GAPs in Herd Immunity
Fighting back against low-information sepsis.
Updated on 12/8/2016.
On the first day of any school year — here is day one in 2014; here is day one in 2016 — I tell students that the language of grade abatement is precise and determinant, and that only by becoming fluent in the universal language of learning can you activate the vast potential of this course.
We lean on this idea from Greg Howard:
I tend to subscribe to a different theory on [Jason] Whitlock. What people see as his self-serving imposture is in fact little more than political and historical illiteracy, mingling with a hack columnist’s instinct for provocation… [H]e’s a low-information guy, infinitely suggestible, learning on the fly, joining in on a conversation in a language he has no interest in learning… Given his lack of intellectual curiosity, the astonishing thing with Whitlock is that he’s ever right at all.
What he says about Whitlock can be applied to anyone entering a conversation with a knowledge-based barrier for entry. A student’s task is to avoid illiteracy about the way this course works. Under grade abatement, there is little success for “a low-information guy,” and the subsequent frustration will always be inversely proportional to knowledge and investment.
Consider this visual essay by Maki Noro:
Noro gives us a careful illustration of the idea of herd immunity, leading to these two helpful panels:
In grade abatement, the same logic holds: Students can work together to develop a kind of herd immunity to gamesmanship and grade obsession. We can develop a collective resistance to the diseases of public education (and those diseases mutate far more than anything nature has cooked up).
Students can only do this by having the right information, however, and that brings us to the feedback in this essay.
Before any student reads further: Assess yourself. If you need to dive back into those opening-day materials — the GAP guides and DAMAGES rubrics and so on — then you better start there. The rest of this only works for those of you with a functional understanding of the course and its nuances. Low-information approaches will just confuse you, rendering all these data incomprehensible.
What follows is complete transparency, which is riskiest because it requires you not just to know the languages of grade abatement and DAMAGES, but to adjust your thinking according to the notations I use to make sense of your work. One benefit here is that you will also be immunized against the idea that any step of this process is without careful, meticulous note-keeping.
In other words, with almost no exceptions, this works.
12/8/16 update notes: The following sections are presented with minimal edits. The information corresponds specifically to a class taught in 2014–2015, but there is much to be learned here, all the same. For one thing, you can see me really dedicate myself to using “data” as a plural noun. For another, you can see the exhaustive note-taking that burned me out and led to some of the updates in this essay from 2016:
As always, this is an iterative process.
Dunning-Kruger Inoculation
Start with the guide to these data: Q2 GAP Legend. That PDF will open in a separate window. Keep it there; you can switch back and forth as necessary.
Each of these spreadsheets has been uploaded as a PDF, and some have been embedded as a series of images. Load the PDFs from following list:
- GAP Scores (Student #) | Q2 GAP scores that have been sorted by student number. Use the guide to make sense of my annotations.
- GAP Changes (Annotated) | If the GAP score you selected in your essay was inaccurate, this explains the reasoning behind the final adjustment. It is sorted by student number.
- Google Classroom (GAP) | This is a checklist of Google Classroom submissions. It is sorted by final GAP score.
The most critical information is found in the document I use to evaluate and assess your quarterly progress. Here is is, broken up into images:
The second most critical set of information is generated by Google Classroom. To a significant extent, this governs the threshold between a GAP 6 and a GAP 7. And since these data are sorted by final GAP score, it should be obvious how strongly correlated basic completion is to the other skills and traits of the course.
Here is that spreadsheet again, broken up into images:
Next Steps
Even as the course inevitably moves away from this sort of teacher-centric data collection, students can use this essay to make sense of their performances and eventual GAP scores. The focus should almost always be on mining for ETA opportunities — ways to emulate peers by analyzing their performances and eventual profile scores.
To avoid low-information sepsis really only requires one thing: that we return repeatedly and insightfully to the universal languages and organizing principles of this course. We can always benefit from strengthening our mutual understanding, and out primary goal remains to help others get stronger.
That’s why it is always our first lesson: Collaboration is the stuff of growth. We need to work together to immunize everyone against the plague of poor learning.
