Exploring the Self

Syllabus and Manual

Morning Module 2

2005-2006

 

Syllabus

 

Introduction

Who are you?! What kind of person? What are your strengths and weaknesses? What makes you you?! The objective of the Exploring the Self class is to give you the opportunity to really take a close look at yourself - to find out what you are good at, what you are bad at, what you like, what you dislike, how you are similar to other people, and how you are different. We will look at where you come from, where you are, and where you are going.

 

Essential Questions

 

What kind of person am I?

How do other people perceive me?

 

Focus Skills

 

Working Independently

Thinking and acting ethically

 

Activities

Not surprisingly, much of the activity in this class will be self-focused and self-directed. There will be very little lecturing in this class, but a good deal of quiet, self-reflective time. Students will have a menu of activities and projects to choose from, and all students will work on their projects and labs at his or her own pace (as long as they finish the required number by the end). All students may do some of the projects and activities, while other projects or activities may only be done by one or two who are interested.

 

In addition to lab and project work, we will meet regularly on Wednesday's for our seminar discussions, which will address particular issues and/or readings. We will have some discussions on ethics, which will include a reading of the book "Everyday Ethics". We may also have group activities built around how we would handle certain situations, and how individual factors come to play in our lives.

 

Entrance Project

Every student will complete an entrance project in order to get into this class. If you do not complete the assignment, you will either have to switch classes, or a meeting will be held with you and your parents, to look into why you were unable to complete this initial assignment successfully. The entrance project for this class is simple, and in two parts: 1) you must complete the Basic Data Sheet provided with this manual and 2) you must sign and have your parents sign the Classroom Procedures Sign-off form and return it. All these things must be completed by the second day of class in order for you to continue your work.

 

 

 

Menu

The following is a basic list or menu of the labs and projects that are given for this class. The difference between activities, which I am calling "Personal Labs" and projects for me is that "project" implies that some work will have to be done outside of school in order to fully complete the assignment. "Personal Labs" are items that can be completed totally within your time at school, assuming you have all the materials necessary at hand. Included is a list of the Personal Labs, which you will find spelled out in greater detail in your "Exploring the Self" workbook, and a list of the project assignments. In order to complete any one "sublab", you must do all the tasks under that heading. Each sublab stands alone and is not required to be completed with any other sublab. You must complete 30 sublabs in order to complete your journal requirement. I will take 5 percentage points off your final grade for each sublab less than 30 that you have. I will not accept a journal that has less than 25 sublabs completed, and you will fail the course.

 

 

Personal Lab #1: Family and Heritage

            Sublab A: Family Tree

            Sublab B: Racial/National Heritage

            Sublab C: Parents and Siblings

 

Personal Lab #2: Physical Characteristics

            Sublab A: Strength

            Sublab B: Endurance

            Sublab C: Measurements

            Sublab D: Coordination, Flexibility, Speed

            Sublab E: Appearance

            Sublab F: Gender

 

Personal Lab #3: Intellectual Characteristics

            Sublab A: Logical Abilities

            Sublab B: Emotional IQ

            Sublab C: Memory (Short-Term, Long-Term)

            Sublab D: Social Intelligence

 

Personal Lab #4: Emotional Characteristics

            Sublab A : Fears

            Sublab B: Responses

            Sublab C: Relationships

            Sublab D: Joys

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Personal Lab #5: Typing

            Sublab A: Meyers/Briggs

            Sublab B: Archetypes

            Sublab C: Astrology

            Sublab D: Gods/Goddesses in Everyman/Everywoman

            Sublab E: Enneagram

 

Personal Lab #6: Multiple Intelligences

            Sublab A: Linguistic

            Sublab B: Spatial

            Sublab C: Musical

            Sublab D: Kinesthetic

            Sublab E: Logical / Mathematical

            Sublab F: Intrapersonal

            Sublab G: Natualist and Existentialist

 

Personal Lab #7: Ethics and Moral Characteristics

            Sublab A: Personal Code

            Sublab B: Issues

            Sublab C: Moral History

            Sublab D: Politics

 

Personal Lab #8: Personal Style

            Sublab A: Favorite Things

            Sublab B: Your Room

            Sublab C: Style in Clothing

            Sublab D: Musical Style

 

Personal Lab #9: Goals

            Sublab A: Immediate Goals

            Sublab B: Professional Goals

            Sublab C: Eductional Goals

            Sublab D: Personal Goals

            Sublab E: Future History

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Projects

 

As mentioned above, projects are activities that you will need to spend some time at home working on. Each student is required to complete four projects during the course.  Note that there are some options for double credit project. A listing of the project possibilities follows. If you have suggestions for alternative project possibilities, please speak with me about them.

 

 Project #1: The Berkeley Personality Profile                                                            

            The book "Who Do You Think You Are" is a book about self-examination and the differences between our own self-perceptions and other people's perceptions of us. It includes a "Personality Profile" which involves some extensive surveying of friends and family. You must read the book in its entirety, complete the Personality Profile, and prepare a visual summary of your results.

 

Project #2:  Self Portrait                                                                                                  

            Create a self-portrait. Your self-portrait may be an extremely accurate reproduction of your likeness, or it may be a very abstract or symbolic depiction of you. What I do expect is that it represents you in a deep and meaningful way, and that you be able to explain and articulate that meaning to others and to me. You may use any medium necessary, and in fact this project may be combined with the dramatic/performance poetry/speech project to form one double sized personal presentation project. Please include a written explanation of why you chose to do your portrait as you did, what it means to you, and what it says about you.

 

Project #3: This is My Life                                                                            

            Pull out those boxes of photos, those old drawings from preschool and anything at all that says, "This is who I was then," and create a visual tour of your life.  Be sure to include people and places that were/are important to you. There must be enough written description to accurately describe what each photo, drawing, etc. represents at each point along the tour.  Just an old photo album is NOT what I am looking for – the purpose of the project is to organize and connect the events of your life.

 

Project #3:  Autobiography

Write an autobiography. You should include both factual details and events from your life as well as your thoughts, emotions, and attitudes at different points. The autobiography project will most likely be a long one, so talk to me about ways you can divide and conquer this project. I have a book that will help you break down your tasks to complete the autobiography project. You can see the autobiography as a more detailed and involved version of the "This is My Life" visual tour. An autobiography, done properly, will count double - i.e. it will count as two completed projects.

 

Project #4 Coat of Arms                                                                                                 

            Create your very own coat of arms. Your coat of arms must include a shield, animal supporters, a crown, a border, a motto, and all the features of a coat of arms. See reference materials provided. You may use elements of a family coat of arms, etc., but the real idea is for you to use the coat of arms as a means of showing what kind of person you are, what you believe in, what is important to you. You should look into the symbolism of coats of arms and their different aspects and attempt to have your symbolism match up.

 

Project #5:  Dramatic/Performance Poetry/Speech                                                

            Give a dynamic presentation or "show" about YOU! Sure it sounds a little self-centered, but, hey, what about this course isn't? Show through dance, action, poetry, movement, and so forth what kind of person you are - your attitudes, your abilities, and your desires and wants. Speak with me before you begin this project to discuss your ideas. You may also want to discuss the project with one of the music/drama/writing teachers. It is possible to earn double credit for this project (i.e. it will count as two completed projects) if the scale of your performance becomes fairly large.

 

Project #6: Genealogy Project                                                                                               

            Research your family history. This project goes beyond the personal lab activity of writing out your family tree for the last few generations - this projects asks you to delve into your roots in a significant way. You may have to make trips to the US. Archives, the Virginia Room of the Fairfax library, and other locations, so if you take on this project, expect to have to do some traveling. Trace your family tree back as far as you can. If you run into dead ends, then pick another branch of the family and pursue it back. I am interested not only in the names and relationships of your ancestors, but some information about them - what kind of people where they, what did they do, where did they live, what was the culture that surrounded them. There is software available that helps you to set up a family tree that you may want to look into or use. I am not, however, just looking for a printout of your relations back 10,000 years – the purpose of the project is to discover things about the people in your family, to learn where your family came from and what it has accomplished. I would rather see fewer generations with more detail than many generations with no information.

 

Project #7: Theme Song                                                                                                  

            Write your own personal theme song. Explain why you think the music is appropriate for you, and what the lyrics (if there are lyrics) say about you and the way you think and feel. You will play your theme song to the class, and then discuss its meaning to you and how it expresses your nature. You will need to turn in a written account of the meaning of the song, how it was written, and why you feel it is expressive of your nature and personality.

 

 

 

 

 

Project #8: "My Ultimate Mixed Tape"                                                                         

The ultimate mixed tape project asks you to create a mixed tape of various songs, songs that speak to you and which hold meaning for you. Include with your tape a catalog of the songs, a selection of lyrics, and pictures of the artists. Write an introduction to your mixed tape, explaining the reasoning behind the selections, why they are in the order that they are in on the tape, and whether there are any overarching themes. Finally, give a brief review of each song that describes your feelings about it, what it says about you, and how it may have affected your life.  Please do NOT include endless printouts of lyric sheets or album liners.

 

Project #8 "The Care and Feeding of Me"                                                                        

            The "Care and Feeding of Me" project allows you to provide your fellow man with a guidebook to your nature. The map should be an abstract presentation of the qualities and features of YOU - a sort of instruction booklet, with diagrams and how-to charts, and perhaps a "troubleshooting" section. The guidebook should be descriptive of you and present your nature through text, photos, charts, visuals, etc. Clearly the assignment, and the book, can be somewhat tongue-in-cheek, but it should also contain valuable and real information about you.

 

Project #8 Inside/Outside Box                                                                                                   Boxes, like people, have an outside that is readily visible and inside that is hidden from view when the box is closed.  In this project, you will use a box of your own choosing as a symbol of yourself.  You will decorate the outside of the box with paint, photographs, pictures, and found or personal objects to reflect the way you project yourself to others.  You will then decorate or arrange objects inside the box to represent the aspects of yourself that you hide from others. To accompany your box, write a key that explains the purpose and meaning of the various items and photographs, and their importance to you.

 

Working Independently

One of the focus skills for this class is working independently. I feel that the course material in this class offers a golden opportunity for students to develop skills of planning out an independent study and practicing working in a semi-independent way, but in a more supervised and structured atmosphere than a totally independent study. A portion of the time we will spend in class will be spent learning ways to plan out your time for an independent study, and you will be graded in part on how well you do on the planning aspects of the class. In particular, you will keep a calendar/log showing when you plan to complete assignments, and when you actually complete assignments. We will develop your course goals and plan, with deadlines, during the first few days of class. After this, you will carefully log in the work that you have completed, so that you can compare this to what your original plan was. A portion of your final grade will be based on this calendar and log - how well they are created and kept up, and what they say about your ability to pace your work.

 

Thinking and Acting Ethically

The other focus skill in this course is thinking and acting ethically. One way that you will practice thinking and acting ethically is by completing at least two of your sublabs from the Ethics and Moral Characteristics sublab. In addition, we will spend each Wednesday focused on some aspect of ethics and ethical thinking. Most of these activities will be Socratic seminar discussions, around readings in ethics. A major assignment will be readings from the book "Everyday Ethics", but we will also have readings from Aristotle, Nietzsche, and others. In addition to seminars we will have some activities and a movie.

 

Self Evaluation

You will do a good deal of self-evaluation in this course. There are prepared grading rubrics that allow you to objectively look at your work and evaluate it on various criteria. We will discuss this more in class. Not all evaluation will be self-evaluation.

 

Exhibition

The essential questions for this class include "What kind of person am I?" and "How do other people perceive me?"   I have enclosed with this booklet a copy of an exhibition assignment that has been used previously. We will look over this assignment in class and discuss whether to use it as presented or whether to alter it in some ways.

 

Grading

You will be keeping track as you go through this course of the sublabs and projects you have completed. Your goal is to complete 30 sublabs and 4 projects during this course. Your grade will be based on the quality of work you produce on these assignments. In addition, each student will receive a discussion and participation grade based upon their work in discussions, their level of activity during the class, and participation in activities and events.

 

 

 

A percentage breakdown for the class is as follows:

Quality of Sublabs                                    35%

Quality of Projects                                    25%

Exhibition                                             20%

Discussion and Participation                 20%

                                                            100% total

Multiple Intelligences Breakdown

(your breakdown may vary depending on which sublabs and projects you choose)

 

Linguistic                                              20%

Mathematical/Logical                           05%

Spatial                                                  10%

Kinesthetic                                           10%

Musical                                                05%

Intrapersonal                                        40%

Interpersonal                                        10%                

 

Class Procedures/Guidelines

1) Exploring the Self is a workshop style class. This means that students are given a great deal of freedom of choice in assignments and in how they spend their time at any given moment. With this freedom comes the responsibility of being in attendance and being on time – a higher level of responsibility than in a regular class. The following participation requirements reflect this higher expectatioin.

 

2. Each lateness counts as 1% off your final grade for the class. Thus, more than 10 latenesses makes it impossible to earn an A, even with perfect work. 

 

2) More than 8 nonsequential absences will result in an automatic withdrawal from the class, unless I find extenuating circumstances in your case. In other words, if you are out for an extended illness, that is fine, but otherwise, you must be in class. Even for extended illness, the school's absence policy still holds.        

                                                                                   

3) There is no eating in my classroom during class. Do not put your feet on the tables. No leaving the classroom for any reason except bathroom breaks or if you are on a specific mission for me. This means no going to get food or drink from the machine, no going to your locker or your car to get work, and no running to make phone calls.

 

4) Because of the personal nature of this class, respect for your classmates is of crucial importance. Any student who makes remarks or other actions that I feel to be inappropriate, insulting to another student or to me, or destructive to the feeling of safety in the classroom will be warned, and may be removed from the class for the day. Habitual or flagrant offenders will be dropped from the class.

 

5) Finally, the nature of this course requires a good deal of individual focus and attention. Your time in class is to a great extent open to you to spend as you feel is most valuable. I will do very little lecturing, and my main role will be as tutor, advisor, and monitor. My chief concerns are that my room be a safe, quiet, and active working environment. If I see any activity or behavior (or lack thereof), which I feel to adversely affect this working environment, I will take whatever steps are necessary to fix the problem. If problems develop on a class-wide basis, I will alter the nature of the course, removing elements of independence that may be causing problems.

Exhibition Assignment

 

The exhibition for this class is to create a presentation that answers the essential questions "What kind of person am I?" and "How do other people perceive me?" and demonstrates that answer through incorporation of various assignments from the course.

 

Each exhibition should include the following elements:

·        Things you like - this can take a couple of forms, from a poster showing your likes and dislikes, to an examination in detail of something that is very important to you. Either way, it should explain why you like what you like, and what it says about you.

·        One of the personality style tests that you have taken during this course. This could include the Meyers-Briggs Personality Typing Test, the Berkley Personality Profile, or some other test from this course. You should present the results of the test, and in the process explain what the test measures, how it works, and what the results mean. Address how accurate you feel your test results were, and what they reveal about you. The main purpose for introducing this information is for you to have an outside, 'objective' perspective on yourself to present – so tie in the personal style test with answering your essential question about how others perceive you.

·        A statement about your own ethical positions, or your responses to our discussions of Everyday Ethics and/or the other class activities. You should gather this information into both the visual and material sections of your exhibition. Would other people be surprised by your ethical beliefs? Or are you very vocal about how you feel on the various ethical issues.

·        Free Choice - pick one other element to include. This could be based around one of the sublabs that you found particularly meaningful or revealing of you, or it could be one of your projects. Many of the project assignments have the opportunity to create large items that would work very well for visual display - family trees, self-portraits, map of yourself, etc.

 

Just like any other exhibition you do at The New School, you MUST answer the essential question.

 

By special request I can make your exhibition for this course "by invitation only". You an do this if you feel there are personal things you need to present that you do not want just anyone being able to view. I would request first that you attempt to make an exhibition presentation that is viewable by anyone and everyone. If you feel you simply cannot do so and still produce the best exhibition you can, then we will discuss making it invitation only.