Tag: don’t let them upgrade your math

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March 6, 2020

  By 2019-2020

This will be published the afternoon of March 5, with the intention of reading through it together on March 6.

Through the weekend, your focus should be on the following instructional post:

Statements of Purpose

All projects must support a full statement of purpose. There must be an appropriate crux:

  • a puzzling or difficult problem: an unsolved question
  • an essential point requiring resolution or resolving an outcome
  • a main or central feature (as of an argument)

Your statement of purpose should further answer questions like these:

  • Why does this work matter to you?
  • Why might it matter to others?
  • What is the potential message for your audience?
  • What is the potential lesson to be learned?

These criteria are listed in the instructional post on statements of purpose, which has been photocopied for you to annotate in class.

For each project, you must submit a statement of purpose. It can be written before you begin, as you build the project, after you finish, or all of these; and it can help you revise and refine your project as often as you like.

Note: You can finish one project before beginning another, or you can move between projects according to inspiration and in-class needs. You might explore an idea for a while, write a statement of purpose, and then discover you’d like to change entirely — just keep an eye on the calendar.

Each of your statements of purpose must be entered into the appropriate form:

✰ Self-Prescribed Book Project | https://forms.gle/ufPyFt4bPWXsVjtD7
✰ Research-Driven Essay | https://forms.gle/mm2JueFFCRgUmbHQ9
✰ Commencement Address | https://forms.gle/g9RLS4UMRxBHpf5R6
✰ Pareto Project | https://forms.gle/xAxbBp2rwnJVLB1x5
✰ Senior Talk | https://forms.gle/NSpDWj5ijHxWtzYK6

The forms will require you to write 250 characters or more. That is half as long as the following example, which is taken from the instructional post:

[Blame] has an inverse relationship with accountability. Accountability, by definition, is a vulnerable process. It means me calling you and saying, “Hey, my feelings were really hurt about this,” and talking. It’s not blame. Blame is simply a way that we discharge anger. People who blame a lot seldom have the tenacity and grit to hold people accountable, because we spend all of our energy raging for 15 seconds and figuring out whose fault something is. And blaming is very corrosive in relationships. And it’s one of the reasons we miss our opportunities for empathy.

So your own statement must only be about half the length of a normal paragraph. It should furthermore not be much longer than Brown’s statement on blame.

The paragraph must be precise and effective, of course, and we will wordsmith and workshop until it is. These statements support your projects. That’s another reason to use Brown’s excerpt: It’s a reminder to take responsibility for your work this semester. Do not blame others for how your project-based learning unfolds. You must own your choices, including the choice to raise the level of your work.

Project Expectations

Speaking of leveling, review these posts on the line between sufficient and insufficient work:

All of your projects must meet grade-level expectations. The research-driven essay, for example, must reflect the standards detailed in this writing guide: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-researches. There are other structures and other model texts you might use, but any individualized approach must reflect the same breadth and depth required by that five-page, eight-step guide.

That means that any research-driven essay must have multiple kinds of evidence from a wide variety of sources. It must use appropriate rhetorical strategies, including appeals to logic, emotion, and ethos. It must be arranged purposefully. And it must, as necessary, cite its sources with accurate MLA formatting and the use of hyperlinks and embedded multimedia.

If you submit a research-driven project that doesn’t meet those expectations, you’ll have to revise it. Depending on your amenability and timing, you may find yourself asked to give up free periods for further feedback. Remember how your choices are tracked and how interventions are triggered.

The Senior Talk also has a guide: https://tinyurl.com/sisyphus-tedx. The seven steps in that guide are required, and your work for each step must meet grade-appropriate expectations. The public presentation or talk is just one element. The research, script, and final reflection are equally important. Think outside the box, but remember that you’re building something; box or not, it has to showcase your own intelligent design.

The default project for your self-prescribed book (or other text) is a reader-response essay, and that, too, has a guide: https://tinyurl.com/maker-readres. Any individually selected project must reflect the same skill and insight required of a reader’s response. Simple exposition — a basic book report, for instance — is insufficient for your grade level.

Remember that a reader’s response is a mixture of different writing styles and purposes, tied together by personal insight into the text. One can be written on any kind of text. That’s why there is such a rich diversity in what you’ve chosen to study this year.

Finally, there is the commencement address, which was not assigned with a guide. Instead, you have multiple examples and the skill to find more. A simple search will turn up hundreds of templates and guides, because the commencement address is a universal experience: https://lmgtfy.com/?q=commencement+address+template.

The difficulty of that address is deciding its purpose. The audience is given. Your purpose, however, is up to you. That’s why the statement of that purpose is so important: What do you mean to convey to that audience? What lesson or message are you imparting to these graduates?

Use the comment section below to ask for clarification on any of these requirements.

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Poetry Practice: Update

  By All Junior Classes (2016-2017), AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017), English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

Update: Google Form Resubmission

The poetry practice form had an error in it, so it wasn’t tabulating final scores properly. You and I can still see your correct and incorrect answers, but overall scores provide some important data. So an update:

  1. If your Poetry Practice assignment was originally due on May 24, but you did not meet that deadline, you should finish the work by June 1. This applies to RE11 students.
  2. If you already entered your answers for the Poetry Practice assignment, regardless of when you did, you must reload the form and resubmit your answers. This should tabulate your final score properly.

If you missed the original deadline in RE11, you can now complete the practice passages and required self-analysis to improve your GAP score1. Finish this work by June 1. The complete assignment is on Google Classroom. Here is the link to the form only:

Hard copies are available by the printer in our classroom. They are labeled.

The Poetry Part of It

One of our earlier posts asked you to consider the poetry in this practice packet not just as test prep, but as poetry worth reading and considering on its own. Depending on your progress so far, you’re going to use this post to discuss the study of poetry. If you still need to finish the practice packet, do that first, and then make sure you’ve submitted or resubmitted your data. Our discussion here should help you with the self-analysis and metacognition required after that.

Start with the end-of-year post for your course:

  1. Lights and Tunnels: AP11, Part 2
  2. Lights and Tunnels: RE11, Part 2

Remind yourself what the last paragraphs of that post tell you, which is that we’re meant to be doing makerspace work now, which is “work that is generated in the moment through questioning and observation and curiosity.” It won’t be work posted on Google Classroom, because it is meant to be folded into your focus on exploration and creativity, but I still want to point you in the right direction. Follow these steps:

  1. Scroll through your course’s post until you find the section labeled HOW TO STRIP POETRY OF ALL ITS BEAUTY.
  2. Consider the quoted metaphor about rose petals and spectrometers.
  3. Read the embedded Medium essay, “Splitting the Atom.”

What I want to know, especially from those of you who are putative 8s or 9s, is what you get out of reading poetry as part of Regents Exam prep. This isn’t like inviting you to read “God’s Grandeur” and think about how incredible the internal rhyme and sprung rhythm is, which you can appreciate without writing an essay or answering a multiple-choice question. It isn’t like inviting you to listen to “Hey Bobby,” which has so many rich allusions that identifying them is part of understanding the song’s purpose2. This is part of exam prep, which means our explicit goal is to get a lot of points. Are you able to compartmentalize and get something more out of the process? If so, what? How?

Talk to me about it below, and we’ll see how that conversation goes this week. Hopefully, a few of you got lost in the hyperlinks in that last paragraph and footnotes. I’d love to hear your thoughts on those poems and songs, too.

  1. And to improve your understanding of the exam and your strengths and weaknesses, etc. That stuff is important, too, even if we can’t always see past the looming threat of final averages. ↩

  2. Or inviting you to compare Sage Francis’ song to the Bob Dylan song that inspired it. That’s worth studying, too, and a comparison between the two as political protest songs would be a lot of fun. And if we’re going to study political poetry, I’d stick with songs long enough to invite you to listen to Brother Ali, even if that one’s a little too controversial to put it anywhere but in a footnote. That controversy is the point, though, isn’t it? Poetry ought to be alive and powerful, and studying it ought to be exhilarating. Brother Ali’s piece is made up of poetry and music and visuals that do something, and figuring out how he’s doing it makes it more powerful. It unlocks it. It’s hard to feel exhilarated by multiple-choice questions and five-paragraph essays, because there’s no life in that analysis. It’s dissection, but not even to figure out how to bring life to our own poetry. Instead, it seems sometimes like education drains poetry until it’s just a desiccated husk. But I digress. Sort of. ↩