Tuesday, May 29
Context
Akrasia, again. We are two weeks away from the end. You need self-control and self-discipline more than ever.
Among your many advantages and resources are systems for instruction, assessment, and feedback that have significant engineering redundancies. You have:
- This Course Website | The home of almost all instruction and feedback. This site has copies of all class resources and archives, n reverse chronological order, all lessons and units.
- Google Classroom | Also has copies of all posts, handouts, prompts, etc., alongside clear assignment requirements and deadlines. If you get an individual assignments, it’s archived here, too.
- Room 210 | With few exceptions, I make photocopies of all posts, handouts, prompts, etc., and stack them around the room. Calendars are everywhere. Outlines and guides are everywhere. I’ve filled our whiteboards with copies of critical information.
I’m present in all of that, as are peer experts who’ve emerged over the year as your most valuable resource. You need all of it to handle the end of the year:
This is good work, and work worth doing. But it’s still work. It requires an investment from you. It requires vigilance. Today, with the AP exam well behind us and the year almost over, you had a chance to showcase your strengths.
Last(ing) Impressions
Watching the Tides Roll Away
Today, I spent P2 and P9 observing you. I didn’t build you any new instruction, and I didn’t conference with any individual. I didn’t circulate to answer questions, and I didn’t prompt you for updates. I just watched and took notes.
There’s a corollary to Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle in this. The act of silently observing your behavior tends to change your behavior, so that you work harder while under a more watchful eye.
Today, though — today, you could not settle. It happened in the morning, and it happened in the afternoon. Too many of you wasted time, or your time was spent on something other than this class.
You were asked a question on Google Classroom about the impression you think you left; Q4B profile scores were posted at 2:30 PM as a complement to this post1; and you should now read the observations and insights below carefully, with the intention of correcting your lapses and the lapses of others.
(1) There is no more post-exam letdown. That post-exam exhaustion is real, but it doesn’t last weeks. You’ve had a grace period. Now it’s a question of self-discipline and self-control. And there’s nothing personal in that assessment; like the rest of these notes, it just is. This is what some of you demonstrate.
(2) Infinite Campus is an addiction. I observed students who tabbed back to an open Infinite Campus folder every five minutes. Others spent fifteen uninterrupted minutes going through grades. This is disruptive to you, and it’s disrespectful to the space. You do not need to monitor your Infinite Campus grades in real time; at most, you need to check them at home, when your teachers have had a day to enter updates. And I would guess that the correlation between obsessively checking Infinite Campus and lower scores is fairly strong.
(3) Posts are meant to be read at home. When you leave instructional posts for class time, you cannot work with me or others on assignments. This is wasted time. The purpose of flipped instruction is to maximize the work you do in the space; it would be like reading an assigned novel during class discussion, and it is no less disrespectful to the intention of the course. If you keep that habit into next year, it won’t result in this kind of feedback; it will result in lost points and failure.
(4) Yearbooks don’t belong in class. This is unique to the end of the year, but there is always something similar encroaching on our space. In this case, signing a yearbook in the middle of a lesson is inappropriate and disrespectful. If you absolutely will never again have the opportunity to sign that person’s yearbook, let me know, because I assume there are some dire circumstances in play. Otherwise, be respectful, except maybe at the very end of the period.
(5) Traditional work can’t be all that motivates you. P9 had the tone exercises assigned here, and P9 was far more focused than P2. Traditional multiple-choice assessments with traditional feedback trigger the right work ethic. You need to develop a motivational approach for nontraditional work, though, because that’s what you’ll have in college and beyond.
(6) Watch your language. In P2, despite me hovering in a very noticeable pink shirt some ten feet away, one of you launched into a diatribe about “[how] that guy is an ***hole.” In P9, despite me hovering nearby in the same noticeable pink shirt, one of you animatedly told a story with some profane dialogue (“Clean your **** up, god**** it!”). That’s inappropriate, of course, and it’s disrespectful. But it’s also a failure to code-switch and approach a college-level classroom with the right intelligence.
(7) Think about changing seats. There is a teacher station in here, and it’s located in one corner of the room. Other than this station, everything is modular. Move the furniture around. Change your seats. It doesn’t matter that we only have ten days left. And what’s really interesting about taking a closer look at where you sit is this: The most productive group in P9 sits at the same table as the least productive group in P2, and that table is as far away from the door and the teacher station as possible. You can be focused anywhere.
(8) If you’re going to do other work, advocate for that opportunity. I’d rather give you permission to rush through an outline than have you sneak it into our class period. It’s an opportunity for introspection, and it honors the stress you’re under, even if that stress is often self-induced. For the most part, though, doing homework or projects for another class is disrespectful. So is planning for college and everything else in that vein. Ask for permission. That’s an opportunity for feedback. When you don’t ask, the feedback changes tone and impact, and that’s a shame for both of us.
More Feedback
Watch Google Classroom for individual and group assignments related to today’s observations. Use the space here to ask questions and offer your own insight, and make sure you are focused tomorrow. We’re going to look into your writing life retrospectives, among other things, and that means you need to have given some thought to the prompt.
Make the right kind of impression over the next two weeks. Like every choice you make, this matters.
The correlation between those scores and your choices today is strong, as you’d expect. It makes sense to dovetail the two instances of feedback. ↩