or so to read these instructions, work through recent posts, and think critically about your progress.
You should also use your newly strengthened organization to revisit the updated guide/overview of grade abatement, which will recalibrate you before you tackle one of these GAP forms:
Even some of the students who have earned a GAP 9 in the past have lapsed over the last three weeks, which was always a possibility when we moved to shorter time frame. Each bad decision is magnified. By the same logic, all of your good work is magnified, too. Look carefully at the profiles and even more carefully at the protocol, which has been updated slightly in order to clarify how to apply it to your body of work. As always, you must focus only on the evidence you’ve generated.
Ask questions about these instructions in class and in the comment section below, and remember: You are balancing many assignments right in order to test your organization and advocacy. If you feel overwhelmed, advocate for yourself. If you are confused, keep attacking the work, alone and with peers, until it makes sense. If you feel frustrated, find someone who knows how to listen, vent, and then fix the problem.
