You must build up your life action by action, and be content if each one achieves its goal as far as possible — and no one can keep you from this.
–Marcus Aurelius
The unit on akrasia is a staple of any course taught in the makerspace. It is defined as a lack of self-control or the state of acting against one’s better judgment, and we study it empathetically and preventatively — although the central metaphor of that unit (a guillotine) isn’t exactly subtle.
Yet it truly is an empathetic lesson, in the end, which is why the readings are about overcoming our human failings. The excerpt from You Are Not So Smart, for instance, is about treating procrastination as a battle with a natural part of your brain. You have to outwit a part of yourself.
That doesn’t mean you should just accept bad choices, of course. You should accept only that there is a part of you that you must understand in order to overcome it — a human part that makes poor choices from time to time. Your job, as a student, is to master that part while realizing this:
That’s another article dealing with akrasia, even if the word itself is never used, and it’s a good article, in that it never pretends expertise, yet offers plenty of guidance and insight. It has a simple, memorable hook borrowed from an advertising slogan, but it’s more memorable for the way it attacks different excuses for inaction, one by one, in order to suggest that even the simplest steps to improve can bring clarity.
In a Humanities makerspace, the simplest steps are what matter. You are building a version of yourself through your choices. You are quite literally rebuilding your brain. If the most important thing we learn is always something about how we learn, then your personal blueprint is always evolving.
With that in mind, this lecture takes aim at two elements of the learning environment: first, how your individual choices are tracked; second, what happens after those choices are tallied (metaphorically, in most cases). This post also serves to explore some of the fundamental issues of motivation and action in our space.
TL;DR, or the gist of this shift:
- You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
- If you are off-task or unfocused for a significant percentage of class time — a percentage you do not dictate, by the way — you will trigger negative consequences.
- If you are on-task and focused during class, however, you will be successful.
See Leveling Up: Level 1-2 for a shorter version of this. There is also an even shorter version here.
There are also related lectures on the need for greater focus as you get older:
- Focus Lecture, Levels 1–3: https://tinyurl.com/focus-focus-lvl-1-3
- Focus Lecture, Level 4: https://tinyurl.com/focus-focus-lvl-4
Let’s review the space and its approach to learning:
You have unprecedented freedom and flexibility. The terms of your learning are clear, and your menu of choices is constantly updated. From the syllabus through our study of literature to the second semester’s provisional setup, you are given projects you design and pursue at your own pace. This includes the college essay in the fall, your required Senior Talk in the spring, and even the required English 12 research paper.
You can take risks, as always, because you’re evaluated on skills and traits that encourage risk and growth. There are no immutable deadlines. Feedback is built into every lesson.
The beginnings of the course prepare you for this project-based work — not just by honing the skills of writing and reading, but through a broader study of skills like organization. We even study why you sometimes make bad choices to give you the skills to self-monitor and self-direct.
Whether you are at the start of this process or about to finish it, one requirement remains the same: You must spend close to 100% of every class period focused and productive. Given your options, this should be easy. You aren’t imprisoned with a chain gang, staring down a day of hard labor in the rock quarry. This is authentic, project-based learning. It’s inspired by the best research and innovation we have access to.
In fact, it’s truly brain-boggling that any student would look at this Humanities makerspace, at its extraordinary flexibility, at the heaps of evidence about how it connects to the future, and then say, “This just doesn’t work for me.” That’s more than a gap in knowledge. It’s got to be caused by more than the usual half-lidded rumor-mongering.
This course can always adjust to provide what an individual student needs, and it can almost always do that through what a student wants. Each element, from the profiles for assessment to the universal process for essay-writing, promotes individualization.
Once you realize what that sort of makerspace-inspired, project-based learning means and what the Humanities actually do (versus how they’ve been crippled by historical accident), the possibilities are about as endless as they get in a public high school.
One of 2020’s graduating seniors, for example, spent the end of the year meeting the goals of their project-based work through a more traditional setup: an online, automated, book-driven course of study that could have been lifted from a 1995 English classroom. That’s what was best for him, so that’s what we did.
One of his peers, meanwhile, studied video game lore and posted his writing process to Reddit for authentic, crowd-sourced feedback. He went on to analyze how video game narratives might meet the criteria for literary merit, and his Reddit-inspired work led directly to a robust, real-world research paper.
Still another peer spent time analyzing the drum tracks of heavy metal songs as part of a research project into autodidactic musicianship — teaching himself to drum like the best, in other words. He was inspired, in part, by a classmate who used Genius.com to analyze contemporary hip-hop in order to produce his own rap lyrics.
We are able to do this kind of atypical work because the systems of the course are so meticulously designed, because the instructions and resources are fully front-loaded, and because the assessment is profile-based. The building blocks are there. The work can be as traditional or experimental as we want it to be.
And if a student can’t figure out on their own how to navigate this course, somebody on our team of teachers and counselors will do it. We will review, discuss, and individualize every element of the learning environment until it works. Again, the building blocks of the course give us that kind of modular flexibility.
Which brings us back to the choices you make during each class period:
- You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
- If you are off-task or unfocused, bad things are going to happen.
- If you are on-task and focused during class, good things are going to happen.
When you put in the required time and effort, this space works. It does what it says on the tin. It prepares you for college or a career, guides you through a study of the Humanities, and invites you to learn more about yourself.
Your choices are, of course, still yours to make, so we’ll also work on advocacy over blaming others. Blame is just as self-destructive as Brené Brown thinks. As she says, it’s an expression of frustration and discomfort, and it kills relationships and empathy.
In here, blaming others does even more damage. It encourages you to avoid any uncomfortable feedback about your performance, which means rejecting the opportunity to improve yourself. Instead of growth, you face stagnation.
Or worse: You can only continue down that path for so long before you become this guy, who fought so hard against evidence and logic that he turned the backfire effect into a literal explosion.
The goal, therefore, is to make every student invest in the class period, because that investment will pay off. Here is an older essay that discusses the importance of in-class focus when you have just 40 minutes (give or take) each day:
The class period is the crux of your learning. In our high school, during most years, those periods are approximately 40 minutes long. During the insanity of the coronavirus pandemic, we had to overhaul the in-person schedule and overall calendars dramatically, leading to entire posts just about the 66 minutes available to us.
Ultimately, the exact number of minutes we spend together is irrelevant to this post. All of this expansive online material is there to enable more time for face-to-face instruction and feedback, and if you read what you’re asked to read when you’re asked to read it, we can shift easily into the mentality of the makerspace.
That’s why flipped instruction was developed, in fact, and why it was further developed in this space into “interstitial” learning. A letter on the subject starts off each year.
You should be prepping outside of class, scheduling the instructional posts around your schedule, and then using the classroom as a workshop. It helps to meet every day. We could make it work once a week, however, or around any other schedule.
Read this excerpt from a longer essay on the makerspace:
Those two excerpts are part of the grade abatement process, as well. In this post, they highlight how straightforward the choice is to use your time wisely, how it connects directly to your growth and success, and how you should fake it, if you have to.
The first excerpt, “Occam’s Razor(s),” discusses the choices you make each day. It’s about the “slow, steady concatenation of evidence,” where concatenation refers to almost every action you take. In the end, however, you are one type of student or another, and some choices weigh more than others.
The second excerpt, “Faking It,” is about tricking your brain into remembering that it loves to learn, loves to create, loves feedback, etc. The hook is there; sometimes you just have to force yourself to listen. If you fake it long enough, you will build good habits.
It may help to note that school is performative by design. Performance-based assessment is a net positive, for instance, and when the assessment model is driven by in-class making, like ours, you can manufacture a lot of the necessary momentum.
You can also default to the basics, if that makes more sense to you. You could choose to do literary criticism and to write an MLA-formatted essay straight out of that 1995 classroom. That’s fine. You can write five-paragraph essays, read the canonical books most seniors read, and churn out literary and rhetorical analysis. All that teaches many useful skills, and it will get you, for lack of a better term, credit.
You could, on the other hand, do contemporary research into cults, like one student did in 2019, and then connect that research to a novel about the world of Far Cry 5. You could explore the connections between video game narratives and canonical storytelling. You could research interactive storytelling.
That Far Cry example is much more authentic and interesting, yet it remains completely immersed in a love of stories and the power of reading. It also gets at the essential questions that matter: How do people fall into cults? What does that tell us about ourselves? Questions like that drive your learning.
If this extraordinary amount of agency and unequaled level of choice fail you, that is a shame. It means you are in shambles, and those shambles have a particular look:
When you hit that shambolic state, it’s a matter of forcing you to use class time effectively until the course works for you. We have to electrify the Skinner box to get you out of it.
From a certain point of view, those mechanisms offer a balance to the project-based learning and individualized attention of the rest of the curriculum. The latter is based on the real world and speaks to autonomy, self-awareness, self-direction. The Skinner box is the necessary evil: a real-time reward or penalty for certain choices.
Grade abatement profiles reward the choice to fight your akratic instinct, but they reward it over time. In the moment, gamification may work. You can research the concept (perhaps as part of a research-driven essay, or as the subject of a river essay), or you can read this quick overview of it.
In here, the gamified element is the tally of your choices in real time. We measure the value added and the value subtracted by your actions. This does not need to be literal.
As the next section explains, the value of your actions is the same as it ever was, and you’ve been told since you were very young what is appropriate and what isn’t in a classroom. You’ll learn how our gamification works through practice, too, which is a bit like what happens when you fire up a video game like Super Mario Bros. on the NES.
You learn to focus as you make choices. Does it hurt you to play a game on your phone with 60 seconds left in class? Probably not, but we’ll see when you try it. Does it boost your performance to volunteer to share your progress with the class? Definitely, and you’ll know that when you receive positive feedback.
Here is what that tally would look like if it were literal:
Again, you’ll learn by doing, and you already know, after a decade in this public-school Skinner box, what is expected of you. There shouldn’t be a need to scratch out tally marks to motivate you. This is much better used conceptually.
Black tally marks reflect choices that correspond to those upper-tier profiles: galvanizing actions, creative collaboration, insightful self-assessment, that sort of thing. Doing more than just what’s required will be noted, for instance.
As for what triggers one of those metaphorical, red tally marks? Here is a list from a post on this sort of thing:
- Inability to sustain focus
- Inability to think critically
- Inability to self-direct
- Inability to self-assess
Or you could work off of the not-at-all comprehensive list in the excerpt you read earlier:
- Watching sports highlights
- Scrolling through social media
- Completing a Social Studies presentation
- Researching prom dresses
- Looking up dirt bikes
- Playing a game on your phone
- Having an in-depth conversation about music
First, an important note on all of these choices: They could theoretically be folded into your project-based work. That’s how flexible this approach is. It would take foresight, front-loading, and discussion, but you could explore almost any interest you have through this classroom.
Otherwise, your akratic choices add up. You’ll eventually tip the scales, go from non-heap to heap, and then there are repercussions. You’re already familiar with what can happen. Some repercussions happen in class:
- Assigned seat
- Restricted access to technology
- Additional daily check-in
- Individual work contract
But if you’re wasting time in class, you have to make up that time. You will fall behind, otherwise. Back to the gist of this focus:
- You must meet a goal of almost 100% focus when you are in the physical classroom.
- If you are off-task or unfocused enough, bad things happen.
- If you are on-task and focused during class, good things happen.
You have to put in the time, and not just to insure you’re getting the work done. It’s also that you owe this space 36–40 minutes of your time. When something has been this painstakingly built to provide you what you need, you owe it the bare minimum you owe every class, which is something approaching 40 minutes. Gratitude is good for you, too.
The repercussions you’ll face when you level up enough akratic choices will mostly be implemented through your Senior Study Halls, which can be repurposed for any of the following:
- Interventions or meetings with Guidance
- Interventions or meetings with administration
- Mandated one-on-one conferences before or after school
- Schedule change: SSH → Study Hall
- Schedule change: SSH → tutoring in Learning Center
You don’t need hundreds of metaphorical tally marks for us to justify helping you; you need only to have demonstrated that you are struggling with the skills and traits required in a learning environment.
Each day, you should go out of your way to appear focused. If you actually are focused, you don’t have anything to worry about. The work is robust and responsive enough to take care of your learning. Otherwise, you might want to fake it, as the second excerpt in this handout explains:
You have been given the tools to be productive — or, at least, to fake productivity long enough for a few positive benefits. Log into your school-issued Chromebooks, for instance, and know that the school’s 1984-inspired Securly software will monitor your focus. These reports can be run at any time, by parents or faculty, and quickly identify if you’re treating the space as a workshop:
Or a study hall:
That’s the digital trail. You can also use the physical space effectively by choosing a different seat at the start of class or by organizing your workspace deliberately to minimize distractions.
Focus, in other words, and be obvious and even ostentatious about focusing. If it looks like you’re focused, you are. If it looks like you’re not focused, then you’re not.