We began our discussion of Frankenstein today with questions from you:

• Why does the story begin with letters?
• Why does the story seem to begin at the end?
• What’s up with Victor’s relationship with his sister?
• Where is Walton going?

These questions and your insights will be the lifeblood of our conversations, so keep them coming.

If you were absent, be sure to get copies of the notes from a peer, but here are a few highlights: ((Here is an ugly comparison between the two eras we’re focused on. Yours will be more detailed when we get done, but it might be helpful now.))

Shelley’s introduction of the story with letters from the mariner provides a bit of verisimilitude to the opening, while offering an excellently sublime backdrop to a story that would otherwise begin with a description of the titular character’s childhood. In addition, it gives the audience a glimpse into the author’s thesis—beware of unbridled scientific inquiry?—through the conversation between the sailor (here embodying the Enlightenment’s values of a self-assured explorer) and Victor (a man whose vanity and hubris brought him low). Shelley clearly wants her audience to understand which side she’s on.

Victor’s relationship with his sister/cousin prompted a discussion of gender politics at the time. We read selections from Edmund Burke’s 1757 A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, specifically his sections on the beauty of small objects and the sublime. To make the Frankenstein connection, we read excerpts of Mary Wollstonecraft’s rebuttal, A Vindication of the Rights of Men. ((Copies will be made available shortly.))

Finally, we began reading from the large “Frankensources” packet I gave you. ((If you’d like a digital copy, send me an email. Copyright restrictions preclude my posting it here.))

You should read and journal tonight through chapter five of the novel. If you’ve journaled all you can, begin reading and annotating the packet. Once you’ve read through a work within, go back to your Frankenstein journal and note any connections; these will soon be the basis of our discussions—they will later be the basis of your paper.

Oh! Interesting explanation of the etymology of “inspiration” here.

We’ve read a number of works over the past few days in an attempt to triangulate an understanding of this “Romanticism” thing. Here are links to most (a second read is worth your while):

Whitman’s “Song of Myself” and “I Sing the Body Electric,” especially these lines:

You shall no longer take things at second or third hand, nor look through the eyes of the dead, nor feed on the spectres in books,
You shall not look through my eyes either, nor take things from me,
You shall listen to all sides and filter them from your self.

Milton’s Paradise Lost ((note that he, like Ellison, begins in medeas res. Not so modern after all…)):

 The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

We can contrast them nicely by looking at the way in which the speaker knows his world: Whitman understands through experience, while Satan is busy cogitating. ((Later we’ll see Hamlet say something similar: “Denmark’s a prison. . . . for there is nothing / either good or bad, but thinking makes it so: to me / it is a prison. . . . I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count / myself a king of infinite space” II.ii)) Both, however, refuse a universal, objective reality that Enlightenment thinkers founded their philosophies upon. As we move forward we’ll find other examples, further work out their attraction to Milton’s Satan, and look at the role of the artist/hero.

Also: There is a great series of lectures on this topic here, if you’re interested, and a previous post by me on the Gothic.

Alternate title: My Grade is WHAT?!

There is a problem with schools today. It isn’t budget cuts, teacher salaries, bullying or drugs (though far be it from me to downplay those issues)—it is much more fundamental. The current grades you receive too often do not reflect your strengths (if you receive a low grade) or weaknesses (if you receive a high one). The result of this is several fold:

1. You (and your parents) do not receive an accurate indication of your strengths and weaknesses from your report card. This means you aren’t sure what is holding you back when you have trouble with an assignment or test.
2. Even if you do well on a major assignment or semester test, your final grade is lowered by that one paper you didn;t do well (or at all) at the beginning of the semester. You are essentially penalized for not learning at the same rate as the class. (If you have failed because you aren’t turning in work, this isn’t going to help you. I have only two principles when considering someone’s grade: 1. If a student knows the material and has mastered the skills, he or she should pass. 2. I can never assume #1.)
3. If you fail a course, it is often because you did poorly on a major assignment or were consistently frustrated by a particular skill (one you may or may not have been aware of [see #1 above]). When you retake a course it is often with the advice (or motivation) to try harder. This only works if you know exactly what you are trying.
4. If you quickly master the skills practiced during a course, it can be frustrating to be unable to move forward. So, you recognize that grades are important and remain bored in lock-step with the rest of the class or you neglect your work—destroying your grade.
5. You play the game. Every single student who has been given a list of assignments and their worth has played variations on a simple cost/benefit-analysis game:
   1. At the beginning of the year: What do I need to focus on?  Notebook neatness is 10% of my grade?! Time to head to Target.
   2. At midterm:  3 points from a B. Maybe I can do some extra credit to raise my score. (“That white board sure looks dirty…”)
   3. At final: I have 2350 points of 3000, the final is worth 500 ”how hard do I have to work to maintain my A?

Of course, every one of these conversations with yourself overlooks the very reason you are in school: to master the skills that will make you a more intelligent, successful, and interesting person.

So how do we solve this? I don’t have a magic wand but I have some good ideas.

The Current Gradebook In a Nutshell

Along the top of a normal grade book are columns headed by assignments. You’ll see labels like “Quiz 1, Worksheet 17b, and Death Final. (That last one is from a school of rock; not nearly as dangerous as it sounds.)

When you get your grade reports, each of these assignments has a score out of a total number of possible points. Like this:

	Quiz 1	Quiz 2	Quiz 3	Final	Class Grade
Rowena Ravenclaw	9/10	10/10	10/10	45/50	74/80  92%

Neat. Rowena seems to be a good student: she does well on her quizzes (Those quizzes are called formal formative assessments in teacher jargon as they reflect knowledge that is still being formed. Standards-based grading does not alter this arrangement–it merely provides a more concise and cogent method of communicating progress.) and nearly aced the final. What is she good at? We’re not sure, but I bet her parents are proud. What might they tell her? “Keep doing what you’re doing! You’re such a good student.”

Now let’s look at the grade report for a student who isn’t doing so well to see where our current grading system becomes a problem:

	Quiz 1	Quiz 2	Quiz 3	Final	Class Grade
Godric Gryffindor	4/10	5/10	6/10	45/50	60/80  75%

Poor Godric (Bet you thought I would use Salazar—Slytherin always gets a bad rap.) here has earned a “C.” He has done well on his final, but his score (his grade, his understanding, etc.) is average. What was the trouble? What did he not understand? Not sure, but he gets a “C.” What do his parents say? Well, if you studied a bit more you’d be more successful. You’re such a smart kid; I know you’d do great if you applied yourself/got off the computer/listened to better music/stopped eating so much cheese.

The disconnect is one of communication: a student (and his or her parents) should be able to use the gradebook as an additional tool to understand strengths and weaknesses. The gradebook above only induces is unfocused sense of unease.

We’ve all been there, but there must be a better way, you think. I can tell you: There is and it is beautiful. Let me show you.

Standards-Based Grading

I’m sure we’ll come up with a better name. At least it is clear: inside the grade book we use standards and skills (Skills are things you do in real life—things you can be good at. No one is good at “quizzes.”) to grade your progress in the class, rather than “Quiz,” “Essay,” or “Papier-mâché robot.”

During the first day of class I’ll give you a list of the skills you will master over the course of the…course.

What do the skills look like?

“Ability to cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text.”

Or,

“Ability to analyze the use of appeals to credibility in an argument, connect each appeal to the message, and provide support for claim.”

In clearer terms: “Ability to support your claims” and “Analyze an author’s use of ethos,” respectively.

Each skill is graded on a 0-5 point scale which for my purposes works like this:

1. Attempted skill with very little success (you purchased a journal but have only doodled in it; you used the word “ethos” in an analysis, but incorrectly; you have a page entitled “Works Cited” with no citations, etc.)
2. Attempted skill in appropriate context (you write about your novel in a journal but provide only summary or stop after the second chapter, you tag an appeal to virtue without support or connection to author’s argument, you list the titles of your sources without any other information)
3. Success with qualifications (you appropriately journal over most of your novel, you analyze an appeal to virtue and support it or connect to author’s argument, you provide the necessary information for an MLA citation in improper format)
4. Success (you journal the entire novel, making connections and providing support for insights; you analyze an appeal to virtue, support it with textual evidence and connect it to the author’s argument; you provide a beautiful Works Cited page)
5. Mastery: you do number four regularly.

Where does this leave you? With a grade book that tells you in no uncertain terms what you need to do to master the skills of a course.

Some nuts and bolts, caveats, common questions:

This means that your grade (that percentage thing you keep your eye on) is going to be low in the beginning. Terrifyingly low. I’d prefer that you ignore it, but if that is impossible I’d like to suggest a paradigm shift:

Your grade percentage is a progress bar, not a value statement.

This means that if you find yourself at 65% come midterm—50% through the class—you’re ahead of the game.

This also means that focusing on those few things you are good at (and ignoring those things you aren’t) is a good way to finish the class with a 65%. Keep an eye on your progress, note any skills you seem to have trouble with, and come see me with questions.

If you feel that you have mastered a skill and your grade doesn’t reflect it, prove it in your next assignment or see me one-on-one. If you’re right, I’ll change your grade. If you aren’t, I’ll give you some feedback and ways you can practice.

“Does this mean that I can avoid all assignments until the last minute? If the individual paper or project isn’t important, and I can demonstrate mastery, then why should I do all these assignments?”

You are certainly free to try. (Not without some emails home and a few conferences, though.) The problem with this plan is not only is it a waste of your time, but the chances of you knocking out all the skills with mastery by the end are somewhere near zero. In addition, you are required to turn in at least the midterm and final. I can’t justify passing you based on one data set. If this is your goal, try something else: prove it to me now. If you can demonstrate mastery before the end of the session of everything I’m going to teach you, I’ll move you to Senior English. If you’re already in Senor English, we’ll work out a really cool independent study.

“What if I start to do poorly on a skill that I was previously good at?”

This is rare, but it does happen. Simply: your grade goes down. I’ll usually talk with you, give you a chance to explain, but the scores in the gradebook reflect your current level of mastery. If you suddenly become less masterful the gradebook will reflect it.

“Can I do extra credit?”

My boards are clean enough, thank you. You can come to me with an idea for a paper or project that would allow you to demonstrate mastery of a skill. Go nuts.

“Is there a penalty for lateness?”

Not exactly. I will not penalize you for turning in a paper or assignment late (except the midterm and final; those dates are set in stone), but I reserve the right to refuse a stack of makeup work at the end of the session. We’re going for quality here, not quantity.

We wrapped up our discussion of the soul and radio broadcast today. Unfortunately, we ran out of time just before I blew your minds with insight into this thing we call “the sublime.” More tomorrow.

If you haven’t started reading Frankenstein yet, go ahead. As I said in class: we won’t have a reading schedule for this novel, but I’d like to be finished reading/discussing by September 6th ((the day after Labor Day weekend)). Read and journal for an hour or so tonight, then see how far you’ve made it. Adjust your reading schedule accordingly.

We’ll begin with #4 in your syllabus on Thursday of this week. As you journal, note any interesting sentences or passages you’d like to discuss with the class. Type up the section, send it to me in an email, and come to class ((We’ll sign up for this tomorrow.)) on your scheduled day prepared to discuss the quotation’s importance to the novel, connection to something we’ve been discussing, or general awesomeness ((Run this “awesomeness” by me before you present.)). We’ll come away from the discussions with some interesting quotations, a clearer connection between the book and other topics/works, and a better sense of presentation style. All good things.

We began listening to an episode of the radio program To the Best of Our Knowledge on Friday. Entitled “Does the Soul Still Matter?,” it brings together scientists, philosophers, believers, poets, and skeptics to offer their opinions on the subject. You can listen here. ((We left off before Parker Palmer’s story (around the 23:00 mark), but you are free to keep going.)) Be sure to take notes, as we’ll continue our discussion Monday.

A few questions that came up as we listened:

• What happens after death?
• What does it mean to be human?
• Is moral freedom the essential test of a human being?
• Is there more to the mind than what is in the brain?
• How do I think about the soul?

It would be a good idea to revisit the notes you took during our listen and attempt to answer the questions you asked. If the answer takes some research, major bonus life points if you bring a copy and share with the class on Monday.

You can find the rest of the series here. If something catches your attention, you may use it for #1 in The Cycle ((check your syllabus))–just let me know before you begin synopsizing.

In case you’re looking/planning ahead, your final project during our study of the Romantic movement will be a researched paper addressing this question:

Why is Frankenstein considered a Romantic novel?

We will delve much deeper into the movement as we begin the novel, but rest assured: our soul/mind, religion/science discussion will be very relevant to your writing.