Functional Pottery was one of the classes I was hired to teach in 2006. When I started that fall, fresh out of graduate school, I taught
Though I was primarily a ceramic sculptor in undergrad and graduate school, I had been teaching myself to throw better during the last year or so of graduate school when it became clear that so many of the teaching jobs expected the applicant to teach functional pottery.
In fact, my application to teach at YVC required a throwing demonstration. I believe it specifically asked me to send in a video of a begining throwing lesson. So my brother borrowed a camera and came to my tiny sub basement studio in the education building to film my throwing demo. Neither of us know a ton about video editing, so it was a one-take kind of situation. While I was demoing, I made a mistake and ripped the rim or something. I thought "well, there goes that application." But I kept talking while my brother continued filming.
On video, I said something to the effect of "well, sometimes that happens and when it does, here's what you can do to fix it" and then demonstrated how to cut off the rim of the bowl I was throwing. Nowadays I build in mistakes into my throwing demos so that I can show students some typical beginner throwing errors and how to fix them, but back then it wasn't a strategy.
The coda to that story is that years later, when I had been teaching at YVC for years, I ended up having lunch with Dr. Kaminski, the YVC president, and she said to me that she remembered my throwing video because it made her feel like she could throw.
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| Teapot by Andrew Martinkus |
My Classes at YVC
Over the years, besides the three I was hired to teach, I've added other classes, most of which I designed or redesigned before teaching. These including
intermediate clay and design classes,
advanced pottery classes, clay
hand-building, a team-taught Design/Photoshop class called
Design One Byte at a Time, and an experimental class called
Mural in a Quarter. After I'd been at YVC several years, I remember my colleague, Bob Fisher, asking if he could take back the Design class, which he had taught before I came to YVC.
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| Three cups by Andrew Martinkus |
Bob left YVC at the end of the Fall quarter in which I took
my sabbatical. When I returned to campus, Bob had left, our adjunct Art Appreciation faculty had taken medical leave, and a miscommunication had prevented YVC from advertising for part time faculty to teach art classes. All of this conspired to mean that immediately after my sabbatical
I taught three sections of Art Appreciation as well as my Functional Pottery class. I don't remember the clay class that quarter, but I remember finding it disorienting to teach three sections of the same lecture class in one quarter--I kept feeling like I was repeating myself (because I was).
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| Student work Fall 2022 |
I also remember bargaining with my dean that I'd teach duplicate classes (because of a scheduling error or faculty shortage) in one quarter, if the next quarter she let me teach Clay1: hand-building as a stand alone class the next quarter. Of course I did and she did, and I've taught hand-building once a year or more ever since.
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| Student work Fall 2022 |
By Fall 2015, I was teaching
Intro to Clay (throwing and hand-building together in once class) as a stand alone class. Sometime before that, maybe Winter of 2012, I taught my first stand-alone hand-building class (
I was talking about making musical instruments in that class in fall 2011--and, oof, reading my very old blog posts is strange, they feel and look very different from how I write now).
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| Student work Fall 2022 |
Through my 16+ years at YVC, my teaching load has shifted from 1/3 clay to 2/3 clay most quarters. At some point around 2014 I also stopped teaching Art Appreciation so that I could teach the
Western Art History series. I taught
Ancient & Medieval Art history online this fall and last fall, but during the pandemic I went back to teaching Design (online) and Hand-building (online) most quarters.
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| Carmen Nelson, blue and white vases |
While I was on
medical leave last year, my colleague taught the Renaissance and Modern Art History classes. This quarter, because we again had not enough studio faculty, especially in Grandview, I am teaching online design and he is taking the Renaissance Art History class.
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| Carmen Nelson, red and purple |
Functional Pottery is Consistent
Though my other classes have switched around quite a bit over the years, I think I have taught a functional pottery class every quarter that I've been on campus. If I'm counting correctly, I've taught functional pottery 42 or 43 times at YVC.
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| Carmen Nelson, flames ashtray |
I was telling students this quarter that when I look at their work during critique, I am comparing their work against a massive catalog of beginner work from more than 16 years of beginner classes. I brought this up this quarter, in particular, because the work was consistently of high calibur across all students. Even the students who struggled the most this quarter, compared favorably against students who struggled the most in previous quarters.
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| Carmen Nelson purple and white teaset |
Magical and Non-Magical Classes
There is some magical alchemy that happens some quarters that causes the dynamic in the studio to produce high quality work. I've observed it over the years and those quarters are so energizing as a teacher. I think the basic ingredients are a full or nearly full class, a couple or three students who were going to work hard anyway, and then somehow the mood and the atmosphere in the studio has shifted just right so that everyone works harder, tries more challenging projects, or simply shows up. It helps to have an intermediate or advanced student or two in the studio to help get the magic started.
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Carmen Nelson, teapot and flames
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Other quarters, those same students, mixed in with a different group of classmates, or in a class that's simply too small, the magic doesn't happen. Often when the magic isn't happening, the visible results are that students are missing class, they don't come into the studio outside of class time, they might miss a critique, and one or two students doing this infects the rest of the group in the opposite way, encouraging more and more people to take on easy projects, miss class, etc.
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Carmen Nelson teapot (detail)
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The basic magic/no magic I've observed quarter after quarter after quarter. Obviously I try to control for making a studio atmosphere magic, but I can't always control it. Low class enrollment seems to be an almost insurmountable hurdle. The only think I can do about it is
advertise the classes and help with advising.
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Searra Rodriguez handleless vase
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Last fall was an exellent example of a whole list of "don'ts" for building a magical studio atmosphere. We had low enrollment to start. I was forced to limit studio access because of the lack of student workers and because of the pandemic restrictions. I, personally, got
fairly distracted partway through the quarter and had to cancel class or close the studio more often than I wanted to. Some students got sick and had to miss more than a little class. And when we were in-class, we were
trying to social distance.
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Searra Rodriguez Cindy's Shino vase
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The wild thing, and something I want to be clear about, is that students in these classes aren't worse than students in the magical classes. I fundamentally believe that if you pulled any one student out of the non-magic class and put them in a magic quarter, their work would improve--regardless of whether they started as the best, the worst, or somewhere in the middle of the other class. And I think it works the other way too.
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Searra Rodriguez horse hair raku vase
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One fascinating thing for me this quarter, is that while the in-class and in-studio work was consistently high quality, the online work was really hit-or-miss. I've
flipped my throwing classes for quite a while now. Students can watch video demos instead of in-class demos, though I also offer in-class demos as alternatives or in addition to the videos. More recently, I've shifted lectures in the Functional Pottery class from in-person events to
online interactive lessons that students can do on their own time (including evenings and weekends when they can't access the studio).
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Searra Rodriguez pitcher
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This quarter, while some students regularly did all the interactive lessons and assignments, others regularly did not do them. Or didn't do them until weeks later. I was annoyed by this, but couldn't figure out why it was happening when it hadn't happened before. It wasn't until well into the quarter that I realized what had happened.
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Searra Rodriguez pitcher
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In previous quarters, if students didn't do the pre-test (which was due before class/at the start of class on the second or third day), I would sit them down in the studio and make them complete it before they could throw or participate in the rest of class. I did this especially for the online studio safety lesson (that replaced a long and repetitive talk about safety on day 1 and 2). But with not teaching the class during the pandemic and then after another break for my cancer stuff, I had forgotten about this teaching tool.
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Searra Rodriguez mug
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Over the years, I've developed teaching patterns and strategies and lots of them are written down, but this year, in particular, I learned how many things that "I always did" weren't written down and thus got forgotten or missed this quarter. Obviously I am making plans to bring back the big ones next quarter.
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Liliana Morales vase
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Functional Pottery Projects
I've kept the functional pottery class projects almost exactly the same year after year. They start with bowls (I once tried experimenting with having them start with cylinders, but I didn't like it and switched back), then cylinders. They have to make 2 at least 8" tall. Then for their third project, they can choose handles, lids, spouts, or all three in the form of teapots, mugs, canisters, or pitchers (or some combination of those elements).
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Liliana Morales gold set
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Unlike in other classes where I switch projects around, decide I don't really like the parameteres, adjust the order, etc. In the Functional Pottery class, I think the projects just make sense this way. They get lots of centering and trimming practice to begin the class. They get pushed to increase their size in the middle, then for the last project, they have some choices and more room for creative solutions.
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| Liliana Morales gold twisted teaset |
I have, as I mentioned above, switched much of the stuff that surrounds the projects. Demonstrations used to be entirely in-class, then I created some supplemental videos, then I replaced all of those and recorded a a massive quantity of videos, then I decided to offer students a choice to flip the class and watch all demos online and none in person.
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| Liliana Morales blue vases |
Now I've settled into something I think I like, for now at least, which is the choice to flip the demos, with a few demos required in class and a few "extra credit" demos offered only online, but most students choosing, day by day, whether to flip or not. Students don't need to choose ahead of time; they can simply watch the videos one day and watch the in-class demos another. Or they can always watch both.
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Kevin Arellanes, lidded set
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What to do when they haven't watched
Sometimes in clas, I notice that students haven't understood the demos (or possibly haven't watched them). My solution is usually to single out a few students and say "this in-person demo is for you". I'm always a little worried about doing this in a way that embarasses students, but frequently when I do this I am noticing a particular thing they are doing that is just a bit off. An example would be a student who keeps leaning too far forward while centering. Though I've touched on this in the standard flipped and in-class video demos, it's a little hard to notice this as your own problem until it is pointed out. For a short in-person demo after I notice this problem, I would target certain students and would exaggerate the problem on my own wheel so they can see it at theirs.
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Kevin Arellanes, lidded set
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The one probel I really feel I haven't solved, however, is what to do with a student who says they've watched the videos, but it doesn't look like they have. Especially when this student has missed class or is asking for early-quarter things late in the quarter (often they also ask this late in the day). Obviously when there's time, I will redo intro demos quite a few times, but there gets to be a point where we've got so much else going on in the classroom (kilns, glazing, other demos) that it is difficult for me to stop or interrupt that to demo things they've had multiple opportunities to watch already.
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| mugs by Jazlyn Alexander. Jaz was in intermediate wheel, which met at the same time as functional pottery but had different and more challenging assignments |
In this case, it is difficult to simply send the student to the video demo (which I do early in the quarter if they miss class and want a demo I don't have time to do in class or between classes). By late in the quarter, if the student hasn't watched the video demos (or if the video demos haven't helped), sending them to watch them is unlikely to be effective.
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| Jazlyn Alexander, white bowl with drips |
Class Time
Functional Pottery (and Intermediate Wheel) classes meet twice a week for about 3 hours. This time includes mostly live-demonstrations on the wheel and student work time. Of course, it also includes instruction and practice for loading and unloading kilns, glazing, surface decoration, studio processes, ergonomics of functional forms, critiques, and more.
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| Jazlyn Alexander, tall blue vase |
I think the most valuable regular use of my time during class, though it often isn't something strictly scheduled, is watching students throw and checking in with them about that throwing. They can watch me throw in-person or via video, but if they don't get feedback on what they are doing, it is hard to take in every single nuance of the process and apply it to themselves.
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| Jazlyn Alexander, tall vase with handles |
When I watch them throw, I can point out adjustments to wheel speed, position of their hands, speed and pressure of their movements, amount of throwing slip, tool use and positioning, and issues specifically related to clay body, centering, drilling, pulling, and finishing. In a shared classroom, I might intereact with students entirely one-on-one for some adjustments, but I might also notice that a group of students are all having a similar issue.
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| Jazlyn Alexander, tall splatter vase |
Also in a shared studio, students can overhear my instructions to a classmate and that may not impact them immediately, but it might be something that they adjust on their own later. One thing I worry about, just a tiny bit, is how well this pratice will age with me. I usually squat down in front of the students' wheels to watch them throw. And I regularly walk through the wheels (we have two rows of four wheels facing each other on two sides of the classroom, so I can see 8 students throwing as I walk up one aisle).
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Jazlyn Alexander, mugs
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However, this quarter I noticed that I was getting more tired from squatting down between wheels than I remember. This year of treatment has been a doozie and I know that the side effects of both radiation and the current hormone therapy include fatigue and joint pain. I'm hoping that, as I get back to more regular exercise, I will gain more stamina, but this was the first quarter I really wondered about how my studio teaching practices will need to adjust as I age (the good news being that last fall, I was just hoping aging was something I'd get a chance to do).
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| Jazlyn Alexander, lidded jar |
Shared Studio
The other great thing about a shared studio, especially one with intermediate, advanced, or independent study students, is that they can teach each other. If I tell one student about a particular technique on Tuesday, they might share it with a classmate on Wednesday (between classes, when I'm not around). Intermediate students have already learned the basics, so they can help beginners, especially early in the quarter, but also late in the quarter when the beginners want to try more challening forms and, in a magic studio, might start looking across the wheel aisle to see what that other student is up to.
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| Jazlyn Alexander, mushroom tea set |
The fact that I have lots of video demos online helps with this, because students can look ahead. I also encourage them to watch other throwers in person (in the studio) or online. I always try to tell students why I suggest a particular technique or tool, because I want them to understand why another potter might do it differently than I do. When both approaches accomplish the same goal, the student can choose my way or the other.
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Jazlyn Alexander, mugs
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Of course, I also try to give students the tools to know when they shouldn't try another potter's approach. There are some potters online, especially on Instagram, who throw very fast. The speed with which they move the clay can be a factor of their skill and experience, but it can also be because the clay body they are using can handle that speed (while our frequently recycled class clay cannot). And, of course, there's always the possibility that a video is sped up artificially.
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| Jazlyn Alexander, plates |
It can be frustrating to watch an expert throw in a way that seems impossible for a beginner. Sometimes the answer is more practice, but sometimes this answer is that even that potter didnt' really throw that fast.
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Jazlyn Alexander, raku bowl
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Right now all my studio classes (Functional Pottery, online Design, and Handbuilding 1 & 2 together) are full. I hope that, and the large group of intermediate students in Handbuilding 2, means that my classes next quarter will be as magical as this past quarter. I also hope and plan to bring back some of the forgotten practices around what to do when students don't do the required online prep.
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Jazlyn Alexander, raku dishes
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