Unusual Summer: More Travel and Online Prep

The family trip to Stonehenge...we don't have a lot of selfie practice.

Most summers I devote the majority of my time to studio work. This summer was unusual. I spent about a day in the studio. I glazed some mugs, but never fired them. I don't think I touched wet clay once.

The sum total of my home studio work this summer.

It wasn't a surprise that I didn't get studio time. I knew, going into the summer, that my time would be spent in a different direction. In spring I took on the the role of AFT union president and the volunteer position brings with it a number of activities that continue over the summer. This coming year is contract negotiations, so I anticipate that my academic year will include a disproportionate amount of on-campus work that is not related to my classes.

Shiver Ball (in orange) suggested he could be president of the cat union. His sister disagrees.

In an effort to save myself time during the year, I promised myself that I would do much of the preparation work for my online classes during the summer. I teach an online art history series of three classes, one each quarter. Last year I made significant changes to the structure of the classes and added lots of "training quests" or interactive lessons designed to give students practice using class terms and content.

Planning calendars for all three online classes.

Adding these interactive lessons, mostly created in SoftChalk, took an absolutely astonishing amount of time, as did adjusting the structure of the classes. In fact, I only managed to make the changes and additions in about half of my fall class, at which point it reverted to the previous year's organization. In winter I taught the same class again (instead of moving on to the next in the series) so that I could finish the revisions. 

Checklist of writing assignments and prep for all three online classes (green and orange still need to be done for fall). 

By the end of spring, I had created about half the interactive lessons I wanted and I had completed structural edits on 1.5 out of 3 classes. I spent the rest of my summer days at home finishing the structural changes and adding SoftChalk lessons. 

We visited both King's Cross Station and the Warner Bros Studio Tour (and loved them!)

Of course I didn't spend my entire summer editing online courses. Breaks are important and I would have had a really difficult time getting geared up for teaching if I had worked all summer. I traveled with my family more this summer than any previous summer since my husband and I have been married. 

Though it may not look like it, this family is actively trolling our fellow hikers.

My daughter and I went to New Hampshire to visit my brother and sister-in-law and nephew. We got to hang out with the kiddo and play lots of games and watch fireworks and have ice cream in Maine. But we just missed meeting my new nephew by about a month. 

We got to see the Tardis! (near Earl's Court station)

At the end of July all three of us traveled to London. It was my husband' and daughter's first trip overseas. I had been to London nearly 20 years ago for a college class. This trip was very different; in 2000 I was there in January. This time it got up to 101 degrees Fahrenheit (and London doesn't do A/C apparently).

It was hot and that made me sad.

After we got back from London, we took a very quick trip to Camano Island to see my other sister-in-law and her family as well as her in-laws (and our daughter's pseudo-cousins). We did some speed hiking and stinky beach combing and the kids and my husband went to a country fair while I snuck in a trip to the Seattle Art Fair.

The cousins and pseudo-cousin on a break during an incredibly fast (and noisy) hike on Camano Island

You'd think we'd take it easy after all this excitement, but the next week I drove over to the Evergreen State University for a  3-day union training conference while my husband took our daughter to a concert at the Gorge. The training was useful, but bizarrely cold in the dorms. I wasn't ready for the switch from the heat in London and Yakima to the cold weather in Olympia.

The Evergreen State University was pretty, but here's a picture of my bag instead.

After the training, we had a little over a week until middle school orientation, so we hopped in the car and started driving south. We wanted to see the redwoods in California since none of us have ever been to northern California. We drove along the coast, played on the windy beaches, saw some amazing recycled ocean debris art, and took an accidental 9 mile hike in the redwoods. And then, since we were reasonably close to San Francisco, we decided to go there, too. We spent a day in the city, saw the Golden Gate bridge, some sea lions, and some hills. We tried (and failed) to find some parrots.

It was incredibly windy in the Presidio overlooking the bridge.

It was a very different type of trip compared to our London trip. For London we planned far ahead, pre-purchased tickets with specific dates and times, and had lots of guided tours. For our California trip, we had a rough idea of when we could travel. So once we felt ready, we simply got in the car and started driving south. We booked hotel rooms from the car based on how far we thought we wanted to drive that day. Both styles have their advantages and disadvantages. It was nice to be flexible, but I was sick of booking hotels by the end of the trip.

Sean was surprised by a hot air balloon festival in Colorado Springs on his way home (doesn't this deflating scarecrow balloon look fake?)

We got back to Yakima in time for middle school orientation, but there was a week between her orientation and the start of classes. Sean decided to fly out to Pennsylvania to see his sister and retrieve the family heirloom Saturn and drive it home to Washington (with no a/c). Around the time he left, my folks came to visit and the four of us went to Ape Cave, a lava tube formed 1900 years ago during an unusual eruption of Mt. St. Helen's.

Examining the lava lines in the wall of Ape Cave (where it was really cold).

Unsurprisingly we were done with cars and planes by the time school started for the public schools. With the kid in school (and Sean not yet back from PA), I had the days to myself to prep my classes and work on union stuff. By the start of September, I had pretty much finished all the work of adjusting the structure for my three online classes. The dates for all the major assignments for all three quarters have also been updated.

My checklist of quizzes for all three online courses (there are lots of quizzes, but they're all pretty short).

I had put off much of the SoftChalk work until the end of summer and the first day after our trips when I sat down to work on the lessons one lesson everything went haywire. The SoftChalk program kept freezing. I finally ended up deleting the software, re-downloading it, restarting the computer, and running some errands before coming back to it. Progress has been fairly quick since then, at least when I'm not interrupted with other tasks and requests.

I was bribing myself (with chocolate rocks and breadsticks) to get through my SoftChalk revisions checklist.

I can't tell if I'm behind where I wanted to be at this point in the summer or if I'm right on track. I feel fairly confident that all the work I did do for the online classes will result in freeing up time during the quarter to spend on union stuff (or revising the SoftChalk lessons I didn't get to. The online revisions are a strange combination of tedious and repetitive and fun and engaging, with technical frustrations and conceptually challenges thrown in. The stuff I have left to do leans a bit more towards the engaging than the tedious and I've got an outline for what needs to be added (and when), so I don't need to invent that during the year.

the major advantage of working from home

I don't expect to be back in my home studio in a meaningful way until...next summer, but I'm promising myself that once contract negotiations are over, I get to take a solid break followed by a solid chunk of studio time. Since the work I'm doing this quarter doesn't lend itself to images and explanation, I don't know if I'll continue to post here regularly. However, in the last two weeks I've made some significant changes to my Intro to Clay class for Fall, so I may write about those results (if they are either positive or interesting). 

Work and Travel Usurping Studio Time

Putting Studio Time Aside

Most years I spend nearly all my summer weekdays working in my clay studio at home.  This is my main time to get sculpture built and prepare for shows during the year. Also, this work refreshes me for the coming academic year.

I did glaze a bit before settling down to do some online work

This year I am not going to be able to spend much time in the studio. It is disappointing and I feel a bit sad about it, but I have made the decision to prioritize other things this summer. I have three different types of activities that will be taking precedence this summer: union work, preparing interactive lessons for my online Art History classes, and travel. I had hoped that I would get to supplement this work with a three-day workshop with Beth Cavener on the YVC campus, but with less than a month to go before the scheduled workshop, there weren't enough folks signed up and we had to cancel.

Other Responsibilities this Summer

Union Duties

This spring I took over as union president for the AFT faculty union on my campus. As union president there is some stuff that ends up on my plate naturally, stuff like meeting with faculty groups and representing faculty in disagreements (major or minor) with administration. This year I am also researching and organizing a group of faculty to prepare for the contract negotiations that will take place next year. The work is important, though it isn't fun, relaxing, or refreshing in the way studio time is and it doesn't lend itself to sharing publicly at this point.

Interactive Lessons for Art History

Over the 2018-19 academic year I took on the daunting, but rewarding, task of "gamifying" my online Art History series. Since I only have so much control over the learning management system, the game elements are not quite as seamless as I had initially hoped, but with game play (and student learning) in mind, I redesigned the classes to feature interactive lessons in SoftChalk.

I also made a character "Art Student" who is meant to travel with the students on their journey.

I wrote about SoftChalk before because I'm a big fan. I used it for my Clay Studio Safety training lesson and apparently our safety person on campus is now using a similar SoftChalk lesson to run his own trainings. The SoftChalk lessons allow students to interact with the content in more ways than Canvas does, allowing them to do multiple choice but also click on areas of maps or images, drag and drop labels or cards into categories, and even give answer that generate feedback instead of grading.

I made achievement badges for the Ancient & Medieval class, but I'm not sure anyone cared about them, so I didn't bother for the Spring class.

Last summer I spent about a month on the SoftChalk lessons and integrated them into my Intro to Clay class and my Ancient & Medieval Art History class. The clay safety lesson is used by all of my clay classes as well as my work study students in the studio. But I only had time to prepare SoftChalk lessons for about half the Art History class before I simply ran out of time and energy. I complicated things by working on some other significant changes to testing and assignments during the same time.

Interactive map plan for the Clay Safety lesson

Because the SoftChalk lessons and organizational overhaul took so much time and energy in the summer and fall quarter, I ended up teaching the Ancient & Medieval Art History class twice (Fall and Winter) and skipped the second class in the Art History series last year. I was able to make 70% of the changes I wanted to make in the first of the series, about that much or more in the third in the series, which I taught in Spring, and I've made none of the changes in the Winter quarter class.

Did the SoftChalk lessons result in improved results in the clay classes? I'm going to just say yes.

I was able to get a lot more done for the spring class because I was able to recycle some of the interactive lessons from Ancient & Medieval for use in Impressionism through Post Modernism. I had also made some of the smaller changes in the Spring class during my ESCALA project last spring and I also teach a reduced load in the Spring because I teach a slightly higher than average load the rest of the year.

planning calendars and todo lists for the online classes

So this summer I have set aside some time to make ALL the changes in the Winter quarter Art History class, Renaissance through 19th Century and, hopefully, the remaining additions to the Fall and Spring quarter classes.

Travel

Of course I am not spending my entire summer working. My family also has three significant trips planned. Last week my daughter and I were in New Hampshire visiting my brother, sister-in-law, and nephew at their house. We had a lovely time watching carpenter ants at the Museum of Science in Boston (and then getting hailed on!), playing board games in Manchester, and visiting Flume Gorge in the White Mountains. 

An epic paper airplane afternoon

The kids getting absolutely wild with their sparklers (both fearless pyromaniacs as you can see)

the family trolling other hikers in the White Mountains

beach glass and shell collection, properly sorted

Later this month the whole family is traveling to London! My daughter is very excited. It will be the first time she and her dad have been out of North America. It will be my second trip to London, but the first in nearly 20 years. I spent J-term (January 1 month class) my second year in college in London taking an education class. We spent nearly all of our time in London and had lots of free time to explore. It was great and I anticipate it will be great again this time. We already have our tickets to see the Harry Potter stuff at the Warner Bros Studio Tour and a mile-long list of other things we want to do there, too. 

this month: real Harry Potter, not just Wizards Unite

Our last summer trip is one we've planned tentatively but we've done nothing to make it official (like booked a hotel). The plan is, assuming we still have energy in August, to drive down through Oregon to the northern part of California and see the redwoods. My daughter has never been to California and Sean and I have only ever been to San Diego.

Politics / Protest Mugs

A screaming Trump with his wall. I like the face, but the wall is boring.

This past summer, when I began working on my 30 pieces in 30 days project, I had originally intended to make three sets of 30 pieces, because, apparently, I like to give myself too much to do. I did finish and display a set of 30 abstract bulbs and a set of 30 politics bulbs, but I wasn't able to finish the mugs.

A (poorly lit) detail shot of my abstract bulbs at Columbia Center for the Arts. As far as I can tell, exhausted me from the summer never even took a decent photograph of the other installation.

The concept I was playing with was the contrast between sides. In the abstract bulbs, I simply created contrasting textures and colors on either sides of some of the bulbs, but for both the political bulbs and the political mugs, the original plan was to create imagery that represented contrasting political perspectives on opposite sides of the same piece.

The opposite side of the "wall" mug. I'm reasonably happy with this side.

If I remember, correctly, I abandoned the reversibility of the bulbs when I realized that some of the more sculptural forms would make the bulbs difficult to hang both ways. The extra depth of the sculpted parts would force the bulbs to hang at a funny angle or not at all. Eschewing the reverse side sculpture also allowed me to close some of the bulb fronts.

I didn't glaze this one yet, in part because I'm less happy with it's opposite side, the Obama "Hope" poster.

But the mugs work as reversibles. The handles are the automatic hook for hanging, and the handle is automatically some distance from the decoration on either side. The depth of a nose won't cause them to hang much differently than they would with a flat surface. Also, the forms are larger, meaning more space for some of the sculpted forms. 

A diagram of two alternate setups for the same mugs, with A side displaying one political perspective and B side another. Each mug has an A and a B side.

I have to admit, the ubiquity of the mug form for a potter, and the fact that people buy mugs, was also part of the appeal. I teach Functional Pottery all year so when I get to the end of the year, I have trouble stepping away from the functional forms. I can't tell if it is just familiarity or if it's a result of the fact that I spend the entire year trying to get students to think critically about form, function, handle shape, rim definition, and surface decoration. After harping on about it all year, I think I need to make the forms I'm bugging them about.

This one has a male dominated side and a gender equity side, but its a little trite and a little boring. It might work ok as a supporting actor for related mugs, but I'm not excited about it. there are some flaws in the glaze on the rim and handle, too.

I abandoned the mugs this summer when I'd made only about 15. I had simply taken on too much work, as I'm wont to do. and I realized that to finish the other two projects, I'd have to drop something. The mugs weren't working as well as the bulbs, so I stopped building and didn't even glaze them. I also knew I'd have to fire the mugs separately. (I was using a cone 6 throwing body and planned to use cone 6 glazes, but the bulbs were done with two different low fire sculpture bodies that I finished with the same low fire glaze.)

The opposite side of the gender equality/inequality mug.

I finished some of the mugs in December in the days I had off between the end of the quarter and our holiday travels. I took the pieces out of the kiln just before we left and mostly wasn't happy. The motifs didn't work as well as I'd initially planned, regardless of color, but I was also unhappy with some of the glazing.

One of the exciting things about the bulbs that I decided to avoid in the mugs is the use of mixed media. If these mugs are functional, they can't have holes, materials that aren't able to be washed, or undercuts that can catch water. The result is more subdued decoration.

I didn't glaze everything. Two pieces had cracked, two were too complicated to finish in a few days and I'd left one blank because I planned to paint the decoration, but I can't now remember what I was planning to do.

The idea for this mug is the two favorite amendments of the two contrasting political parties. The second here and the first, above, but as is, this just looks like guns randomly stuck on a mug. 

I'm still halfway interested in trying to finish the project, but I need dedicated time. The political or protest inspired pieces are simply more taxing mentally than the abstract pieces. Working on the abstract pieces is repetitive and relaxing and the results aren't controversial, so I don't stress about how people will react.

The glaze was either too thin or underfed on this mug. I was too lazy, too, on my glaze application. This one, on its own, probably put me off writing about these for over a month.

With the political pieces, I know I'm going to make someone unhappy if I'm doing what I mean to do, but the worst result is if people don't know what I'm trying to say. I'm afraid I've accomplished that (a lack of clarity) with some of the mugs, and in general the mugs I've finished are, across the board, more disappointing to me than the political bulbs. Some of the mugs simply feel cheesy and/or amateurish.

This one has protestors and placards on both sides. The decoration is ok, but it felt like too much work to glaze it in December. I'm glad I didn't, too, because I'm unhappy with the contrast I got from the commercial celadons in the text mug above. Instead I'll use underglaze like the gender symbol mug earlier.

The pieces I still like the best and that I most enjoyed making are the screaming faces. They're fun to make and they also feel like they capture the mood of the country right now. I've been toying with the idea of making an installation composed exclusively of screaming faces. And really, who doesn't want a screaming mug right now?

These two are my favorites. The screaming person is the opposite side of the screaming Trump above and who even cares what is opposite the birth control, because the color worked well. I used underglaze for both and the color is much more what I want than what I got with the celadons.

I think I will eventually finish the mug pieces. During the year I've got a day job that takes a lot of my mental energy, but in the summer I think it might be worth it to push past the unpleasantness and the failure of some of the mugs to see the whole set installed together. Though I'm disappointed with the current results, I'm not totally over the whole idea.