Sonata in A+ Minor

A Recapitulation and Essay Prompt

You’ve probably heard a good portion of the most famous piano sonatas. They are used liberally in movies and TV shows. Here are ten that might help you focus while you work.

“Essay” is a word that is charged, by the time you are a junior in high school, with all sorts of terrible connotations. That’s why Paul Graham’s writing on writing is so important to what we do next, and why the lesson on his “Age of the Essay” starts with Cthulhu hiding behind a building:

Click on Cthulhu to revisit the post on Paul Graham and what we will eventually call bishop composition or river writing. Support C Is for Cthulhu by buying a copy at Amazon.

The period was given over to you on Friday, October 2, as a point of departure and an opportunity to do more than just what is required. There is no Google Classroom assignment for Graham, but the efficacy of branching out beyond that Skinner-box mentality should be obvious. If you reflect on his ideas and apply a bit of ETA logic to his writing, you’ll generate evidence of that GAP 8:

That is one of our grade abatement profiles, of course, and your first essay, the essay in question, is about grades.

We are digging into the substructure of the course again, because you were already asked to think about your relationship to grading and assessment. Your introductory writing (the Google Doc is available here) led to many fascinating responses, but the most fascinating patterns came from these two questions:

Here is a particularly insightful set of responses to these questions.

(4) What has your relationship to assessment, especially grading, been throughout your school career?

(5) If you haven’t already answered this, how do you feel about grades?

These questions are now the prompt for your first essay. With it, you will receive a kind of responsive writing protocol — directions that can be followed step-by-step or used as a more general guide.

Everything you need is delineated below. It has also been uploaded to our course website and to the official (read: Skinner-box) stream on Google Classroom. In other words, the resources you need to write have been cross-posted so much that you will have to work hard not to see them. There will even be photocopies stacked liberally in the back of our classroom.

This is primarily an exercise in creation — in making meaning and seeking truth — but it is also about redundancy and resource management. You will need to sift through lectures and lessons online; you will need to organize (our aegis, as always) your workspace in class and at home; and you will need, more than anything, to ask questions and seek collaboration.

Your prompt:

Write an essay about your relationship to assessment, especially grading.

RECAPITULATION

Prompt and Circumstance

Almost everything you need to write this essay — and any other essay — is in a single Google Drive folder:

That’s a fairly large icon, but I don’t want you to miss it. This folder will be updated with any new resources, so it is as critical to your writing work as anything that is posted online or distributed in class.

You can also find these materials at Sisyphean High proper, under the bishop composition subheading.

This is another point of departure: If you ignore these resources — if all you do is utilize your current mind and a keyboard to write an essay — you will still give us all something to work with. You will still, through the authenticity of the prompt, discover some meaning and some truth. And you will still, in the process, inevitably develop some of the skills and traits of effective learning.

If, however, you immerse yourself in this process, then that will benefit you tremendously. You might, for instance, give your writing contextual strength by using the ETA process archived here in order to break down some of the following articles:

• Alfie Kohn, The Case Against Grades | An insightful look at the research into grading and de-grading
• Jerry Jesness, Why Johnny Can’t Fail | A teacher’s story of the pressure to inflate grades and lower standards
• Drew Magary, Down With America’s Kid-Competition Complex | One father’s argument against our hyper-competitive culture (includes a link to Magary’s experience retaking the SAT at age 35)

These will also comprise our second Ramiform Reading, to keep the momentum going:

Ramiform Reading #2

Each of those articles — on eliminating grades, overemphasizing them, competing over them — is worth time and attention, because they are some of the more cogent and stylistic essays on grades and assessment. And that is another point of departure: a way of deepening and broadening your understanding as you prepare to write your own work, especially if you return to those bishop composition protocols and rubrics to aid your understanding.

If you haven’t spent time looking through Sisyphean High’s main site, you might want to do that, too. Remember that this sort of ramiform learning is meant to get you lost before it helps you figure things out.

Here are those protocols and rubrics again:

▸ Prompt & Circumstance
▸ Writing Process: Lite Version
▸ Writing Process: Full Version
▸ Post-Writing Report
▸ DAMAGES: Original Rubric
▸ ETA Reading Example

They will help you start an essay that seems to have no beginning; they will help you break through writer’s block; and they will give you a universal language for radial and proxy feedback.

EXPOSITION

Grade Abatement Connections

This is not our first universal language, of course. That was the language of learning, called grade abatement, that we have spent now three weeks studying. This first essay of yours will exercise and strengthen many of those skills and traits:

Click the image to load the GAP protocol you parsed and analyzed at the beginning of the year.

You should take a few moments before you begin the writing process to look back on how these academic skills and traits have been used in our course so far, especially how the interstitial elements and required assignments connect.

The easiest way to make these connections is to load Google Classroom’s complete list of required assignments. Then identify which elements of grade abatement are being targeted by that assignment.

Start with a list:

I’ve removed the period so that no group is embarrassed. Look at the number of missing assignments: That is embarrassing, and the result is that at least a baker’s dozen of you — in this class; there are others, of course — will be capped at a GAP 6.

Those are the four most recent required assignments, and each one has done something to set up this first essay. The “Practicing Empathy” work forced you to think divergently about the relationships in your life, good and bad, and to begin to see commonplace experiences from a different perspective. The easiest GAP connection, therefore:

① Practicing Empathy ➩ CIE — Collegiality: Imaginative Empathy

At its core, any discussion of grading is a discussion of empathy. The discussion might wander into our experiences of sympathy, entitlement, rigor, grit, and even happiness, but the machinery of education depends on empathy — its presence and its absence.

But that assignment also strengthened other GAP elements in preparation for this essay. You were required to write down your observations and insights:

② Practicing Empathy ➩ CTM — Critical Thinking: Metacognition
③ Practicing Empathy ➩ ECW — Effective Communication: Writing

And, of course, the entire empathy exercise was predicated on your reading of Chad Fowler’s essay and the contextualizing post on Sisyphean High. That means we also have:

④ Practicing Empathy ➩ CRI — Close Reading: Internalization

Every required assignment strengthens multiple areas of your developing grade abatement profile. Track them, and you will not only have evidence for the end of the quarter, but a stronger sense of your nascent strengths and weaknesses — and that’s the key to navigating all of this, from the essay you will write to the course as a whole.

DEVELOPMENT

Point and Publication

I want you to keep a few quotations in front of you at all times — so much so that I will probably create posters for them and hang those in our classroom as it evolves into a new species of makerspace.

What teachers choose to hang in a classroom is of endless fascination to me. Students spend a lot of time looking at the walls — looking for a way out, I imagine — so the choice is an important one. Which is why I think we should read 1984 and then only hang posters related to it. (Image from the 1956 film version.)

Each of these quotations deals with a different perspective on writing; when read together, they suggest a way for us to invigorate the skill that may be the most important part of being human.

That’s why all of this background is so important: You have the rest of this year to learn to write authentically and organically, and then you have the rest of your life to put it all into practice; if you never know why you are doing it, however, all the essay prompts in the world will do you little good.

Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death:

Writing makes it possible and convenient to subject thought to a continuous and concentrated scrutiny. Writing freezes speech and in so doing gives birth to the grammarian, the logician, the rhetorician, the historian, the scientist — all those who must hold language before them so that they can see what it means, where it errs, and where it is leading.

The written word endures, the spoken word disappears; and that is why
writing is closer to the truth than speaking.

Paul Graham, The Age of the Essay:

An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question. In a real essay, you don’t take a position and defend it. You notice a door that’s ajar, and you open it and walk in to see what’s inside.

The river’s algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting… Err on the side of the river. An essay is not a reference work. It’s not something you read looking for a specific answer, and feel cheated if you don’t find it.

Gerald Graff and Steven Benton, Great Teachers Can’t Save America’s Schools:

[A]s they move through junior high and high school, students should learn to map their ideas onto a larger intellectual landscape and make the crucial move of acknowledging and engaging opposing arguments. Throughout it all, students learn that arguing is not synonymous with fighting — its primary goal is not to destroy contradicting viewpoints, but to engage them in a way that reveals hidden dimensions of a problem.

In this digital age, when vast amounts of data are as close as the nearest touchscreen, it is all the more crucial that schools focus on helping students make articulate arguments out of the information they can so easily access. Now more than ever before, schools need to help students do more than acquire data. They must learn how to explain that data, apply it, promote their interpretations of it, and modify those interpretations through respectful debate and discussion.

Those last points by Graff and Benton bring us to the idea of entering your essay — your ideas and insights — into the Web of “vast amounts of data” that exists around us. You will be encouraged to publish, and Medium makes that easy:

Don’t Write Alone

That short article explains how to use Medium to collaborate. This next one explains how to utilize the platform’s note-taking feature:

Why Medium Notes Are Different and How to Use Them Well

The entire site is intuitive, though, and requires you only to take your time to figure out how to use it effectively. You can always start with the collection set up by the company itself.

This sharing is part of creation, and it is the goal of almost every essay you will write in here. It’s why there are so many exemplary student essays on Sisyphean High. In fact, the only exceptions to this push for publication will be the test-specific essays we practice in order to get you ready for whatever high-stakes monstrosity descends on us in May and June.

There are a few ways for you to organize your collaborative efforts. First, note that AP students should have more familiarity with the writing process, because they spent part of their summer studying it; they should be taking the lead here, and all other students should be looking to them for guidance.

Second, set aside time to conference with me in small groups. Use the staging area at the front of the room, invest in radial feedback, and then carry that knowledge back to the rest of the class.

Third, set up a regular time to reflect and revise. Answer our three central questions as often as you can, trying to keep grade abatement and the writing process equally in focus, and then share your answers with your peers:

① What have I accomplished?
② What have I learned?
③ What’s next?

Finally, fill our subreddit with proxy feedback and interstitial collaboration. Focus on asking the right questions, offering the right advice, and eliminating the clutter and detritus.

Coda

Don’t hesitate to ask me questions. As I’ve said, that needs to be a habit. I suggest that you recognize that the only true requirement in all this is the post-writing report, which is far more about the process than the product.

Another large icon that leads to an essential document. Read this post-writing report as soon as you can, so that it can help you organize and plan your process.

You can also, as the Sisyphean High post suggests, involve your parents and guardians in the writing of this first essay. Ask them to answer the same questions and read the same texts. They’ve all been students before, and the shift in their perspectives — which happened when you came into their lives — may give you the kind of insight that galvanizes good writing.

You might also, if you’re feeling brave, encourage these adults to write their own essays. Their voices are unique and important, too. At the very least, encourage them to leave comments next to yours on the Sisyphean High post:

Essay-Writing: Grades and Gradients | English 11

This is a conversation that involves all of us, and it should be a course that involves all of us, too. We are fighting some very old and very powerful beliefs, and it will take an army to make us all immune.

GAPs in Herd Immunity