Möbius Strips
I want you to understand how important feedback is, and how important it is that it loops — me to you, you to me. In fact, a better metaphor might be a Möbius strip:
That’s cool by itself, but it also lets me link to this article, which is worth your time.
Our work has a kind of non-orientability. It lacks a “surface normal” element. In other words, there is a twist to it1.
There is a quotation at the top of our course website that helps my perspective:
- The content of a lesson is the least important thing about learning.
- The most important thing one learns is always something about how one learns.
I return to this frequently in planning your lessons, hoping to rebalance the process and product portions of our work. When we focus on process, we’re really focusing on feedback — how you communicate with me, and how I communicate with you.
Some of the more insightful comments left on recent instructional posts address this. (Here is a thread I entered that touches on goals and goal-setting.) I also received a half-dozen emails about it, many of them wondering how to navigate work without terminal deadlines. The short answer is to collaborate on student-generated deadlines, or to use the GAP protocol to set periodic endpoints, but this is all a distinct and dislocating shift for students.
It’s a shift for me, too. I have had to learn to think in writing, to prioritize individual feedback, and to be flexible in a way I never anticipated. Some deadlines and markers can’t be (or shouldn’t be) changed, like the ones baked into the GAP process; almost everything else, however, should have an element of mutability built-in. It’s like jazz, in a way: You have to be able to improvise, but there are boundaries. There are keys and tempos and other musicians sharing the space.
Certainly jazz is more complicated than that. So is process-focused learning. Metaphors and analogies help us figure out what to do with the time we’ve been given — and how to cultivate perspectives we didn’t have before. That’s why it’s important to write to you like this, in a way that opens up ramiform learning. Having mentioned jazz, I would invite you to lose an hour reading this essay on Thelonious Monk, which includes lines like this: “We love Dizzy, but Monk’s multi-dimensional mystery tugs more insistently at our consciousness than Dizzy’s sophisticated, sun-drenched delight. The ineffable allure of shadows.”
Back to the English part of the Humanities: If you look, you’ll see that the course calendar has you writing an essay right now. That essay was meant to teach you the skill of synthesis alongside a universal writing process, which would be based on Paul Graham’s advice in “The Age of the Essay.” You had several weeks’ worth of lessons building toward that.
You weren’t ready, though, when we returned from the Thanksgiving holiday. A pair of instructional posts (In the Spaces in Between, Antediluvian Discussion), posted a week apart, explore that reality, but it matters most that it is reality: You weren’t ready.
It seems like capitulation — surrender — to say it doesn’t matter that you weren’t prepared. So let’s not say that. It matters. GAP scoring holds you accountable for your choices, doesn’t it? What would we gain by pushing into an essay many of you aren’t prepared to write?
The answer is to shift the writing focus to next week, when you’ll begin 1984 and a packet of texts of all kinds on the subjects of memory, truth, and lies. This week is better spent on process.
This is a chance to validate your feedback to me, too. In RE11, your feedback helped your teachers identify the need for guided annotation and metacognition, so we’ll spend the end of our week doing that. In AP11, your feedback identified the need for guided help with these ETA questions. We’ll work radially and by proxy to glean what we can from those essays.
How to Read This Post
This kind of post is instructional. I’d like to unpack it for you, this time, to show you exactly what it teaches you. The central feedback — some version of, “Let’s be flexible about our work, and let’s talk about it more” — is surrounded by opportunities to learn about all this:
- Möbius strips and orientability
- The innovative design of the first level of Super Mario Bros.
- H.P. Lovecraft and non-Euclidean geometry
- Thelonious Monk and a bit of the history of jazz
That list isn’t random. There are metaphors and deeper insights into our work. It’s also part and parcel of the course to want to learn more about things you didn’t know before — to become a polymath-in-training. These are interesting subjects. Reading about them is going to hone your close reading, critical thinking, etc., and maybe open you up to a new passion.
But not one that breaks the rules of geometry. We haven’t fallen into the non-Euclidean nightmare of Lovecraft, for instance, although I might have to revise that statement before 2017 ends. ↩