Header image from Charles Allan Gilbert’s All Is Vanity (1892).
Each student enters this makerspace with a different history and different goal. Some of you love to read and write, and you look forward to improving your skills and experiencing new texts. Some of you, on the other hand, have hated English classes since you became aware of them, and you want only to escape — by climbing out the back window, maybe, if that’s what it takes.
Please adjust your ongoing expectations and plans according to this post.
Today, Monday, and Tuesday, you are strongly encouraged to use class time to work on the reading and writing and data collection in this post:
When you get to the two spider-graph sections, use this handout to help you self-assess. We will go over that in class1.
You are also strongly encouraged to split your class time as necessary between that Gestalt Suite and the work described in this post:
By Monday, you should be moving around the room, using new areas, sitting in new seats, experimenting with different resources, etc. You can also start bringing in your concrete and abstract contributions to the space.
Tomorrow, you are most strongly encouraged to split your class time between your Q1B GAP report and your Pareto Projects. The GAP report will be available tomorrow morning, alongside a Google Classroom post that can be used to submit evidence. Review the posters in our classroom for the most salient aspects of the scoring process:
https://goo.gl/7EEuT9
As students in an advanced curriculum, you always have the choice of how to use the resources available to you, which includes class time. The expectation is that you will monitor, analyze, and refine those choices as you move forward. Over the next week or so, I want you to direct that metacognition toward the idea of self-control.
One marker of the highest grade abatement profiles is a “desire to do more than just what is required.” This is one of those opportunities. Read this post carefully — and if you’ve done that already, read it again:
You are invited2 to use that post to shape a writing response that does something for you. You might shape it through
(1) your close reading of the post;
(2) metacognitive analysis of how you read this kind of complicated instruction;
(3) your self-awareness with regard to your self-control; and
(4) the assiduousness and self-efficacy you believe it will take to master self-control.
There are other options. A post like this exists to force you to organize, use resources, work with peers, etc; and in the case of this particular post, the goal is to force a discussion of self-control that isn’t a lecture or judgment.
Ask questions and continue your in-class discussions below. Make this optional work on self-control a requirement you set, and then test your interstitial focus. Above all, let the space help you.
We’ll probably draw these spider graphs next week, too, as a kinesthetic and aesthetic exercise. ↩
The language of invitation is different from the language of suggestion. I’m strongly suggesting, with “strongly” in italics, that you use your class time in one of a few ways for the next four days. This self-control work is part of an invitation to think critically, read closely, and write responsively. You choose whether or not to accept that invitation. ↩