Thursday, September 12, 2013

Humanities: What Is Humanities & Clarifying 9/11

Today in Humanities we developed a more solid answer to "What Is Humanities?"
Warm Up
We started with another improv game, this one called "What Are You Doing?"
Watching & Discussing
And then we turned off the laughs for some serious watching, thinking and discussing courtesy www.Upworthy.com and ESPN's Outside the Lines.

If you watch here, you get some great notes via Upworthy.


We then discussed clarifying questions about 9/11 and ended the day by discussing "What IS Humanities?"

Homework
Be thinking about Cardboard Challenge; practice round tomorrow!
Get in any missing work (signatures, goals, artifacts)



AP Lit 3G: Legos & Literature & Synthesis Thinking

Today's AP Lit 3G class started with a quick trip to our new Make Space design & innovation lab in the incubator room here at Mt. Blue Campus.  (It's still getting refined  down there and when it is all ready to go?  Look out, cook out.)
Legos & Literary Analysis
There we built Lego constructs, reflected on the construction process, and then developed analogies between that process and the literary construction and analysis processes.

And it was super fun.  See more here.
Assessment & Synthesis
After lunch, we returned to the room to discuss our strengths and weaknesses as literary analysis essayists and construct rubric drafts for our first synthesis essay.

This lead to our first foray into synthesis thinking. 

Our examples of synthesis thesis statements are on the board (which is away from me at the moment so I will update this soon).

At the heart of our synthesis work lays this process:

Analyze the literature we read
Reflect upon your life experience and content knowledge across your spectrum of contexts
Identify threads, patterns, meaning, symbols across the literature, experience & knowledge
Focus upon a single, powerful idea/understanding that emerges from the above work
Defend your understanding with evidence from the above work

Synthesis thinking is what writers and thinkers like Malcolm Gladwell, Dan Pink, and Steven Johnson do every day.  Chuck Klosterman and Sarah Vowell, Cintra Wilson and Barbara Ehrenreich do it too.

We are in age where the amount of information exceeds our ability to consume it.  We have to cull and curate, extract and explicate, and then find the underlayment, the powerful notions holding it all together.  Then we might be able to start making sense of this world in which live and figuring out ways to make it better.

Finally, a heads up.  As we haven't had our primary means of communication, the laptop, at our disposal until now, I have been soft on due dates and submitting work.  Starting Monday, timeliness rubrics (see Guidelines & Expectations in their colorful glory) will be strictly enforced on all assigned homework.

Homework
Finish: Ender's Game for Monday
Complete: Student Designed Essay Rubric - send along ASAP
Draft: 1st Working Draft of Synthesis Essay Due for Workshop Next Wednesday, 9/18


AP Lit 3G: Legos & Literature

Today we spent time before lunch building lego constructs & using analogous thinking to explore literary constructs & analysis

PACE: Heroic Journeys & Essential Questions

Today we started our "I Am Hero" unit by first taking time to explore essential questions.

Essential Questions
Here's a video that will hopefully refresh your understanding of essential questions and add some ideas you may not have considered in class.




And here is a link to the essential question work that we did on a shared Google doc.  You can find that doc in your Drive under "PACE 2013 OUT."
The Hero's Journey
That lead us to watching this brilliant video about the hero's journey and the monomyth.



When then took some time to figure out our first reading groups.  You will be choosing your own reading schedule for either The Hunger Games or The Adventures of Ulysses.  
Teacher PACE: Finish the book by Sept. 30
Student PACE: Determine how you will chunk that reading between now and then.

Next week, we dig into the monomyth, what that means, and the expectations for your first big project including due dates, how I designed it, and how it will demonstrate your understanding.  We also open up the curriculum and figure out what it is you are supposed to know as sophomores and transform the school's language into your language.

Homework
Read: your group's chosen selection for Monday.
Teacher PACE: finish book by Sept 30
Student PACE: Determine how you will chunk that reading between now and then