This is a brief post that covers the start of the 2022–2023 school year. Students and other stakeholders should rely on Schoology as the hub for assignments and materials.
Read on for the syllabus, first-day resources, course policies, and more. These are also available on the Current Course page.
This week, you only meet in class twice; the rest of the time, you will need to use the interstitial mechanisms of the course to stay on top of your work. That’s a good thing. One of the skills you need moving forward is the ability to regulate yourself without constant supervision. You have to beat back any learned helplessness before you graduate.
And, as always, this is about making connections between lessons and lectures while making you stronger readers. That’s why you have to get used to flipped instruction, and it’s why the first part of the latest assignment on Google Classroom tells you to read this post:
That post connects to the reading you should have done at the beginning of the year, the assignment you should have done last week, the work we’ve done on writing and discussion, and a dozen other elements of this space.
If you have done your work diligently, this is the logical next step. It will make sense. If you have not done your work recently, you’ll have to catch up, as you’d expect.
Note: A copy of the assignment from Google Classroom is below the rest of today’s announcements and updates.
You have a week to figure out this writing response, although Friday’s class period should be reserved for passion projects and college essays. That further makes this Goodreads assignment a test of your ability to use the resources available to you to do good work without relying on someone to spoon-feed you answers.
On the subject of college essays, working on them remains on the menu of choices through October 25. That will be the last day you can elect to workshop an essay, meet with a teacher, peer edit, etc., during the class period.
After October 25, you can still get help on the essay, but you’ll have to schedule time outside of class for it. Remember that this writing assignment has its own deadline, which is the actual application deadline for the schools you’ve chosen.
Once we’re through this week, we’ll start The Things They Carried. There’s no formal assignment until the novel is distributed, but you might want to read more about it on Goodreads:
Due on October 21. GAP Q1B ends with a formal score on October 22.
Your assignment is to use the resources of the makerspace — time, feedback, peers, and a new resource in Goodreads — to write about one of the BHS summer reading books for 2019.
You can do this, if you read your chosen book, by using last week’s writing (Summer Reading in the Fall) and the instructional post attached below. It will be a straightforward response based on your experience of the text, our background reading, and the reading you do on Goodreads.
If you did not read a book from the list, choose one now. You can find the complete list in a post from the first week of school: http://sisypheanhigh.com/malachite/?p=3316. Once you’ve chosen a book, you can head over to Goodreads and read about it.
What you write can be driven by our universal process, which you can find linked again below, but it may be more useful to discuss your ideas in person, online, over email, etc., as you decide what to create after you log into Goodreads, look up your particular book, and enter that conversation.
To give it a list’s structure:
1) Download the app or load the website for Goodreads.
2) Register a new account, or decide to revisit this step later.
3) Search for the book in question — in this case, your choice from the list.
4) Dive into the writing and other data on Goodreads about this book.
5) Discuss what you find, in writing and in person, with peers and your teacher.
6) Write a response — the one you are assigned, the one you choose to write, the one inspired by the writing process, etc.
7) Decide whether or not to post the finished response to Goodreads.
8) If you publish to the site, wait to see if you get feedback. Otherwise, get feedback in the usual way.Ask questions in the comment section below, in class, and through the usual methods.
Often, you believe you are on-task and focused when you are not. You believe that you are using the resources of the space effectively, but you are not. This is the Dunning-Kruger effect applied to self-awareness and self-regulation.
In other words, you believe you are focused because you don’t know what focus feels like. You have to experience what it’s like to focus your entire self-selected group of friends on one task for a period to know what that feels like. You have to avoid social media for 30 minutes straight with the phone right next to you to know what that feels like.
You’ve had the phone taken away, or been told it has to be off. You’ve been silenced in class. But those are not choices. Your brain does not process them as choices; each one is filtered through your knowledge that it was not a choice that you made.
Yesterday, you were given an assignment: to read the following post in class.
Today, October 8, you’ve been given the class period to write a response. This helps you to
There is always more to do in here, which is why “a desire to do more than just what is required” is part of the criteria for a GAP score of 8. Case in point:
These hubs address essential elements of your learning, not just your work in this makerspace. You can always ask questions and have discussions there. Today, for instance, you will be given a brief in-class lecture on this:
Ongoing Discussion: Dunning-Kruger Effects and Imposter Syndromes
Find time to read that post. Watch the video on the Dunning-Kruger effect. Look at the comments left by other students. We need to target your ability to self-assess. You have to get better at judging your own effort and output.
Here is that post’s first paragraph:
Discrepancies between a student’s self-assessment and their actual performance are common. It’s human nature to struggle with uncomfortable truths, and perhaps the most uncomfortable kind of truth is that we are not as skilled or knowledgeable as we thought. In fact, this phenomenon, known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, happens for almost all of us at some point in our lives.
This is why internalizing the difference between sufficient and insufficient work is critical. The same is true of in-class focus and your use of feedback. It is uncomfortable to realize that you really don’t have the level of self-control and focus you should. You can’t improve without real self-awareness and amenability, though.
In other words, your struggle might be that you don’t know you’re off-task. You believe you’re focused, or just focused enough, for it to count. When someone else — your teacher, most of the time — tells you that you’re off-task, that clashes with what you believe. It’s hard to be self-critical.
I think the reason why is that you haven’t had much experience being focused, truly focused, when the choice is yours to make. You don’t have experience choosing to ignore your phone, for instance; you’ve always been forced to put it away. You have to make that choice yourself for it to have lasting impact.
Because there is always more to do in here, formally and informally, you can always practice being focused in class. You must listen to that uncomfortable feedback, however, that identifies when you aren’t focused.
The form you should fill out for summer reading is here:
This Google Form, which was posted yesterday to Google Classroom, uses language from the background lessons on reading to get into your summer work. One goal is to make that summer work — really, your choices about that summer work — meaningful beyond the first few weeks of school.
This first form offers a chance for meaningful writing for those who read. It’s about added value; if you are able to answer these prompts, then you will have more evidence of the skills and traits that matter. If you cannot answer these prompts, that will not lower your profile. Instead, you will have a chance next week to add value through a different assignment.
What you write on this form is also powerfully helpful for teachers. It offers insight into BHS’s summer reading, both as a matter of policy and as a part of our study of literature. Be honest. This year is about growth.
I should be able to get a post up about the complete “summer reading” assignment — this is just part of it — tomorrow, when you have a day off. In the meantime, ask questions about any of this in the space below.
Read the assignment below carefully. You can ask questions about this assignment in the comment section of this post.
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For students enrolled in this course for 2018-2019. Contact information for any questions you have included in the assignment.
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F06%2FAP-LIT-Summer-Reading-18.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]
For students enrolled in this course for 2081-2019. Contact information for any questions you have included in the assignment.
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F06%2FDCC-101-Summer-Reading-18.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]
Note that the assigned chapters from The Language of Composition require a BCSD login.
[pdfjs-viewer url=”http%3A%2F%2Fsisypheanhigh.com%2Fmalachite%2Fwp-content%2Fuploads%2F2018%2F06%2FAP-LANG-Summer-Reading-18.pdf” viewer_width=100% viewer_height=500px fullscreen=true download=true print=true]