This post has instructions on how we’ll begin our work on Tuesday. As an example of what we’ll be calling “abstract stuff,” here is a newly revised version of the profiles, skills, and traits we use every day:
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Copies will be made for you, although the changes are mostly cosmetic. Pay attention to the category headings for the skills and traits. There is a colorized version of this, too, but the embedded PDF above will behave better with the printers in our building.
Creative Clutter, Continued
Before we get to Tuesday’s plans, the expectation, as always, is that you’ve read every recent instructional posts. If you haven’t, do that immediately:
I promise that most of your confusion or frustration will disappear as soon you read those instructional texts. You have to read them, though — not just load them in a browser window or print a copy that sits in your backpack. As always, these are the instructions you need, and they are written so that engaging with them forces you to slow down, practice close reading and critical thinking, and develop the organization skills you need to make sense of complicated ideas.
One of those posts introduces a focus on the physical classroom, which we will begin to clutter creatively on Tuesday. We want to think differently about how we populate our space, starting with a shift away from “decorate” as the verb. That word comes from the same root that gives us decor and decorum, which is mostly about how we expect to find things. Our room is about breaking expectations in an innovative way.
This is prompted on my end by how you are using technology. Educational tech, including the device you’re using right now, can’t compromise our embrace of face-to-face discussion and more kinetic or kinesthetic 1 work.
To put it more directly: Yes, you need to put down the screens and talk to each other more. That’s true out in the real world, and it’s true in here. The computer or smartphone is an essential bit of technology — even curmudgeons have to accept that — but there must be a balance. That’s one of our two focuses this week2.
That brings us to a teacher-led, asynchronous, offline activity for Tuesday:
Those are the two rolling whiteboards in Room 210. You are going to work together across class periods to fill those boards with ideas, which will be photographed and flipped back to you at the end of the day on Wednesday. Any other notes you keep are up to you. Below is a quick overview of what to expect.
Concrete Stuff
These categories aren’t really about what you can touch versus what you can’t, although that’s pretty close. Instead, you should think of it as tools and technology versus semiotics and inspiration. On the concrete side, you are thinking first about how to populate our bookshelves with transformative literature, collections of poetry that teach us about being a human being, autodidactic texts, etymological dictionaries, and so on. You’re going to take over these bookshelves, build new ones, and then organize it all to encourage us to read more often and more closely — without the usual Skinner-box threats of a classroom. The other concrete considerations are manipulable materials like Legos and fidget toys.
Furniture | Checked off because we already have what we need. As tempting as it is to talk about comfy chairs and rugs, that stuff isn’t a priority. We have modular furniture, whiteboards, rolling carts, etc.
Technology | Similarly, we’re set here. It would be nice to have a dedicated desktop for Pareto Projects — one for musical composition, video editing, and so on — but that’s not a priority, either. You have your Chromebooks, your smartphones, a classroom printer, and a Chromebit-enabled TV screen.
Books | There are now multiple empty bookcases in our classroom. Again, your job is to fill them with books of all kinds, but especially with books that help us create meaning for ourselves. That means poetry, literature, essay collections, graphic novels, and so on. Look at what we already have, and remember the point of reading in a Humanities makerspace. My examples are an epic poem and some underground hip-hop.
Destressors | This category is what it sounds like: the stuff that will help you mitigate your stress while you work in this space. My example is Legos, which are used by many companies to promote creativity and fight stress. You’ll also see board games like Scrabble in the room already. In high school, we’re focused on fighting stress as much as promoting creativity, so think about both sides of the equation.
You can ask questions below about these categories whenever you like. It’s up to you to figure out how best to talk to each other over the course of the next few days, just like it’s up to you to figure out how to work together to start bringing this stuff into the room.
Abstract Stuff
The abstract stuff is where most of our work is going to take place. We need actionable inspiration on the walls. We need symbols surrounding us. We need the space to encourage the sort of introspection and collaboration and innovation that lives at the heart of our system.
One way to think about these abstract concepts is to see each option in terms of how it improves the learning environment. Use the language in the grade abatement profiles to motivate you: This is a chance to contribute to the learning environment so that your peers are galvanized, encouraged, supported, etc. It’s easy to explain why you think a book of William Blake’s poetry might help us experience the Humanities; it’s harder to explain how a mechanical Sisyphus improves our learning.
Protocols + Procedures | Taken care of already through the posters and handouts we have. There will be more of this stuff on the walls as we move forward, and any new iterations of course materials — for instance, of our writing process, which we will delve into in Q2 — will be posted, too. The Pinterest boards posted here have plenty of non-course examples.
Inspirations | These will primarily be posters or decals on the walls, but I would include certain kinds of artwork, too. It’s about drawing creative inspiration for your work. My example is a prominently displayed decal of a Latin expression: Verba volant, scripta manent. That is the philosophy of the course, so its inspirational efficacy is different from, e.g., a poster like this.
Symbols | Clutter in our classroom needs to have purpose behind it. We’re using metaphors and symbols to push back against traditional learning, which is why my examples are a statue of our favorite rhinoceros and this Lego Sisyphus. You need to think critically about the semiotics of our space.
Again, you can ask questions below about these categories whenever you like. It’s up to you to figure out how best to collaborate, and we’ll need that collaboration to procure or print or otherwise produce what we need.
Kinetic refers to motion itself, while kinesthetic refers to your perception of that motion. It’s another example of the meta- level to our work. ↩
The other is a gestalt suite of self-assessments that will be posted later. That’s one reason we need this focus on the kinetic/kinesthetic stuff: You’re going to be doing a lot of reading and answering questions online this week, and you need to balance that. ↩