Ono. Quizzes
I gave you all these quizzes (that aren’t quizzes) recently:
- Lo-Fi [Onomatopoeia] Quiz — Paul Graham’s “The Age of the Essay”
- Lo-Fi [Onomatopoeia] Quiz — Instructional Post: “Splitting the Atom”
Two interesting things happened as a result of this. First, you all were eerily focused for a few days on just filling in those boxes. The second, unrelated thing is that I realized these quizzes were a bad idea.
My original intention was to provide traditional feedback to some of you in the form of handwritten commentary and scores out of 100 points, thereby empowering you to teach others about the content of the quiz. The scores wouldn’t count, of course, but I thought they might let us weaponize that lizard part of your brain again. Hence this:
Except, well… that last hyperlink (“that lizard part of your brain“) is to a post called “How Feedback Should Work,” and everything we’ve done since then is expressly about pushing the boulder away from the Pavlovian, Skinner-boxed logic of the system. Attaching a point value to your work is toxic, even as a symbolic exercise. You don’t need unilateral commentary to teach each other, either. Feedback can’t be forced; that defeats (or at least undercuts) the purpose, which is to give you a universal language for learning and writing while encouraging you to experiment and grow as students.
Instead of focusing on these quizzes (again, not quizzes), I want you to focus on the links in this post, if you need to look at them again, the full scope of the instructional post given before reading Graham, and the Q&A that will be posted later tonight.
Walking Deadlines
Except for the assignment due on November 6 — the one that asked you to respond to The Aft Agley Gang and The Ironic Use of TL;DR — you won’t have any formal deadlines in Google Classroom for the rest of the month. Instead, you must use the space and each other to organize your work, keep goals in front of you, and track your learning.
This is an extension of our look at self-control. If you want to see why that is, read the sixth section of this essay:
That conversation between Malcolm Gladwell and Bill Simmons touches on the psychological danger of preparing, since it makes your performance entirely about your ability, not some outside factor. For a while, at least, you won’t be able to self-medicate through deadlines in here, so let’s see what we can do to avoid other forms of self-handicapping. (The opening of that essay also shows you what kind of abomination my traditional gradebooks were, along with other interesting perspectives on the course.)
Remember, too, that there is a date on which we pause to determine a GAP score. This time, it’s December 1. See the calendar again for more information:
Ask questions about these updates below.