Occam’s Razor Wire

Eleven perspectives on Sisyphean High

Image from the TV Tropes entry for Occam’s Razor. An hour spent reading TV Tropes is an hour well spent, by the way.

Do not go blindly into the grade abatement process. It is about truth — about collective human judgment informed by evidence. Every action and every choice has repercussions, and a student who makes consistently good choices will do well.

Threshold Mechanics

A 21st-century grade book might look like this:

Ah, my Frankenstein moment — bringing an abomination to life in defiance of reason and God.

That is a window into the winter of 2014–2015. You’re seeing what I saw when I loaded my grade book for a tenth grade class.

Infinite Campus and its ilk have tried to make the act of assessment better by giving students and parents direct access to all the data used to generate a final average. It certainly makes the process more transparent. The problem, however, is what Alfie Kohn argues:

It’s not enough to disseminate grades more efficiently — for example, by posting them on-line. There is a growing technology, as the late Gerald Bracey once remarked, “that permits us to do in nanoseconds things that we shouldn’t be doing at all” (quoted in Mathews, 2006). In fact, posting grades on-line is a significant step backward because it enhances the salience of those grades and therefore their destructive effects on learning.

Any student who has scurried to the nearest Internet connection to look up the grade on a Physics quiz knows that salience. Each number or notation has an almost visceral impact on the students who receive it, but we aren’t any closer to true transparency. If anything, I oversaturated students and parents with information. It was obfuscation by accident.

We need a lingua franca, because the stakeholders in a student’s education have radically different dialects when it comes to the language of learning. Parents employ their past experience and future expectations; administrators talk in extremes, relying on statistics and individual cases; teachers turn the word “grade” into an unintentional equivocation; and students struggle with gamesmanship and a pervasive, mutating kind of stress.

The lingua franca is grade abatement. It puts the torch to the grade book above and replaces it with the clear criteria of holistic profiles. Unpacking those profiles reveals the substructural skills and traits necessary for a universal and lifelong success — a claim that is repeatedly backed up by the real world:

Top 10 Skills You Need at Work That Have Nothing to Do with Your Job

So we strip away the heuristic of the grade book, and we begin to grapple with a new language. Like any language, the rules shift through usage. We have to iterate as we go.

For students, the simplest way to track progress is to ask, “What evidence do I have?” while looking at the spectrum of skills and traits we value. Then we can focus on the most powerful and predictive threshold mechanics for the most desireable GAP scores:

6 → 7: Complete all work.

If all you do is what is necessitated by Google Classroom and in-class instructions, you should meet the criteria for a 7. The language is all about having evidence: You must “show skill” and “demonstrate more growth” in some skills and traits; others must be “measurably better” or “more readily apparent.”

Do not mistake a GAP 7 for doing the bare minimum. Remember that a 6 requires you to be “consistent and reliable in performance” and “above-average in demonstrated skills and knowledge.” A 6 is difficult enough in and of itself.

7 → 8: Galvanize your peers.

The “systemic investment in the course” specified in the profile of an 8 — the “desire to do more than just what is required” — is largely about how you collaborate. Remember that collaboration is the stuff of growth; even a 6 or 7 must work with others. Past this threshold, you must connect the skills and traits of grade abatement to the classroom environment. It’s the last and most critical idea in this profile: These students must strengthen their individual skills and traits “in ways that galvanize their peers and demonstrably improve the learning environment.”

In other words, you have to play well with others. You need evidence of proxy feedback and interstitial collaboration. Your class time needs to be galvanizing — which means it can’t be distracting or disruptive.

8 → 9: Reflect and metacogitate regularly.

Most of the language of a 9 is superlative in nature, but the key difference between these students and the lower profiles is the last sentence: “They demonstrate a precocious strength in metacognition and are consistently, insightfully reflective.”

You must reflect regularly to justify even a 7, but there will be required assignments that take care of that evidence for you. If you fit the profile of a 9, you aren’t just reflecting and metacogitating regularly; you’re doing it in writing, sharing it with your teacher and other students, and growing from that process in a measurable way.

This kind of self-awareness and self-efficacy is the engine of all real learning and growth. It is the capstone to the rest of what we do, and while you will benefit from grade abatement without doing it to this extent, the intention is always that your work ends in written self-assessment.

In fact, the easiest way to track your progress is to recognize that you will be in a good position at the end of each quarter if you

1. read all of the interstitial posts and essays;
2. do all of the required assignments;
3. seek regular radial and individual feedback;
4. give proxy and otherwise galvanizing feedback to your peers; and
5. reflect and metacogitate about your accomplishments and learning.

Develop those habits, and you won’t just have earned a higher profile — you’ll have become a better student and human being.

The Forer Effect

There is power in recognizing for ourselves how we have performed, whether we have done well or done poorly, rather than having someone else force that realization on us. The lessons learned take stronger root.

As true at that is, you need expert help from time to time. You can’t be dragged through the process and hope to evolve much, but you also can’t be left entirely to your own devices. Not when we are engineering your own learning and developing universal skill and traits. Not when we are working on writing as a kind of alchemical skill. Most of all, not when we are stressing the collaborative environment as much as we are.

Sometimes, I need to intervene to isolate students who are not working well. It precisely because they are not working well that they will not identify their failings themselves, which is why this essay will include a direct criticism of anyone who wastes time or chooses not to invest in our learning.

Trust the idea, however, that they make up only about 20% of the whole group. My hope is that they will recognize themselves in this feedback; for now, at least, I am not intervening on an individual basis, however sharp this Occam’s razor writing becomes. I am giving them the comfort of anonymity and the chance to change on their own.

As to the other 80%:

The risk of this criticism is that students who are anxious or concerned may apply it too readily to themselves. This is again part of the Forer effect:

[O]nce a belief or expectation is found, especially one that resolves uncomfortable uncertainty, it biases the observer to notice new information that confirms the belief, and to discount evidence to the contrary. This self-perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and builds up an overconfidence in which the arguments of opponents are seen as too fragmentary to undo the adopted belief.

We might see this most often with irrational confidence — with the illusory sense of superiority known as the Dunning-Kruger effect — but confirmation bias is universal. Some of us see only our faults, and we apply only the negative part of general commentary to ourselves. Self-deprecation and self-hatred are no more helpful than self-aggrandizement and self-centeredness.

All you must do is entertain the possibility that how you rate yourself is inaccurate. Grade abatement relies on the collective, expert evaluation of objective evidence; in the end, you are what you have done, which should be both a comfort and a motivation to do more.

Triage

Years ago, I began thinking of feedback as a kind of triage. In the sophomore class, it took the form of an extended post of general commentary; for the juniors, it was about self-respect:

Self-Respect and Self-Discipline

I’m not sure I still believe that “[c]risis trumps curiosity every time,” but the discussion in that post needs to be brought into our classroom. Are we trying to fix what is wrong with ourselves and our environment? Or are we trying to ignore Patient Zero and focus on improve what is good?

It is more than a debate between optimism and pessimism. The practical side of this, on my end, is how to allocate resources — a kind of pedagogical triage.

I could let the expectant go and focus my attention on the ones who are critically wounded. I might also focus on those in the green, training them to help others in an attempt to widen the range of impact — our proxy method, in other words.

On your end, triage might be a useful metaphor in self-assessment. Read this student’s thoughtful email on the subject:

Included at the top of the student’s email: The Universal Pain Assessment Tool.

I thought about what you said and it really made me feel more comfortable in recognizing my weaknesses. I tend to only notice the things I do wrong, more so than those I do right, and as pessimistic as it is, my weaknesses shine brighter than my strengths. But if I wasn’t conditioned this way, I would never improve. By identifying my problems, I am able to seek a solution. I say, “This is what I do wrong, and this is what I can do to fix it,” and that state of mind helps me push myself further and further, eventually eliminating many mistakes that I had previously made on multiple occasions.

When you said I could “diagnose my progress” I immediately saw this as a negatively connoted phrase, because when something is diagnosed, it is usually bad, like a disease, or sickness; something you fear hearing at the doctor. So I thought of those pain meters. You know how a doctor will ask you, “On a scale of one to ten, how much pain are you in, or how sick are you?” And the higher up the pain scale, the worse the disease or sickness is? This connects to our course. Diagnosing our progress means to me, picking that point on the pain scale, and each level represents how many mistakes we make. Once we find our place on the scale the doctor will give us the diagnosis and say, “You have _____ disease, and you need to take _____ medication.” So when you said, “hone in on your individual needs,” well to me, that means find the treatment, the elixir that will make you feel and perform better, and then, only then will you reach your full potential and ultimate health.

When you said some students needed that shock that would galvanize them to devote their time into actively reading this site, it made complete sense: some people need to hear the diagnosis, that slap in the face or pinch of reality, for them to actually realize, “Gee, I’ve been making the same mistake for years now, and if my condition is this serious, I need to change my habits, alter my lifestyle so that I don’t become even more ill.” In this class, the “pop quiz” was what we all needed, and even for the people that cheated, there’s always room for improvement, just like no one can be perfectly healthy.

I think that by diagnosing our current level on the pain scale, we can all understand how serious or negligible our sicknesses are, and the more effort we put into finding a cure, the closer we’ll be to good health.

Uncanny Valleys

There are less pejorative terms that “Mt. Stupid,” but (1) this is a terrific rendition of the Dunning-Kruger effect, and (2) this course is working very, very hard to push you down that mountain, through the valley of despair, and toward something like enlightenment. (Image source: Understanding Innovation.)

Students who truly invest in this course may fall, at first, between the “valley of despair” and the “slope of enlightenment.” That doubt is a disruptive thing, but it is powerful. It indicates and allows for growth. It is also different, as we will discuss, from helplessness and arrogance.

Remember, too, that this is a forgiving and flexible paradigm… if you embrace it. When we first discussed the need for vigilance and self-awareness, you were told that

this course is about exploration more than maybe any other concept. Without grades, the usual map for learning is lost; you will need to explore your surroundings, metaphorically and sometimes literally, in order to figure out what that means for you.

Exploration of any kind needs direction, which is why you have so much to read from me. But a direction can be simple — north — and change constantly. You need curiosity and common sense to navigate that sort of new territory. You also need resources and often a team.

If I held your hand through this process, it would make me a museum guide, and you would be passive tourists, observing interesting things briefly as you shuffle between exhibits. Instead, I will be a guide for you — an expert to help you avoid dangers and embrace transformative experiences.

If necessary, read that essay again in its entirety:

Beneath the Surface

It gave you a goal: “At the end of September, you should be able to say that you are a seven on a scale of familiary with and understanding of Sisyphean High.” It is now the end of October, and I know two things:

1. Not all of you can say that you are a seven on that scale.
2. Some of you have no idea that the scale even exists.

Ghost Town

Our course is the same as it was on the first day: These interstitial teachings are the backbone of your learning, and you really don’t have a choice in reading and responding to them — or, at least, you can only choose not to read if you are willing to accept the repercussions.

We spent weeks, for instance, explicitly studying the basics of grade abatement. During that time, you received this:

On Deadlines and the DK Effect | English 11

And this:

Tricking Future You | English 11

And this:

Redundancy, Subreddits, and Sturgeon’s Revelation | English 11

With this sandwiched in between:

Practically and Provisionally | English 11

That is obviously a lot to digest. It is made less daunting, however, when you remember that this course is built on collaboration, especially the tools of radial and proxy feedback.

Regardless, these are not optional readings. They are the course — the lessons and lectures and directions you need to be successful. You can only utilize class time well if you’re prepared to do so, and this is how you prepare.

That’s clear enough, which is why the traffic to Sisyphean High during that time period is cause for concern:

See that spike and subsequent, precipitous decline after October 4? On October 4, this post went live:

Essay-Writing: Grades and Gradients | English 11

That’s your first writing assignment, and the site numbers suggest that you all reacted mostly to the idea of the assignment — the threat of having something you’re familiar with, like an essay, that activates all the old heuristics in your mind. For a day or so, you tried to wrap your heads around what to do. Your Pavlovian instincts kicked in.

Then you moved promptly away from the careful, continuous reading that is actually required by these posts. You must avoid what are called “zero days” — days when you make no progress toward a specific goal. Read about the idea here:

Avoid "Zero Days" to Form Better Habits

Then look at the week of 10/7 to 10/14 on our website:

Every zero day in there makes it harder for you to return to the notes and lessons that inform your writing. Do you need to read every post over and over again? No, of course not. But these posts and essays are far too ramiform in nature to gloss over a single one of them in a period, never to return.

More importantly, here are the number of questions you had asked during the first ten days of a difficult, intricate, and protracted writing process:

That’s taken before the diagnostic given on Friday, October 16. We’ll discuss that “quiz” again in a moment (as an addition to our recent discussion of it); it’s worth noting, however, that even with that Skinner-box push, only four more comments appeared.

Our subreddit has a similar problem. You started strong, and then you lapsed:

That shows only pageviews and uniques, however. The subreddit itself — the focus of so many posts and discussions and lessons earlier in the year that it is not even worth hyperlinking to them — was a ghost town on 10/14:

Things picked up as you attempted to make sense of what happened on Friday the 16th. Yet it’s worth noting that the discussion of integrity and student ethics was a required assignment — you had no choice but to participate. Now the thread has died out, while the posts surrounding it continue to field only crickets.

Here is the conclusion you should already have drawn from these statistics and screenshots: In late October, six weeks into the school year, two of the pillars of grade abatement — students teaching students and students advocating for themselves — were almost completely missing.

2015 marked the 70th anniversary of this photo, one of the most famous ever taken. You should read CNN’s account of the story behind it, and then you should look through this USNI article, which emphasizes just how culturally resonant the photo became.

Their Best Interest

The following is excerpted verbatim from a 2006 article that ran on ESPN’s Page 2. In it, Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell discuss professionalism and the way environment shapes our success.

Simmons: I think there’s a certain amount of professionalism that needs to be there, as well, because there will always be days when you don’t feel like doing your job, and those are always the true tests. Halberstam has a great quote about this: “Being a professional is doing your job on the days you don’t feel like doing it.” I love that quote and mutter it to myself every time I don’t feel like writing because my allergies are bothering me, or my back hurts, or my head hurts, or there’s some random dog barking, or any of the other excuses I use when I’m procrastinating from pumping out something. So how easy is the writing process for you? Are you one of those guys who writes from different locations or does everything at one desk? Do you keep hammering out drafts and tinkering with what you wrote, or does it all come out in one felt swoop? Do you ever get writer’s block? How long does it take you to finish one of your New Yorker features after everything is researched?

(And just for the record, if you say something like, “I usually write a first draft in about 5–6 hours, then go back over it the next morning, fix the typos and send it right in,” I’m making a Gladwell voodoo doll and jamming 50 safety pins into it.)

Gladwell: This is actually a question I’m obsessed with: Why don’t people work hard when it’s in their best interest to do so? Why does Eddy Curry come to camp every year overweight?

The (short) answer is that it’s really risky to work hard, because then if you fail you can no longer say that you failed because you didn’t work hard. It’s a form of self-protection. I swear that’s why Mickelson has that almost absurdly calm demeanor. If he loses, he can always say: Well, I could have practiced more, and maybe next year I will and I’ll win then. When Tiger loses, what does he tell himself? He worked as hard as he possibly could. He prepared like no one else in the game and he still lost. That has to be devastating, and dealing with that kind of conclusion takes a very special and rare kind of resilience. Most of the psychological research on this is focused on why some kids don’t study for tests — which is a much more serious version of the same problem. If you get drunk the night before an exam instead of studying and you fail, then the problem is that you got drunk. If you do study and you fail, the problem is that you’re stupid — and stupid, for a student, is a death sentence. The point is that it is far more psychologically dangerous and difficult to prepare for a task than not to prepare. People think that Tiger is tougher than Mickelson because he works harder. Wrong: Tiger is tougher than Mickelson and because of that he works harder.

To me, this is what Peyton Manning’s problem is. He has the work habits and dedication and obsessiveness of Jordan and Tiger Woods. But he can’t deal with the accompanying preparation anxiety. The Manning face is the look of someone who has just faced up to a sobering fact: I am in complete control of this offense. I prepare for games like no other quarterback in the NFL. I am in the best shape of my life. I have done everything I can to succeed — and I’m losing. Ohmigod. I’m not that good. (Under the same circumstances, Ben Roethlisberger is thinking: maybe next time I stop after five beers). I don’t know if I’ve ever felt sorrier for someone than I did for Manning at the end of that Pittsburgh playoff game.

So do I work hard on my writing? Well, yes. But not that hard. I’m a five- or six-draft kind of person, not a 10- or 12-draft kind of person. Plus, I write for the New Yorker, so I have an entire army of high-IQ fact checkers, and editors and copy editors working with me. To stretch the quarterback analogy here, I’m Jake Plummer: I work in an offensive system designed to make me look way better than I actually am. Speaking of which, how fascinating was the Plummer meltdown in the Pittsburgh game? People have been beating up on Plummer, saying that his true colors emerged in that game. I prefer to look at it the other way. Shanahan managed to put in place an offensive system so brilliant and so precisely tailored to his quarterback that he could make Plummer — Plummer! — look like a great quarterback for 17 consecutive games. That’s pretty remarkable. The Plummer story is not about the frailty of individuals. It’s about the redemptive power of environments. As I said, I think I’m Plummer.

Simmons: Wait, I know Jake Plummer, I watched Jake Plummer, I wagered on Jake Plummer … you, sir, are no Jake Plummer. Shanahan’s system was predicated on the Broncos’ jumping out to leads, then protecting those leads in the second half with their running game and Jake’s occasional play-action passes (which were always wide open because their running game was so good). The catch was that they could never fall behind in any important game; there was no way Jake could be effective under those circumstances, and only because Shanahan inadvertently undermined his confidence (by creating the “Now don’t screw this up, Jake!” offense), so Plummer’s meltdown against the Steelers became a self-fulfilling prophecy of sorts. If the Patriots had gone to halftime with a 6–0 lead, it would have happened a week earlier. But it was going to happen. You can’t make it through a 20-week season without your QB carrying the team at some point. It’s impossible.

I sincerely doubt that the New Yorker carries you like the Broncos carried Plummer all those weeks. Besides, you could never grow one of those lead-singer-of-the-Black-Crowes-level beards like the one Jake has been working on.

Gladwell: You’re probably right. But imagine Plummer was drafted by Shanahan and came to maturity in the NFL entirely within a conservative, run-first offense. Imagine, as well, that the Broncos were every bit as successful in those years as they were in the pre-Plummer era. What would we think of Plummer? We’d say that he was an efficient, intelligent quarterback. We’d call him an adept game-manager. We’d marvel at his discipline. John Madden would go on and on about how the value of a quarterback who doesn’t make mistakes has been vastly underestimated, and if Plummer occasionally imploded while playing catch-up in a big game we’d say that the one problem with a Shanahan offense is that it can’t score in a hurry. We’d blame Shanahan, in other words, not Plummer. Plummer would still be Plummer. But inside of a very structured system — one that played to his strengths — he would seem to us like a totally different quarterback. And after five or six years or so with Shanahan, he really would be different: all vestiges of the old swashbuckling Jake the Snake would largely be obliterated.

My point is its almost impossible to know where the person ends and their environment begins, and the longer someone is in a particular environment the blurrier that line gets. More specifically, you can’t make definitive judgments about the personal characteristics of people who come from structured environments. What does it mean to say that a Marine is brave? It might mean that a Marine is an inherently brave person. It may also be that the culture of the Marine Corps is so powerful, and the training so intensive, and the supporting pressure of other Marines so empowering, that even a coward would behave bravely in that context. That’s what I mean when I say I’m Plummer: I’m working in a such a supportive and structured environment that I no longer know where my own abilities end and where the beneficial effects of the environment begin.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The graph that leads this essay, originally taken from Understanding Innovation, has been modified to fit our course:

Adapted from an original image at understandinginnovation.wordpress.com.

You saw this version of the Dunning-Kruger effect as part of the self-assessment given to you on Friday, October 16. That Google Form asked you to rate yourself from zero to ten in response to a series of questions:

1. How many teacher-generated posts and essays have you read? | These are the interstitial lessons and lectures that have been uploaded to Sisyphean High and the course Medium site. Use the new 2015–2016 calendar to check the complete list.
2. How DEEPLY have you read these posts and essays? | In everything you read, there are dozens of hyperlinks to click on, references to research, and ideas to explore.
3. How often have you reflected and metacogitated? | I know, I know: “metacogitated” is a ridiculous verb. I kind of like it. Anyway, you should be creating insightful reflections and bits of metacognition on a regular basis.
4. How much, generally speaking, did you know on that D3 quiz? | You have to have taken it, of course, to answer this, and you don’t need to know exactly how many you got correct.

Then you were given that modified Dunning-Kruger graph and asked a final question:

• To which point on this graph are you closest right now? | When you answer, you won’t yet have read the essay that includes and explains this graph. For now, you don’t need it. Focus on the labels, the axes, and your understanding of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

This diagnostic could be given every week — even every day — and lose almost none of its efficacy. You should continue to ask yourself these questions.

Calvin’s Categorization

Identifying which of our makeshift Dunning-Kruger categories you fit is an important part of the learning process. Are you helpless? Arrogant? Anxious? The more accurate your sense of self, the more you will become a partner in this course, not an unwilling participant.

Helpless/Hapless

Grasping at straws

The biggest difference between this group and the next group is confidence. Helpless students know they don’t know. This can be frustrating and demoralizing, especially if you believe it indicates an actual inability to read and/or to process what you read.

But this course is transparent, flexible, and fully integrated into the interstitial environment you already inhabit (i.e., available in full on the smartphone you keep with you at all times). It also adapts to you, which means it is provisionally impossible for to remain helpless.

Helplessness is a learned trait, however, and it is caused by the floating standards you may have faced throughout your life:

Why Johnny Can't Fail

If you read Jesness’ essay, use this opportunity to talk to your peers about the story he tells and the argument it supports. The floating standard is just as prevalent today, sixteen years later, as it was when he wrote this.

If you don’t read the article, here is the definition he gives in his approach:

I am a grade-inflating teacher guilty of “social promotion.” I have given passing grades to students who failed all of their tests, to students who refused to read their assignments, to students who were absent as often as not, to students who were not even functionally literate. I have turned a blind eye to cheating and outright plagiarism and have given A’s and B’s to students whose performance was at best mediocre. Like others of my ilk, I have sent students to higher grades, to higher education, and to the workplace unprepared for the demands that would be made of them.

I am, in short, a servant of the force that thwarts nearly every effort to reform American education. I am a servant of the floating standard.

If you are helpless, that is as much the fault of this system as your own reticence to be challenged. That’s why the other term is hapless — because you have been unfortunate. We have to turn your fortunes around and return to you the ability to learn.

Arrogant/Ignorant

When an opinion shades off into an error of fact

One of the most cogent arguments against relativism — the belief that everything is just, like, your opinion, man — is from Roger Ebert’s “I’m a Proud Brainiac.” If you have time to read the complete essay, use this opportunity to lead your peers in a discussion about opinions, facts, and the way we classify and divide the two. Focus that discussion on this quotation:

I am fond of the story I tell about Gene Siskel. When a so-called film critic defended a questionable review by saying, “after all, it’s opinion,” Gene told him: “There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact. When you say ‘The Valachi Papers’ is a better film than ‘The Godfather,’ you are wrong.” Quite true. We should respect differing opinions up to certain point, and then it’s time for the wise to blow the whistle. Sir, not only do I differ with what you say, but I would certainly not fight to the death for your right to say it. Not me. You have to pick your fights.

If you don’t have time to read the full essay, simply study that quotation. This idea — that an opinion can absolutely be wrong — is how we disarm the Dunning-Kruger effect, especially the thinking of low-information folks.

It isn’t just arrogance, however, which is why the other term is ignorance. That word, ignorance, is charged with pejorative meaning — it’s an insult that makes us bristle — but it really just means a lack of knowledge. In our case, it means that the student has invested just enough to believe himself superior, but not enough to recognize his deficiencies.

Here’s another quotation to pull:

Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that “my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.”

That’s Isaac Asimov (predicting the 2016 election cycle, among other things). Our course is an attempt to democratize the learning process, but that democracy rests on ineluctable truth: There is no way to game this system, no way to fake your way through it, and nothing to be gained by trying.

Invested/Anxious

This too shall pass

Our brains don’t like ambiguity. We are prone to the ambiguity fallacy, in fact, which means that we rely on arguments that can be misinterpreted — sometimes deliberately — because of unclear language.

In grade abatement, this is one of the last redoubts of the arrogant: a defensive redefinition of terms. If the profile of a 7 requires you to “complete all required assignments,” we can quibble over what “complete” means. Does it mean complete at any point, even if it’s late? Does it mean complete to any extent, even if it’s poorly done? In the profile of a 9, what does “strongest” even mean? That “consistent and reliable” clause in a GAP 6 — does it matter that you were goofing off and watching videos during one class period?

Fortunately for all but the arrogant and ignorant, there really is no ambiguity here. You have explanations, explications, and exemplars for every aspect of the course. The curriculum and syllabus are transparent and consistent, even as they evolve to meet your individual needs.

Unfortunately, this precision initially — and almost paradoxically — hinders the most invested students. It isn’t the intricacies of grade abatement but the sweeping clarity of it that creates anxiety.

If you feel anxious, the first step is to separate stress management from anxiety management:

What Anxiety Does to Your Brain and What You Can Do About It

You must hack this part of your brain. It is part of your intrapersonal work — the self-awareness and self-efficacy that drives any new paradigm. You are building a better self, and anxiety is the enemy of growth: It is almost always based on an irrational and self-replicating series of beliefs.

Trust that this system was built by a human being, not a textbook company or state organization. There isn’t an algorithm. There are profiles.

Occam’s Razor(s)

Those profiles are built on the choices you make each and every day, in and out of class. That slow concatenation of evidence changes how we process your final GAP score. In the first guide to grade abatement, this is called the rhinoceros test, and it is summed up as follows:

You fit the bill or you don’t. When you’re done cataloguing your work and analyzing your performance for each quarter, you should be able to step back and say, “Yep, that’s a rhino.”

Keep in mind something else about this process: You don’t start with a 100. You earn your way into effectiveness, and that’s the kind of progress that can be tracked. It takes time and effort and consistency. That said, the rhinoceros test is a cousin to Occam’s razor, a philosophy where you favor the simplest theory or set of data, avoiding needlessly complicated or convoluted reasoning. That means that highlights and lowlights from the quarter should matter more than minutiae.

Notice the mention of Occam’s razor in that last paragraph. This refers not to a singular explanation, but to the clearest and simplest. We can turn again to TV Tropes to flesh out the definition:

[It is] commonly misinterpreted as saying, “The simplest theory is the best.” or, even worse, “The simplest theory is always right.” This is not correct in Real Life unless it is the simpler of two theories which make predictions with identical degrees of accuracy. All other aspects of the theory have to be equal before simplicity is taken into account. It also requires that all the data are accounted for. Newtonian physics are simpler than modern theories and were sufficient to take man to the Moon, but (with all due respect to the man) Sir Isaac simply could not explain all the data eventually collected — especially since a lot of the offending material had not been collected when Principia Mathematica was published. This required some other smart man — namely, Albert Einstein — to formulate more complex theories, particularly the outrageous stew we call “Relativity,” which functions along completely different rules.

In this course, all data are accounted for. If anything is missing, that absence is your responsibility. You must substantiate each and every clause and phrase of the grade abatement profile; vague or unsubstantiated language is, in and of itself, evidence of a less effective body of work.

That means we can use Occam’s razor to sort you. We will reason less in terms of single moments and more in terms of single experiences, however, and that distinction is critical. Some experiences are enough to push you in one direction or another along the immutable logic of GAP scoring; other experiences must be folded into the larger body of work produced throughout the quarter before an assessment can be accurately made.

Carve the profiles into a bell curve, and then consider an example of the two tapers:

The Upper Taper

Let’s say that you finish an essay, and then conference with me for several periods by

• taking notes and working on your understanding of your writing strengths;
• learning what a periodic sentence is;
• learning how parallelism and fragments work;
• learning the way however and but shift the way a paragraph opens;
• learning what zeugma is from your own nascent style; and
• never losing sight of the fact that all this rhetoric is in service to your main ideas, which are insightful and well developed.

Well, you’re probably a 7 or higher. It is overwhelmingly unlikely that a student with that level of amenability and assiduousness is missing assignments. We can check — I will check — but some assumptions are safe to make.

Assuming the criteria for a 7 exist, the next step is to carry some of that individual feedback and instruction to your peers through our proxy mechanisms — e.g., in-class discussion, the subreddit, Google Docs. Do enough of that, and you have the evidence for the environmental criteria of an 8, don’t you?

Then you ought to do a steady bit of reflection and metacognition about

• your experience writing the essay;
• your understanding of yourself as a student;
• the way you attempted to teach your peers; and
• how the Protégé Effect helped you hone GAP skills and traits.

Now you’re likely a 9. You’ve done more than just what is required, demonstrated growth and strength in the requisite skills and traits, and embraced the collaborative and metacognitive backbone of our learning.

The Low Taper

Let’s say that, instead of finishing an essay, you are

• watching sports highlights;
• texting;
• completing a Social Studies presentation;
• researching Halloween costumes;
• looking up dirt bikes;
• playing a game on your phone; or even
• having an in-depth but unrelated conversation about politics.

In other words, you’re treating the period like a study hall, and you’re doing it often and/or blatantly enough for me to notice. Occam’s razor tells us you’re not “consistent and reliable” enough to justify a 6, but even a 5+is questionable. Here are some of the criteria for a 4:

[These students] tend to be demonstrably unmotivated, incurious, and resistant to learning. There may be an explicit inability or unwillingness to invest in the learning process and classroom environment.

It’s a mistake to think that “resistant to learning” refers only to a student cursing out the teacher and storming from the classroom. Refusal and resistance take many forms. That “explicit inability or unwillingness” to do what is expected includes reading a magazine when you have hundreds of pages of reading still available; putting your foot up and listening to music, instead of doing any of the dozens of academic tasks available to you; chatting with some friends for 30 minutes, instead of collaborating on the almost limitless interstitial opportunities you have.

Perhaps you get back on task when I furrow my brow at you. That pseudo-shameful adjustment — which often lasts only as long as I am standing next to you — shows only that you might have a few shreds of self-awareness, amenability, and integrity left. It does not salvage the quarter.

This applies to quite a few of you, so listen carefully: You are, right now, careening toward a 4. If you continue for these last two weeks to waste your time and mine, you will be doing it despite individual and collective attempts to correct your behavior — attempts like this essay itself — and that level of resistance would make you a 3 or lower.

Faking It

When you are in doubt, fake it. Force yourself to be collegial. Force yourself to do metacognition. Force yourself to spend the entire period pretending to be the right kind of student.

Do this for long enough, and the skills and traits you are pretending to hone will be honed. You will become a better student. This is the Wiseman effect transposed onto education. It is a kind of psychosomatic inverse: tricking your brain into developing habits by forcing your body to take particular actions.

In here, it’s fine if you try to game the system by generating whatever evidence it takes to justify that GAP 8 or GAP 9. Why? Because there is no gamesmanship — no way to cheat the system, fabricate evidence, or twist the language of the profiles. There isn’t even a way to cheat yourself.

If you force yourself through the motions in here, those motions will inculcate the skills and traits we want. A misanthrope who forces himself to take collegial and galvanizing actions will incrementally learn empathy. A narcissist who forces herself to reflect and metacogitate every week will incrementally find new self-awareness and insight. An apathetic student who grinds through assignments just to get them done will incrementally gain a real appreciation for the value of the work.

This is a subtle conversion. It evades the entitlement at the heart of both helplessness and arrogance. The helpless among you feel entitled to be shepherded from task to task; the arrogant among you overvalue your intelligence and devalue the good work of this course. Both groups anticipate being gifted a high grade through some kind of alchemical magic.

The logic of this course is immutable, however. There is no game to play and no gamesmanship to lean on. This course does not care how naturally gifted you are. It does not care if you play sports and play them well. It does not care what your parents think of you. It does not care what you look like, how charming you are, or how much latitude you have been given throughout your life to do what you want.

It cares only about what you do.

Salt in the Wound

Students who find themselves anxious over their progress with grade abatement are often suffering from Imposter Syndrome, which is an inability to internalize their accomplishments. It’s common enough to be featured on morning shows and in Forbes magazine:

Afraid Of Being 'Found Out?' How To Overcome Impostor Syndrome

In our course, this is a weakness. We are not after false humility, and there is nothing to be gained by sandbagging. You should have the critical thinking skills — the metacognitive strength — to know yourself, and you should be amenable to positive feedback, too; by the end of each quarter, your profile should be clear.

But it has never been more than a handful of students who rate themselves a 7 when they are an 8, or an 8 when they are a 9. Because of the threshold mechanic for a 7 — you must complete all assignments — students in that upper taper almost never mistake themselves for a 4–6. Even then, being surprised by your success is probably preferable to being surprised by your failure.

Surprise might be the key. Surprise acts in self-assessment like salt does in cooking: It magnifies everything, and too much of it overwhelms the dish.

You should not be surprised in here. The process is evidentiary. The requirements are all delineated in clear prose. Surprise only happens if you are uninformed — if you are arrogant enough to think you’re getting away with wasting your time, or if you are delusional enough to think that you can game this course.

Save yourself the surprise. Accept your bad choices, and try to make better ones. Don’t waste more time trying to get evidence thrown out of your GAP report; there is no appeals circuit in here, just the work you’ve done.

If you do better work, you’ll avoid this:

Through the Looking Glass

I will try not to active the atavistic anger in me. I’m going to lean on reason instead: You have no excuse for being uniformed, just like you have no for being immature or unfocused. If you want to choose a 5+ or 5-, be okay with that choice. If you want to choose a 4, be okay with that choice. You’re the one making it, and you can’t unmake it.

Notice, too, that this kind of post, which is being photocopied and distributed in order to catch even those of you who won’t read the required interstitial updates, has a kind of self-affirming logic to it: If you don’t read this and, therefore, don’t adjust your expectations for your GAP score, you will be surprised, and that surprise will be proof itself that you deserve a 5+ or lower.

Like salt in a wound, the surprise will hurt. It might be necessary, however, to push you toward real growth and understanding. They say that ignorance is bliss, but I’m not sure — it never seems to end well.

“We’re heading for that cliff!” is my motto.