Read the following updates carefully. The title of the post comes from this poem.
On the Quixotic Attempt to Go Paperless
In various corners of the classroom, under the windowsills, on desks and stacked precariously on bookshelves, you will find photocopies of materials for this course. The windows, for instance, frame the most recent posts and texts — the AP reading on horror movies; the instructional post on empathy, which is next to Chad Fowler’s essay; the post on “Habits and Habitats”; the always relevant post on guillotines, self-control, and the intersection thereof; and so on.
Way back in September, in what now seems like the fever dream of another life, I told you that we would be trying to go paperless. We are still trying. I’d like to ramp up that effort, too, in light of these data:
- The Fatal Flying Guillotine — 51
- Habits and Habitats — 53
- The Most Important Skill — 92 (!)
Those are three of the photocopied posts, with the total number of photocopies left as of Monday, 10/30. They’ve all been there at least a week; the guillotine post has been there since October 8.
Unless a majority of you can explain those numbers, I will no longer print copies of instructional posts. Any central texts, yes, but no posts. It’s a waste of resources.
[Onomatopoeia] Quizzes
Note for AP students who have been hardwired in a particularly unfortunate way, and who, despite spending all of Friday discussing cheating, will react to the word “quiz” in an unhealthy way: Read carefully. There’s a reason you’re getting this online before it’s distributed, and it has everything to do with how you hold yourself accountable. You might be able to cheat your own integrity and honesty here to generate evidence of internalization, but that sort of poison seeps into your bones. I don’t think you should do that.
Below is a an [Onomatopoeia] Quiz. It asks you to write down everything you learned from reading the instructional post and the central text by Fowler. Photocopies will be distributed in class on Wednesday, November 1, for AP11 students. They were distributed on Thursday, October 26, for RE11 students. Read this first:
Moving forward, that is required reading. It explains more about how and why we would use this sort of “quiz” to help us learn.
This particular “quiz” takes the form of a reformatted copy of the post and central text for our study of empathy. You’ll find some (but not all) of the original subheadings and images from those readings, plus enough blank space for you to write. Your prompt for this “quiz” (which I’ll stop putting in quotation marks now) is to fill in that space with what you know about these lessons, texts, etc.
Regardless of your course designation, this is a required diagnostic. Load a copy of the two documents here:
You have been trained all your life to look at quizzes as a risk/reward system. They are Skinner-box switches you press, hoping for a reward. If you know the material, you get a prize in the form of a high score; if you don’t know the material, you are punished with a low score.
In this course, the question is different: What does your performance tell us?
The answer to that leads to metacognition, collaboration, and all the other stuff of growth. Perhaps your performance reveals an eidetic memory. That’s a rare skill, and we need to weaponize it. On the other hand, your performance might indicate a weak memory, some performance anxiety, or the struggle to read critically and closely. As frustrating as those results can be, they also provide the best starting place for growth.
The reason is simple: As long as you’re putting in the time and effort necessary, you are exactly where you want to be. This [Onomatopoeia] Quiz is, in that case, just a diagnostic. It tells us which of our universal skills and traits need attention. It gives us a blueprint for the feedback loop you need to improve (and for a fourth-tier GAP score).
What is not acceptable is a lack of self-control. This could be posted once a week, and it would always be relevant:
You must learn self-control. You can recognize, as that post argues, that self-control is difficult to master, but you must put all your effort into developing it. It springs from self-awareness, assiduousness, integrity, collaboration, organization, and a few more of our skills and traits; as a result, you develop self-control by doing your job in this course.
Let this [Onomatopoeia] Quiz reveal your level of self-control, in addition to what it might reveal about your understanding of the posts, especially your ability to internalize key concepts. You can talk to me about this in the comments here.
More on Self-Control
This is a review of how to take control of your learning in our makerspace.
Start with the idea, first given to you in the syllabus1, that the problems we are solving are often unique to you. The components we are using have universal names and definitions, but they take on a unique appearance in your individual learning.
One of the makerspace problems given to you to hack is the lifelong problem of self-control:
Yes. that’s embedded twice in one post. It matters that much, in part because this process continues well past the end of our formal in-class discussion and writing. Every assignment, lesson, text, class period, etc., for the rest of the year provide opportunities for you to work on your self-control.
You could compare this to an attempt to build a robot arm in a robotics makerspace.You’d start with instruction in the basic skills, from electrical wiring to coding. Once you had the basics, the focus would shift to your vision and needs, your work ethic, and a lot of testing and restarting and refining. You’d expect setbacks. You’d measure progress.
A compelling example of how this works is the assignment that was due October 30 around 7AM2:
When you load this assignment, you also load the work you completed. A document was created for you, and your instructions were to divide your writing between the explicit exercises and a separate box for metacognitive analysis. At this point, Google has recorded all of your submissions, resubmissions, edits, and so on.
If you did everything by 7AM, you demonstrated self-control over the weekend. You avoided procrastination, hacked your brain’s tendency to get distracted, made a plan and followed through, and so on. That self-control lets us focus on metacognition, which is the key to your learning (and, not to put too fine a point on it, your performance in this course).
That’s the point of covering this all here, with an eye toward referencing it in the future: Metacognitive writing is what makes learning permanent. You need enough self-control to get you through the first level of the assignment — the one on Google Classroom, usually — because that’s the only way to generate something to be metacognitive about. In this case, I built metacognition into the assignment, instead of asking you to add it after the fact.
You can use any and all choices you’ve made lately, from the amount of focus you had on Friday in class to the way you spent your weekend, to fuel good metacognition. And if you are struggling with the self-control necessary to get your work done, let’s put the space to work on that as soon as possible. It’s not a habit you can afford to keep.