Below is a set of five discussion-driven prompts based on a video and article. The prompts are most often assigned to students through Edpuzzle. The article has been reformatted below.
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Tag: deep reading
Self-Prescribed Literature Project
A Little More Wisdom, Goodness, and Sanity
This project uses the word prescribed, not assigned, to describe your reading choice, which echoes this metaphor:
We should learn to treat [literature] as doctors treat their medicine, something we prescribe in response to a range of ailments and classify according to the problems it might be best suited to addressing. Literature deserves its prestige for one reason above all others: because it’s a tool to help us live and die with a little more wisdom, goodness, and sanity.
This quotation also appears in our makerspace’s reading guide, where the key word is tool, as in a tool for our makerspace. Literature is a way to solve problems and create meaning. Reading is perhaps the best tool we have for learning in a Humanities makerspace.
November 13, 2019
Quarter 1 ends on Friday, November 15. Let’s use the next three days to assess your progress.
The most powerful and consistent feedback is, as always, the GAP score you receive. It indicates a profile, and that profile is a cipher for universal skills and traits that were honed and tested through various assignment from the panel or quarter.
The next most powerful and consistent feedback is found in instructional posts like this recent one. These posts improve your ability to self-assess through exemplars, general discussion, and the practice of deep reading.
The third level of feedback is what happens in class. The caveat is that the power of that face-to-face feedback is almost entirely dependent on how well you use the kinds mentioned above. If you have some clarity on grade abatement and read deeply on this website, you have the foundations for bell-to-bell work in the makerspace.
11/13/19 – 11/15/19
Over the next few days, you will self-assess through another GAP report, submit evidence of your current writing process, and share your Q1 Pareto Project progress. Except for the GAP report, these submissions will be part of the evidentiary process for Q2A, which ends on December 9. The focus will be on growth and improvement.
You should also focus on reading as far as possible in the current novel, The Things They Carried. There is no page number you need to reach, because the goal is now to finish. Demonstrate through your actions that you are hitting your potential, not an arbitrary page number. This weekend, after we’ve wrapped up Q1, you will receive a instructional post with more context.
Finally, we need to collaborate to improve your use of class time. I think this starts with a soft ban on phones. Read this updated guide to the start of class, and note the emphasis on how you set up your physical workspace: What to Do at the Start of Class.
Some of you will need direct, written feedback about your use of class time. This may be written to groups, not just individuals. Others may need to be separated physically from their self-selected groups in order to build better habits.
Remember that many people struggle to be disciplined at work. The Dunning-Kruger effect is one reason for that. Whatever the reason, you need enough self-awareness and self-control to stay focused when required to, especially when the requirement is only 30-40 minutes at a time.
These are the habits and skills everyone needs. If you read this instructional post carefully, you learned that colleges and careers desire self-control and self-efficacy as much any job-specific skill set of academic knowledge.
I believe that part of what’s happening is, first, that jobs are increasingly automated and outsourced, which means that the more important skills are human ones, like empathy and creativity. The analog in academics is the extent to which knowledge is externalized and crowdsourced. The more important skills are, again, the ones that can’t be programmed, like collegiality and creativity.
And at the base of that collaborative and creative skillset is the capacity to focus and regulate yourself. If you’re competing with machine learning and automated productivity, you can’t get distracted every five minutes by gossip or your phone. You have to be disciplined and serious. The difference between you and everyone else will be your capacity to conquer what is called akrasia.
Right now, far too many of you are undisciplined and unserious. You can call it senioritis, blame it on the system, etc, but it comes down to habits of mind: