thinking about thinking – Sisyphean High

Gestalt Suite: Getting to Know Yourself

By Mr. Eure Organization: Getting Things Done, Triage, Units

From the profile of an INTP, or “Logician.” Links to the test are in the post below.

Form and Function First

Here is the Google Form you have been formally assigned:

Gestalt Suite – Google Forms

This isn’t meant to be an exhaustive self-assessment. I’m sure there are interesting data and questions left out. This is the start of mapping as much of your academic self as we can after the first month of the year. First, review the key concepts below, familiarize yourself with the Google Form above, and then read the complete instructions for each section. You’ll need to take a bunch of tests before starting to fill out the form, so I’d strongly suggests creating a folder for your saved results.

Key Concept: Data Tell a Story | All data tell us something, if we’re willing to look hard at our own assumptions and heuristics. Treat every number, whether it is generated for you or by you, as a starting point. Treat every description as a part of an ongoing and much larger story.

Key Concept: the Forer Effect | Read about this concept here, or look for the embedded article later in this post. Always remember that no online test — and not too many off-line tests — should be treated as absolutely accurate. Your role is to become, as David McRaney says, “capable psychonauts who think about thinking, about states of mind, about set and setting.”

You Are Not So Smart – Book Trailer – Procrastination

Key Skill: Critical Thinking and Metacognition in Writing | For each set of data you create this week, write a paragraph of analysis that tries to find some insight. You must do this. The written word is how we freeze our thinking and refine our beliefs.

Key Skill: Organization + Autodidacticism | You can’t rush through these, and you’ll need to plan out ahead of time what needs attention. This is not your only assignment for the next week. It will be easier to focus when the work is about you, so the real danger is forgetting what else you need to prioritize.

You are recording these data in the Google Form at the top of this post, which is also available here or attached to the assignment on Google Classroom. Each of the sections below explains what you will enter on the form, with context or instructions as necessary. Read carefully.

Again, the bolded and all-caps words in each section are what appear on the Google Form. You must be organized here to keep it straight, which is the point: You learn what you do.

Form Data #1: ACADEMIC RESOURCES

COUNSELOR | This is one of the most important resources you have — the person who can help you with courses, college, and a lot of the existential and emotional havoc that comes from spending half of your day in a high school. For some of you, this is known; for others, it will be the first time you’ve looked up who this is. Select the appropriate last name.

LAST YEAR’S ENGLISH TEACHER | There are a number of reasons for us to reach out to the teacher you had last year, especially as we look at your growth as a writer over time. This person spent a long time with you. Select the appropriate last name.

Form Data #2: GPA DATA

OVERALL | Seems odd to ask for this in a grade-abated course, right? The reason, as the top of this post also argues, is that all data reveal something, and GPA is no different. At the very least, it will open up a discussion of Alfie Kohn’s “Case Against Grades” (available here) or Jerry Jesness’ “Floating Standard” (online here), which are seminal texts for any group trying to change how we learn¹. Select the approximate number. If you have your weighted average, use that.

LAST YEAR’S ELA | This tells us something about your work in the Humanities. The score probably correlates to your ability, but it also reflects your interest level, maturity, personal life, etc. — although it does not tell the whole story, as you know. Putting the number in context is critical.

Form Data #3: MYERS-BRIGGS

This is the first test you’ll take, and we should talk about what that means. A personality test, especially one as steeped in good research as this one, might be useful, but the Forer effect is a real and powerful phenomenon:

The idea is not that a personality test is inaccurate or useless. It’s that you must be metacognitively vigilant about anything a test like this tells you, especially when your goal is self-improvement². Approach this Myers-Briggs diagnostic, the IPIP-NEO diagnostic below, and any other test you happen upon with the same understanding: It’s always more important to use the ideas to organize your self-analysis. Read everything the site presents to you as context, keep that Forer effect in mind, and do a lot of reflective writing.

The test:

TYPE | Once you have it, select the profile shorthand (from this list) in the Google Form.

Form Data #3: MULTIPLE-INTELLIGENCE SELF-ASSESSMENT (SPIDER GRAPH)

Now we move into a pair of self-assessments. You won’t take a test to generate these numbers; instead, you’ll have to look at yourself as honestly and accurately as you can.

First, though: This is a direct test of your ability to be autodidactic, specifically your ability to research concepts enough to be able to work with them. The concepts are below. There are no hyperlinks this time, because you need to practice your own Google skills.

Spider graphs, also known as radar graphs or wheel graphs | You need to create your own spider graphs with these data. Visualizing this sort of self-assessment has serious efficacy in analysis.
The theory of multiple intelligences, as devised by Howard Gardner | These are the categories listed below. You need a working understanding of them to self-assess.

For these categories, use the 0-9 scale as indicated by the options on the Google Form. This is a self-assessment, which means you are acting, once again, as a “capable psychonaut.” Only honesty helps.

Note: The categories are not official, and there are other lists out there. Our list respects Howard Gardner’s version³.

THE ARTS | I’ve grouped these together, because they are most often associated with the arts. You’ll learn more through your own research. Fill out the form by ranking yourself from 0-9.

MUSICAL
SPATIAL

TRADITIONAL | These two are most often associated with traditional schooling, and with our traditional definition of intelligence. Again, you’ll learn more through your own research. Fill out the form by ranking yourself from 0-9.

VERBAL
LOGICAL

SOCIAL/EMOTIONAL | Again, the grouping is mine, because it helps to chunk information as we self-assess. These two intelligences contribute most to your social and emotional learning. Fill out the form by ranking yourself from 0-9.

INTERPERSONAL
INTRAPERSONAL

OTHER | And here you have the “other” category, which will make sense when you research what each one means. Fill out the form by ranking yourself from 0-9.

BODILY
NATURAL
SPIRITUAL
TEACHING

Form Data #4: UNIVERSAL SKILLS & TRAITS (SPIDER GRAPH)

This section is a direct test of your ability to internalize important information — in this case, the set of universal skills and traits that are trained and assessed in this course. Like the above section, there are no hyperlinks in the main text. You have dozens of ways to refresh your understanding of:

the eight pairs of universal skills/traits and how they interact; and
how those skills/traits lead to a grade abatement profile.

Note: There are sixteen distinct skills or traits, but they form discrete pairs because of how they interact with each other. Focus on the instructional materials you’ve been given all year.

Collegiality ⇆ Empathy
Integrity + Character
Close Reading ⟹ Internalization
Critical Thinking ⟹ Metacognition
Effective Communication ⟹ Writing
Amenability ⇆ Self-Awareness
Assiduousness ⇆ Self-Efficacy
Organization ⟹ Autodidacticism

Ask questions about any of these particular elements below. Treat the comment section of this post as another resource for organization, researching, and understanding what you must do to make sense of all these data.

That’s us, by the way. We are trying to change how we learn. It’s as someone said about dreaming big: “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, you’ll land among the stars [where your skin will inflate and your lungs will explode].” ↩
I have long thought of myself as an INTJ, for instance, but I see more and more of myself in the description of an INTP these days. Without taking the test again, I can read through the differences and apply that knowledge to myself. I believe those differences are crucial to my development as a teacher, which gives me a starting point for meaningful metacognitive discussion and writing. ↩
See his interview here for more. You can get to this interview, by the way, through a careful reading of the Wikipedia page on multiple intelligences. It also quotes a useful definition of intelligence, according to Gardner: “a biopsychological potential to process information that can be activated in a cultural setting to solve problems or create products that are of value in a culture.” Unpacking that sentence is an excellent exercise in close reading, and it would help you make sense of this self-assessment. Note, too, that this footnote is helping you with the research component. As always, these posts are meant to help. ↩

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10/11 Post-Writing: RE11

By Mr. Eure English 11 Regents (2016-2017)

*Image from Garfield Minus Garfield. If you read this assignment carefully, you can avoid the wall.

SWOT Post-Writing

Starting today, and using the SWOT analysis given to you last week, you will answer the following prompt:

Spend a significant amount of time reflecting on your process. Then tell the story of that writing process, start to finish, viz.

your use of class time;

your collaboration with your peers;

any questions you asked your teacher;

your use of other resources, like the Internet; and

especially your overall sense of how that writing process unfolded.

Before we can analyze how effectively you wrote, we must have a sense of how you, like some sort of ersatz Frankenstein, brought the response to life.

This is the first step of the post-writing protocol we use whenever you produce a piece of writing. It applies to a SWOT analysis as much as it will apply to your first full essays, and is just one of the writing tools you will learn to use as part of this makerspace:

Opens in Google Drive

The rest will be introduced and practiced over the next few weeks. For now, you are being asked only to write a process reflection. You still need the entire post-writing directions:

Post-Writing: Guide

When you load the modified template given to you in Google Classroom, you will see space only for Step #1.

Step #1: Process Reflection

Start by collecting your work. As necessary, print a copy of your responses. Then turn off your devices and look at the product(s) in front of you. For the moment, you are assessing exactly what you have — no more and no less.

In this first step, you are also analyzing the extent to which you meet the criteria for a fourth-tier GAP score. This is not, however, a completion check. Some of you will have negotiated a slightly different assignment by speaking to your teacher; that meets the threshold for a “student-generated feedback loop,” which is a significant part of these higher profiles.

Many of you, unfortunately, will not have completed your assignment, and you will not have spoken enough with your teachers to excuse that lapse. You will have wasted time in class and failed to complete the work at home. These are the facts. They are part of the evidence that we must process in order to improve your work ethic.

For now, any of you who do not have a finished assignment or a clearly articulated alternative track are locked into the third tier of GAP scores. You can unlock passage into the fourth tier through renewed assiduousness and a kind of academic makeover — a significant change in attitude and approach that will create a more assiduous and invested version of you.

If, however, your habits do not change, that is a failure to take this feedback — what you are reading right now — and apply it. At that point, you are likely locked into the second tier of profiles. You can see the logic for this by reading the first tier again and noting its focus on amenability and improvement:

GAP Tiers

After you’ve taken stock of your work ethic and time management (among other things), you can use those observations to produce an answer to the prompt. You are, as the directions suggest, telling the story of your learning: a short and hopefully edifying narrative about how you have approached this class, especially over the last week or two. (You’ll want to define “edifying” before you begin.)

This writing response shouldn’t just address the past, however; the purpose of the SWOT analysis you were assigned is to prepare for the future, and you will need to write about that, as well. Before our next class, you need to have produced a piece of writing that connects what you’ve done to what you will do.

There are no other formal requirements. You can write this response by hand or type it. If you choose the latter, you will need to print a copy before arriving to our next class, and you’ll need to attach it somehow to the Google Classroom portion. We will run a kind of triage on these responses before we begin our next unit.

Preview of Next Unit

That next unit will be to read, analyze, and then utilize “The Age of the Essay,” by Paul Graham, which you can preview here. We will use it to differentiate between digital and analog annotations, to discuss your writing habits, and to set up your first full essay assignment.

You can begin thinking about that first essay, too, if you like (and are capable of multitasking more than most). We are going to use the “find a river” philosophy to write about your own journey, with “journey” used to invoke the summer reading, Enrique’s Journey. This will be a personal narrative conceived and iterated through the tools of our course.

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Back to Basics

By Mr. Eure AP English Language & Composition (2016-2017)

*Header image from the YouTube video embedded in this post.

A Quick Aside: Procrastination and the Akrasia Effect

Part 1: Feedback Looping

Before we move into a unit on your reading life, we should test the capabilities of our interstitial classroom. Friday’s work gives us an opportunity to loop feedback through a period of transparent discussion, i.e., you can see what you wrote and respond to that, too. You produced 12856 words — with a response from every single person, unless I miss my mark. You should have access to these responses as part of the results page here:

Click here for the responses.

If that doesn’t work, load this PDF. Note that the PDF conversion cuts off part of the responses. When possible, we’ll want to use Google itself to flip feedback like this, but I need to insure that you can read what was written.

That writing should be anonymous and randomized. Let me know immediately if that isn’t the case. Anonymity and discretion are parts of our feedback loop; the more you see the way your class talks to me about itself, however, the more finely we can tune that discussion.

What do you notice? Leave those observations here, as part of the comment section of this post. Ask questions to which you need a more direct or immediate answer through the Q&A section of our Google Community. (You can always take your own notes, write your own responses, etc; in this case, I’d like you to engage me directly with what you observe.)

Part 2: Procrastination

Many of the more recent posts on Google+ and here deal to some extent with procrastination. Since Friday’s writing and today’s feedback loop also address assiduousness, I want to give you a way to deepen this discussion:

From You Are Not So Smart: Procrastination

There is also a book trailer for McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart that focuses on procrastination:

We may spend the next few days on this. If you pay attention, you’ll notice that your English 11 contemporaries will spend considerably longer unpacking those two texts (along with this one, on the concept of akrasia); the assumption is that you, having chosen a college-level course, can master procrastination and focus without a protracted look at how it works.