PS02: Q2 Quasi-Calendar

Shuffling about and planning ahead.

There are times when the endless ringing of the bells in school reminds me less of Pavlov and his dogs and more of the tortured protagonist of Victor Hugo’s novel. I may be thinking of the interesting roots of Quasimodo’s name (quasi and mode), since our course has its own kind-hearted monsters — me, if you like, or maybe something more abstract, like the pressure to do well. We also have our own slightly irregular approach to things.

Try not to confuse the blood-letting stones with the stones of madness. Do look up Hieronymus Bosch, though. Where possible, you should flesh out your knowledge of important painters — the Internet lets you see great works of art whenever you wish, even if it can’t replace the power of seeing it in person.

You can see your calendar for the rest of Q2 by clicking here.Note that the recap of the past few weeks is specific, but the future is more ambiguous; we need to remain flexible, because we are at the mercy of storms both literal and figurative.

Keep in mind that nothing about our upcoming plans is written in stone. This is all subject to change — and we need that stone for blood-letting, anyway.

Breaks and Greenstick Fractures

We need to talk about the work you’ve (not) been doing over this break. You were given a simple enough assignment: Focus on the reading, thinking, and communication we’ve had in front of us recently. Complete your interstitial work, make connections between lessons and texts, and enter discussions online with your peers.

Well, there have been no student contributions to any of the interstitial elements of our course in the last seven days or so. In one sense, that’s okay; I think we all needed the time to recharge our severely depleted batteries.

My battery is just a pair of old potatoes. Interesting fact: Searching for an image of a potato battery leads to spoilers about Portal 2. That game series is famous for its experimental approach to narrative, so it may be worth a bookmark for our discussion of video games as art later in the year.

When school resumes, however, we’ll be moving very quickly through more and more difficult work. You won’t have the luxury of taking too much time off, and any backlogged assignments are going to overwhelm you quickly. We can deal with crickets over a long break; starting now, those crickets are a bit more monstrous.

For example, you’ve been reading 1984 long enough now to have finished it, if you’re planning on doing that. (If you opted not to read it, you have obviously written the required metacognitive breakdown of that choice and your experience with the first 50 pages, which were required.) You’ll start work on your next autodidactic text, Thank You for Arguing, on January 5, as part of our study of manipulation, formal logic, and logical fallacies.

(If you’re interested in getting the book ahead of time, here’s a link to its Amazon page. Heinrichs might be willing to talk with us, too, after we’ve studied his approach to rhetoric a bit. Here’s his website.)

There will also be timed essays, multiple-choice work, and plenty of discussion — and that’s on top of 1984, grade abatement profiles, and the usual protean approach we take to learning.

Remember that you are inculcating the skills and traits you need in the future. If you invest fully in the mechanisms of learning we’ve built this year, you will earn your way into those upper GAP scores — but that’s not the real reward. The real reward might not be immediate. It might take months or even years to pay off fully.

I promise you, however, that it is real. This particular cake isn’t a lie.

Back to Portal: The meme “the cake is a lie” is worth knowing, not just because of its prevalence online, but because it serves as a 21st-century metaphor for broken promises. In our case, the lie is the one about the polysyllogism of education — keep chasing diplomas, and you’ll end up with a happy life. Jerry Jesness had this to say about it: “Knowledge is power, but a diploma is just a piece of paper. Our schools have undersold the former and oversold the latter.”