René Magritte, The Listening Room (1952 )
Message Received: You Got This
Remember that instructional posts like this are called interstitial, which refers to their intended use: You should visit and revisit the post when you have a enough time to focus on paragraphs or sections, to click on links, to look up references, and so on. Use the spaces in between.
In other words, these are instructions meant for more than just our English work. As you read these, you’re meant to learn interesting things and practice universal skills and traits. Think of them less as a lecture you watch once and more like a textbook chapter you should return to as necessary.
This is always worth repeating, because it’s a deliberate attempt to help you develop a more future-proof kind of reading skill. It’s much more about the how than the what, although this is still an instructional post based on the current situation.
The header image and thumbnail for this post link back to Magritte, who keeps appearing in the instructions for distance learning. Maybe the use of Magritte paintings reflects the surreality of our current situation. Modern art should also be part of any study of the Humanities, especially if you are drawn to that study purely out of curiosity.
For today, there’s one more bit of interstitial knowledge: the ten-code system, which you might have heard in the line, “Ten-four, good buddy.” It derives from CB slang, and it means that a message has been received. Like that Magritte painting, it’s (sort of) about listening.
What does that have to do with this post? Well, America is one of the few countries in the world that uses the MM-DD-YYYY format for dates. The rest use DD-MM-YYYY. It’s an interesting fact, and it means that today, April 10, is also 10-4-2020.
The “ten-four” message received here is about your stress level and need for clarity, simplification, and support. After the most recent weekly update, one student left a private comment:
As I went through the instructional post today. I notice that even though you are giving us a good amount of time to work on them, it just feels like a lot of work. Maybe if you could share something like a checklist ,or something how to make one, or how to organize your work. I think this would be really helpful. Thank you.
That is a great example of working on the feedback chain that sustains individualized learning. It also gives us an excuse to look back on the strategies for organization embedded in a November unit. You should look at those when and if you can.
Here’s the thing, though: While those resources are continually useful, they were designed around regular in-class and face-to-face meetings. We don’t have that resource right now. That will require us to circle back to your projects over the next week or two to make them manageable.
Here is an additional resource, by the way, that was shared by one of your peers earlier this week:
It was also posted yesterday to Google Classroom as a formative assignment. You can make a checklist for checklists and then a checklist for your everyday work in here. Your list should remind you to set a goal, fill out the daily Google Form, and check for updates online. Then it’s about your current project goals.
But as that comment from another peer reminds us, the project-based work that was meant to be spread across four months of in-class interaction is now being done in quarantine. It was the right amount of work for a normal semester; while you might have more free time now, you don’t have the same resources. The workload needs to be adjusted.
Projects and Projected Adjustments
If you load the main page for these second semester projects, you’ll see the fundamentals of project-based learning and then a list of the three most important things to remember:
- Almost every aspect of every project can be individualized.
- You must read the instructional posts carefully in order to individualize the work and make it authentic.
- Your in-class focus and use of feedback will determine your grade abatement profile more than any other aspect of your learning.
That list is repeated on all of the individual project pages, which makes updating it to reflect our COVID-created reality a little difficult. Instead, we have to tackle each of those elements now, one by one, in reverse order.
③ Your in-class focus and use of feedback will determine your grade abatement profile more than any other aspect of your learning.
While we are all working from home in the midst of a pandemic, there is no in-class focus to evaluate. You must check in every day with a clear goal for your dedicated English time, and you’ll have plenty of opportunities to share feedback, works-in-progress, and so on. You don’t, however, have that 36th chamber as the center of the learning experience. The result:
③ Your in-class focus and use of feedback will determine your grade abatement profile more than any other aspect of your learning.
Cross it off. Your use of feedback is still critical, but it’s not observable in the same way. The expectations are radically different now.
The next element of these projects:
② You must read the instructional posts carefully in order to individualize the work and make it authentic.
Still absolutely essential. If you don’t read everything carefully, you can’t keep up with the work. Flipped instruction has always been a building block for our makerspace; it is now more important than ever. You can’t rely on in-class Q&A, handouts with simplified checklists, whiteboards with key dates — that’s all impossible to replicate here.
What’s most important about these online resources is that they allow you to individualize the work, which is the single most important element of your projects:
① Almost every aspect of every project can be individualized.
And this is the goal now: to make the best of this situation by individualizing the projects. To do that, the project parameters might need adjustments. We might need to be streamline and simplify the work to give you more flexibility and freedom.
That will be the instructional post on Monday: a rundown of which projects to prioritize, which ones to combine, which ones to ignore, and how it all fits together, whether we spend the rest of the year apart or reconvene at the high school in May or June.
Right now, the “ten-four” takeaway is that I recognize your stress, especially as this situation stretches out longer than anyone anticipated. I know that working from home is not easier than having class every day, and that some of you will do better work if you know that the next two months offer even more flexibility than the original slate of second-semester projects did.
Look for the update on Monday. In the meantime, be sure you’ve done the weekly self-assessment and reflection assignment, and contact me or Ms. Egan with any questions or concerns you have. Read all the recent posts on this site, too. Do it in bursts, when you can, and try to use the comment section below to get clarification.