Quasi-Calendars

Shuffling about and planning ahead

Adapted and updated from this 2015 essay.

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 Sisyphean High 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.

Claude Frollo, of course, is the New York State Department of Education.

In the past, I’ve kept a calendar of units and lessons to track this approach. Consider one pathologically exhaustive example from 2013, which is only slightly crazier than this daily recap from the year before.

It seems like those are necessary records of the work we did, and I still feel some vestigial pride over how hard it was to stitch it all together. But in a course built around universal skills and traits, individualized learning, and makerspace creativity, that kind of calendar makes little sense.

Here is Alfie Kohn only a few days ago on this idea:

What you might note, if you were bored or brave enough to delve into my old calendars, is that the recaps become more and more specific, while the upcoming units grow more ambiguous. As another example, compare the AP syllabus from 2016 to the AP syllabus from 2010. In 2010, there was already a mention of rhetoric as “a living thing,” so the units were presented as potential choices; by 2016, that list has shrunk considerably, and much more emphasis is placed on the flexibility of makerspace learning.

What this means is that very little of our upcoming plans is written in stone. It is all subject to change — and we need that stone for blood-letting, anyway.

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.

Breaks and Greenstick Fractures

That is all preface to an important conversation about the work students do outside of school, especially in advance of a deadline. For all our deliberate flexibility, we’ve actually made student work ethic more important, or at least more meaningful.

The ongoing and probably never-ending issue is the extent to which students work interstitially to make connections between lessons and texts, to enter discussions online with peers, to ask questions of the teacher as they occur, etc. As always, it’s about the 36 chambers:

Head Training: The 36th Chamber

(If we get a new schedule next year, one that eliminates 40-minute periods, I’m going to have a hard time letting go of that metaphor.)

The difficulty is developing the habit of using those interstitial mechanisms. Website visits and online conversations drop precipitously over vacations. Even weekends see interstitial work vanish. In fact, it’s rare to see bursts of activity after 3PM. At night? Crickets.

In one sense, that’s okay. I think we all needed the time to recharge our severely depleted batteries at the end of each day/week/month, because decision fatigue is real.

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.

The problem is our need to work rigorously toward our learning goals. You don’t have the luxury of taking too much time off, not least of all because any backlogged assignments are going to become overwhelming. We can deal with crickets right up to the point where they become monstrous.

Remember that we are working to inculcate the skills and traits needed 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, of course, 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.”