AF: Turtles DO have it figured out REVISED

I have received several emails asking about a test.  Of course there will be a test (!) but not on your first day back, and not without some time to talk about ALL of the books (even the one you did not read).

I will return your notebooks to you on the first day, UNGRADED, but checked in.  I am looking at everything, and forming an impression of you as a writer and a thinker (adding to what I know about you already from the blog), but I am not grading anything right now.  Your ticket into the class was the work, so I'm finding out who did the work thoroughly, and who just slapped it together.  Your summer work will be a topic of conversation between us at some point during the first semester, and it will be graded before your first real report card in January.  Every portion of the summer homework is worth 100 points:  blog, Postman, Huxley, Carr/Thompson.  That's 400 total, so it is significant, but I have learned that trying to get all of these graded in the two weeks before school is a losing proposition, and puts me behind from Day One.  I'm not doing that any more.  I will be fair, and I respect your work.  That's all that should matter today.

You will write an on-demand essay on Friday, September 5th that I will score immediately, and your test on all four books will be on  Friday, September 12.  By September 19, you will have an essay score, a test score and several participation events in the grade book.  (For those of you who are coming to me from Colln/Phinizy, I also use the 3P Grading system.  For everyone else, you may want to read up about this.  This will be my third year using 3P; it is just a better system.  It doesn't make Portal Surfers happy, but 3P is more fair and more transparent than the traditional system that I used for the first 12 years of my teaching career. Google it.)

Anyway, from Monday through Thursday (9/8-9/11), there will be two things happening:  you will be learning and practicing how to work in my classroom, and you will be reviewing and discussing the summer work, and helping your peers understand the main points of the book they did not read.  You will use your own notebooks and the texts themselves to look more closely at all of the ideas we have encountered.

Have you ever read our English Language Arts standards?  The CONTENT of what we read is important because that's why we read and write, but what we work on is WRITING, READING, SPEAKING, and LISTENING.  So the tests I write do check to see whether you read and understood, but mostly whether you can take what you read and explain it, discuss it, synthesize it.

Writing is thinking made visible.  Orwell said that if you don't write well, it's probably because you can't think well, and if you can't think well, "don't worry.  Somebody else will do your thinking for you." Scary, isn't it?  But if your thoughts are naive, immature or lazy, your writing will reflect that by being repetitive, superficial, and incoherent.  If you can think a clear thought, and put that thought down on paper in clean, vigorous English, you are going to do well.  But in any case, don't worry.  I've seen every kind of student come through my classroom. I've had brilliant, brilliant kids who have gone on to do big things in the world, and I have had very mediocre students who have ALSO gone on to do big things in the world  The junior year is important, but it is not the end of the line for you.  Room 508 is just one stop along the way, and whoever you are and whatever you know already, I'm going to help you improve.

PS:  I have recently heard stories about kids celebrating (bragging) that they got into this AP class. Stop that.  Anthony Sayas said it well the other day -- it is not a big deal to get in the class.  It really isn't; it's not worth bragging about.  It just means you did the work, and for the record, the work I received is not uniformly good.  Again, this is not unusual.  If you are willing to do the work to be in this class, I welcome you.  But some of you are going to have extra work to do because you are starting off standing in a hole.