Grade Abatement: Threshold #1

Note: If you received an email last night from me, you must reply to it. It takes a long time to construct that kind of feedback, and you will not benefit from it without a careful consideration of what it says; you must, therefore, send me an email in reply that continues the dialogue and shows me some introspection and understanding.

Your first self-assessment of this quarter was the QORAS assignment for Francine Prose. Your second is the synthesis essay and attached scoring work that we will finish tomorrow. You should, therefore, already have a sense of your progress—or lack thereof, as the case may be. Continue to follow the same protocol this quarter for grade abatement. Monitor your learning; be reflective and metacognitive regularly; ask questions whenever necessary; and make yourself be honest and accurate about how you perform with every lesson, exercise, or assignment.

About Q3: Many of you will get typed feedback tonight, but not all. If you were close to the right score, or if you were only a few shades off, you might not have been written. That is because of how long it takes to draft and revise that kind of feedback; it is not because I have nothing to say to you. If I could, I would devote an hour to each of you, either in writing or in person, discussing your thoughts on this process and how you have performed. Unfortunately, I do not have an extra 70 hours.

Here’s what I can do: I will set aside the next three days for conferencing in class, which will give you—if you keep it short and focused—a chance to ask questions and speak to me in person. We can continue these conferences even into Friday’s writing exercise. (Like last week’s, the goal is to approximate a timed exam setting; if you lose a few minutes to conference with me, and that requires you to extend your writing into the afternoon or weekend, that is your choice.)

Watch your email, and remember this comforting fact: We don’t have to talk about grades—numerical, draconian, awful grades—again until the end of the quarter.

Grade Abatement Redux

Before you do anything else, check your email.

Self-Monitoring: Case Studies

Two notes on progress reports:

1. Your responsibility is to share your comments and your explanations with your parents.
2. Some of your requested comments have been overridden; if they have been, it is up to you to seek me out to discuss these changes.

The second one brings us to the idea of self-monitoring, because it includes checking your email regularly. Of the twenty or so students I wrote last week about the canned commentary assignment, only a handful replied or got back to me with their justifications. This is unacceptable, and it means that all of you have to hear this:

These are your work emails. You no longer have the luxury of ignoring them, regardless of how professional-sounding your personal email is. It also doesn’t matter if you use that personal email far more frequently than this work email; Google Drive and Gmail are a part of our course, and if you miss something from me, it means you missed something in this course. This goes doubly for the website, which ought to be set up to notify you when a new post is added.

And while I shouldn’t have to say this in March, you need to read everything you’re given carefully. If you skim, you will miss something important. The good news is that many of you are doing exactly what you should be doing, and I can already see the difference in how you learn and what you retain. Your efforts are giving this old curmudgeon a dangerous amount of hope.

Now load the following document, read it, and consider how it might apply to you:

• Kohnian Case Studies: Third Quarter

As we round into spring break and the end of the third quarter, your investment and achievement are under the spotlight. A Kohnian classroom means that everything you do matters, not just the occasional assignment. Adjust accordingly.

Interlude: The Case for Kohn

In our last lesson, we began this quarter’s Kohnian shift; in the next, we will decide on the criteria that will drive your self-assessment. Expect to have a clear understanding of what we are doing, how we are doing it, and what it means for your learning by the end of next week.

First, however, I will show you why we need Kohn at all. Read the following feedback on your current grades. Then visit the Portal to see your scores, noting just how difficult it is for you to separate your actual performance from your printed grades—they are that curved, manipulated, and otherwise inflated.

Part 1: QORAS

Only a few failed to finish, and I’m proud of you for that. In fact, only a few demonstrated a complete lack of preparation; the rest of you obviously used your week well. But to help the  few who weren’t prepared helps all of you. To that end:

1. QORAS#4 and QORAS#5 were scored individually
2. Only the higher score was counted

If you failed to finish the exam, a few points were deducted to reflect that. Similarly, if your answers overall were much weaker than your answers to #4 and #5, a few points were deducted to reflect that. But that this does not apply to most of you; with few exceptions, if you didn’t finish the exam and/or your answers overall were weak, your answers on #4 and #5 were limited or ineffective.

I chose #4 and #5, by the way, because they were the two that produced the best responses. You struggled most with #11 and #12, but that is likely because of time and pressure.

Part 2: Synthesis Response

This section featured the biggest changes:

1. The prompts were not counted after being scored
2. Only your essay was counted toward your average

The biggest reason for this was the poor quality of a handful of the prompts. Building a prompt is difficult, however; to fall short in presentation, arrangement, and general succinctness is to be expected. That you still wrote, in most cases, compelling arguments means more in our course. And the prompts can be considered outlines, anyway; the better they were, the better the essays were.

There was more to my decision: Factoring in a value of effectiveness for the prompts hurt more of you than it helped, and that score might prevent us from focusing on the goal of the exercise: to connect sources to each other as part of your own argument. Better to give a score for the essay only as as independent exercises in synthesis argumentation. Only when your focus was so unclear as to render the argument incoherent did I fold in a consideration of your prompt, and then, only if it helped your score.

Notice how many times the logic behind these decisions returns to your scores and your reaction to those scores. That is why we are doing what we can within the confines of a school system to get rid of grades.

Update: Q2 Enrichment

We are going to have a lengthy conversation about this midterm, and the refrain of that conversation will be succinctness and preparedness—the two traits at the heart of your performance, whether you demonstrated them or demonstrated a lack of them. The preface to that conversation is a response of sorts to the (thankfully) few of you who sought me out to complain that you did not have time to finish:

• For Part 1: You had this article a week in advance. You had a half-dozen guides to rhetoric and style built on a semester’s worth of work, plus time in class to meet with me or your peers to prepare. Your annotations and notes on the article were required on the day of the exam.
• For Part 2: You built your own prompt. You had time to outline your response before the exam. You had guides to the prompt and the response, plus a practice prompt we built collaboratively, plus access to me and your peers.

The only difficulty—and one emphasized in all our preparations—was compressing your thinking and outlining into two hours. But the synthesis essay requires only 40 minutes to write. That left 80 minutes for twelve questions on rhetoric and style—or between five and seven minutes each. The conclusion—one drawn for you in advance—is obvious: You had to be precise and fast. You had to be succinct. But most importantly, you were not expected to produce volumes. This was about quality over quantity, and you cannot blame the time frame of the exam for your struggles.

This is really a discussion about grades, and one I’ve raised before with a reference to an educator named Alfie Kohn. Grades are ineluctably tied to learning, at least for the moment, and that means we aren’t just talking about your reading of Sam Anderson or your ability to write a synthesis argument. We are talking about a number and how that number affects you. And I will tell you what I have always told you: Grades matter, but I will always give you control over what that number looks like.

So let’s talk briefly about enrichment and Q2 grades.

Midterm Preparations

The exam is at 8AM on Tuesday, January 22. Your locations will be posted around the building. For reference:

• Period 4 is in Room 214
• Period 6 is in Room 215
• Period 9 is in Room 216

And a quick checklist to use on Monday:

1. Read this post again. It says everything I’m about to say, and it should be your primary resource. (On the eve of the exam, of course, that post should be as a sort of final check, not a last stand. You’ve been at this for two weeks.)
2. Bring your synthesis prompt to the exam. Print it before Monday morning if that is at all possible. Otherwise, plan to get into the library or Room 214, where I will be waiting, as early as possible.
3. Use the templates and notes you have to insure that your prompt looks like it should. Think about what you will write, including which sources you will use.
4. Mark up the prompt and sources ahead of time, if you like. You can use any annotations you bring with you. You will be handing in your prompt with the response.
5. You may bring this guide to synthesis writing, which was also included in the previous post (and distributed in class a few times this year). Use it to help you plan and edit during the actual writing.
6. Bring the Sam Anderson article with you. You may use any annotations you have to help you answer the questions on rhetoric and style.

Note that this exam is as much about resource management (including time management) as it is about rhetoric, close reading, and argumentative writing. Keep this in mind as Tuesday rattles toward you: If you’ve been hard at work, you’ll do well; more importantly, no last-minute cramming will really help you.

Finally, you should look at the following document:

• Directions – Student Copy (Advance)

That is exactly what you will see on Tuesday, only the questions on rhetoric and style have obviously been removed. Check over those directions ahead of time.

Good luck, Kinder.

Feedback: YVA02 + YVA03

We tackled these questions on rhetoric and style before the winter holidays, and our approach was a bit different: You had the first part of the week to read and respond to the text in class; on 12/20, after you ostensibly completed the questions on rhetoric and style, you were given about 25 minutes to complete two responses. During those 25 minutes, you had to write alone, but you could use any notes you took, including ones prepared by your group ahead of time.

Overall, speed was secondary to preparation. 10-15 minutes is more than enough time to write effective responses to these questions after two days of collaboration with your peers; many of you, however, didn’t focus your efforts during that preparatory time. So let’s just get this out there: When you waste time in class, you perform more poorly on whatever assignment follows.

I took up these responses and scored each holistically out of 100 points. You completed QORAS #4 and QORAS #7; the former asks you to identify and analyze Church’s definition of “real,” and the latter asks you to evaluate the argument as a whole.  (Here is another link to the text, if you’d like to revisit it before reading this post.) Your scores are online only; you’ll need to visit the Portal to check them, after which you should refer to the usual general scoring scale to determine your relative effectiveness.

As with the last set of general commentary, you can earn up to 50% of the deficit in your grade back by writing a thorough reflection on this assignment. This reflection, however, must incorporate application of the commentary in this post to your responses. You must, in other words, explain what you’d fix if you could. Be specific, thoughtful, and honest. Treat the reflection as an explication and as a vehicle for metacognition, not just a rote summary of what I’ve said here, and you will see an increase: A 70 might improve to an 85; an 80, to a 90; a 90, to a 95; and so on. You can only earn up to 50% of the missing points back. Finish this by the time class starts on Friday (1/11), and submit it to me typed and printed.

As for the general commentary that follows: These are approximations of what an exemplary response would contain, so you are applying this understanding to your own work. In other words, this is what an effective response looks like; if you want to earn credit back, however, you need to do more than just repeat what I’ve written here.

Feedback: RA01 + Q2AD2

Note #1: You will be given the second leg of your prompt-building exercise in class, so that you can focus your online/at-home attention on scores and feedback.

Note #2: Feedback for YVA02 and YVA03 will be given in a separate post.

Note #3: I’m using the abbreviations from the gradebook (RA01, Q3AD2, YVA02, and YVA03) as shorthand for particular assignments. I’ll use the real names, too, when we get to the commentary.

Feedback: Progress Reports

Or, The Paradox of the Heap

Tomorrow, your progress reports are issued. You will have three grades: an adversarial, a set of questions on rhetoric and style for Edelstein, and a set of questions on rhetoric and style for Ebert. You will not get to see how you did on your timed rhetorical analysis essays until over break; the DAMAGES/C4 analysis was disrupted by my impromptu hospitalization, and I will not give you numbers until you also have feedback—and, of course, the time to study that feedback.

Which brings us to the paradox of the heap.

Twice every nine weeks, your teachers are asked [Note: That’s an interesting passive voice, isn’t it?] to draw arbitrary lines in the sand. When we do this, we look back and articulate, through canned commentary and somewhat oblique grades, how you are doing. Certain grades and commentary indicate that you are learning; others, that you are not. But this is obviously imprecise. Some of you still need to share your Chaos QORAS with me—be sure to check your email, while you’re online—but that’s an easy one; all of you will have progressed further the day after these progress reports are posted. Like the heap linked to above (you are still reading every link, aren’t you?), it’s a vague and sometimes inaccurate kind of report.

Because, of course, you are in charge of your progress. For the adversarial, you were given explicit annotations on exactly which comments earned what number of points; you spent an entire day looking this over to prepare you to discuss online the next adversarial, which will be tabulated and scored beginning on 12/20. For the QORAS covering Edelstein, you were given emails and exemplars through Google Drive—so many, in fact, that you were given another day in class just to read that feedback. And for the QORAS you wrote on Ebert’s review, you have just received a set of similarly scaffolded feedback: an exemplary response, plus the option to conference with me for further feedback on your grade. Again, you should check your email for that feedback. I will give you your actual group responses tomorrow, after I know you’ve had a period to look at the exemplars.

In general, the paradox of the heap tells us that grades, while important, aren’t the key. As long as you check your email, pick up all handouts, and take full advantage of the time you are given, you should know exactly how you are doing in this class. The final piece of that puzzle came today in the form of those grades, however, so take the time to look at all this. And if you are wondering about how you can improve those grades, well, just make sure you’ve read that last post.

Bonus Round Redux

As a teacher, Neil Postman would deliberately use logical fallacies in order to test his students. He’d preface the course by saying that he’d do this; if sharp-minded students caught his specious reasoning or deliberate logical missteps, he’d reward them. I tried this myself while we studied political rhetoric in September and October. One student—Avery, from Period 9—caught me using a false analogy; no one else did.

Of course, this could be due to a general hesitation to call out a teacher for specious reasoning, and respect is the only rule I’ve ever set for you in here. (It’s why, in fact, watching a group or two chat and daydream and generally waste Tuesday’s student-driven reading of “Yes, Virginia” was so disheartening.) So I abandoned the tactic as probably more harmful than helpful.

When we moved into our next unit, I began emphasizing the need for you to do formative work. That refrain, begun in July, got louder. I posted this assignment. After offering you a couple of weeks and a lot of time in class to complete it, I surprised you by collecting it for enrichment credit. Here again is the post that details your failure to take advantage of that (which was the fulcrum of many parent-teacher conferences, I am sorry to say). Part of the original formative assignment was a push to email me with questions if anything confused you, seemed unclear, had a typo in it…

I’ll let one of your peers connect the dots for you: