Top card

The boxed part at the head of a lesson: the whole practice, and the sign that it worked, in ninety seconds.

A busy reader gives a page ninety seconds, and the top card is what those seconds are for. It holds what you will be able to do in the next ten minutes, the practice in at most four steps you can follow from there alone, the same practice done with a notebook, and one observable thing you can see, hold or say when it worked.

It is load-bearing because it is the page's honest offer. Everything below it is for the reader who wants the whole of it; the top card is the promise that the reader who wants only the thing can have the thing. It also makes a lesson testable: try the top card alone, and the place where you or your agent stalls is exactly the line that needs mending. That is how a correction gets found without a committee.

A Player+ uses a top card twice. The first time to do the practice, in the ten minutes it asks for, and to check the sign rather than the feeling. The second time as a reminder later, when the lesson has been read once and only the practice is wanted.

The notebook line is part of the card and not an afterthought. A practice whose top card cannot say how to do it with paper has usually smuggled a requirement in, and writing that line is where the smuggling gets caught.

The sign matters more than it looks. "You will know it worked when you hold a filled card that says when it ends" can be checked by anyone; "you will understand venue cards better" cannot. A lesson without a visible sign leaves its reader unable to tell learning from the pleasant sense of having read.

Also called: top cards Stands on: Lesson · The Deck Standard · Notebook form Opens onto: Module · Player+ Modules · Just in time · Second reader In play: door Sources: Player+ Modules, How a Module Lives, The Deck Standard, and the head of every lesson in the deck. Open: none found.