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. ↩