The Assignment1
Your success in this course depends on the work you do. That’s obvious — and true of any class — but you already have a sense that we learn differently. In here, your success depends on evidence.
In the opening-day materials you are (still) reading, you should have come across these documents:
The profiles will be the subject of many lessons as we move forward. That last document will be revised and adapted for you, and it will dictate how you structure your learning. Note that it has sections for “internal artifacts” and “external artifacts” — i.e., the stuff you make. Some of that making happens inside you. Some of it happens externally, through essays, conversations, etc.
We’re going to focus for a day or two on the easiest way to meld the internal and external stuff of growth. To put it another way: This is how to succeed in here. Load the following:
That Google Form gives you questions and prompts that are metacognitive or reflective in nature. You shouldn’t need more than one or two 40-minute chambers, as we’re defining your learning time, to evaluate last week’s learning, from the schoolwide activities on Friday to the contents of the course syllabus.
You will notice that there is a minimum character count for each answer. If you don’t meet that minimum requirement, you can’t hand in the assignment. This is not a class where your work is checked in mindlessly; you need to gain something from every assignment, and only by writing enough can you start to dig into some useful metacognition.
Be mindful, too. This is your first real interaction with the materials of the course, and you are delivering those thoughts and insights directly to me through an interstitial mechanism. That’s a complicated way of saying that this is your first written impression.
Ask questions below, if they arise, and make sure you mark the assignment done through Google Classroom when you’ve finished.
What exactly is the look that Tesla is giving the camera in that picture? Why does it feel like he’s staring into my soul? ↩