I’ve said before that throwing is by far my favourite part of making pottery. And for the most part, it is.”I’m almost never terribly happy with the way the surfaces of my pots turn out, and I’ve always felt somewhat cheated by the firing process: load the electric kiln, and then wait patiently for two days as a machine transforms your work without any input from you.”Raku is different.”The raku firing process isn’t very demanding in terms of money and materials. If you can get your hands on a propane tank, a torch, some bricks, a bit of insulation, a few metal garbage cans, and a bag of sawdust, and some open space, you can set up a raku kiln and some reduction chambers. And it’s a quick process: as little as an hour, compared to the day and a half to two days that stoneware spends in the electric kiln. But raku demands careful attention and input from the potter: a premature removal of wares, or a slight delay covering the pots can dramatically alter the outcome. And even when done properly, it’s not for conservative potters.”The payoff is huge: bright colours, dramatic metals, and the coolest chemistry lesson you’ll ever experience.”I’ve chronicled this weekend’s raku fire at my pottery gallery, and I’ve got some photos of the finished products.
Archive for November, 2005
Playing with fire
Nov 29
I didn’t date when I was fourteen. The main reason was the lack of prospects, to be fair, but on top of that I simply wasn’t interested in dating when I was fourteen. At fourteen, I gazed briefly into that abyss, it gazed back into me, and I turned away and didn’t look back until I was old enough to vote.”I didn’t date when I was fourteen, because the sorts of fourteen-year-olds who dated were kids like Jessica and Matt, and it takes a special kind of self-loathing to want to be like Jessica and Matt. Jessica was this cute, perky, na
At the risk of engaging in the premature counting of chickens, it looks like I’m going to be involved in something off-blog that will expose my rants about the fucking graphing calculator to a wider audience. Like, wider by a few orders of magnitude. Exciting stuff. Exciting enough that I spent some time today researching the link between Texas Instruments and the math textbook industry that I wrote about a few months ago.”It’s worse than I thought. It’s scandalous, and everyone who has a stake in what students are taught should be outraged.”Here’s a tiny subset of what ten minutes of Googling got me:” * An alliance between TI and textbook publisher Pearson Prentice Hall: Pearson Prentice Hall and Texas Instruments to Publish Educational Products for High School Math Market. Never mind the creepy abundance of business jargon: far creepier are the repeated references to “increas[ing] student achievement”, “improv[ing] student performance”, “scientifically researched and standards-based instruction materials”, and the like, all waved around without either specifics or support. Just because you say it, doesn’t mean it’s true. Show me the data, Pearson Prentice Hall and TI.” * Here’s a beautiful example of technology making simple concepts complicated: The directions for performing these operations differ from calculator to calculator. The steps for a TI-82 are given on page 663 of the textbooks. For other calculators, you will have to consult the manual for instructions. Learn how to use these important functions Oh, allow me to present a bold alternative to that shit: graph your bloody STRAIGHT LINE by hand, you goddamned punk.” * Fostering Children’s Mathematical Power: An Investigative Approach to K-8 Mathematics Instruction. Here’s Activity File 0.1 – ZERO. POINT. ONE – in a book about teaching math to children: It may surprise children to learn that some calculations are too hard for a calculator. Encourage them to explore the limits of their calculators for each of the operations. For example, what is the largest addend that can be added on a Texas Instruments (TI) Math Explorer? I’ve got a word for this approach as a zero point first step toward fostering children’s mathematical power, and it ain’t “investigative”. Also: free cookie to anyone who can tell me why the TI in particular is necessary here. The $10 doodad I use to balance my checkbook could do just as well for this, maybe better.” * Probably the creepiest material of all comes from the TI site itself. Take this, for instance. What do MTV
Back among the working
Nov 22
Throughout the conference, I was trying to figure out how to blog about the conference without well blogging about the conference. And then, on my last night out of town, it came to me in a dream.”On my last night out of town for the business conference, I dreamt that one of my coworkers found my blog. But the blog that he found wasn’t Tall, Dark, and Mysterious as you know it; it was more like what Tall, Dark, and Mysterious would be like if 1) I worked with complete nutcases, and 2) I had absolutely no discretion whatsoever, as opposed to the small amount that I actually have. For instance, in this dream blog, not only did I routinely violate my company’s non-disclosure agreement in my posts, I also violated the non-competition agreement. On my blog. No, I don’t know how that would work, either, but apparently I was doing it.”In this dream TD&M, I was also writing at length about the accountant’s embezzling of funds from petty cash, the receptionist’s costly cocaine habit, the company’s use of migrant workers in the shipping department, and the boss’s affair with the girl who works at the taco stand in the mall. None of these, by the way, bear any resemblance whatever to fact, but the last of these in particular is something my subconscious cut from whole cloth. First of all, there is no taco stand in the mall. Second, the boss just got married, and everything’s all “new wife this, new wife that”, so as if. But third, and perhaps most important, I would bet hard cash that if ever my boss discovered that someone else was sleeping with the girl from the taco stand, he would call that person into his office and say, “I hear that you’ve been sleeping with the girl from the taco stand. It’s not for me to judge you; however, I want you to ask yourself,
Actually, there’s only one point, and it is this: An essay and a speech are different media. If you’re going to drag several dozen people to a different city to hear your talk, rather than just giving them essays to read, you need to justify the time and expense involved. When your presentation consists of you just reading an essay you wrote, your message is not best delivered as a speech. It is not even best delivered as a speech if:” * It is accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation that consists entirely of excerpts from the very paper you are reading.” * You periodically glance up at your audience for a tenth of a second at a time, to make it look like you’re giving a speech rather than reading from a paper.” * You write faux spontaneity directly into your essay. This includes, but it not limited to:” o Jokes of any type.” o On the spot “observations” such as “You all look very excited to be here.” When you can’t even look up at your audience when you say that line, it loses a shred of credibility.” o The line “This award comes as a complete surprise to me, so I didn’t prepare a speech.” Dude, you’re not fooling anyone: you walked up to the podium with a goddamn folder, for crying out loud, which you proceeded to open and then read from FOR TEN MINUTES. You even read that line from the folder.” * Its title is Effective Teaching: Nurturing Active Learners. Tell me, do you think that you are underlining or undermining your message when you deliver your findings by monotonously reading a paper at your audience for two straight hours without interacting with them? Me, I’m gonna have to go with undermining.”(In other, unrelated news, the business conference was superfantastic and not painful at all! But it’s good to be back at home so that I can blog about things that have nothing to do with the conference and were not in any way inspired by it.)”A somewhat tense hour and thirty-nine minutes”" Meta-Meta, Talking To Strangers.”The other day, I found myself lamenting the lack of bloggable material that has crossed my path of late. I did not, however, then say to myself, “Oh, I know! How about I leave my wallet on a bus, and then write about my experience trying to get it back!” Nevertheless, you take what you can get, and I couldn’t be happier with what I got, really:” * Prior to taking this bus, I had to buy a transfer from a machine. All I had on me was twenties, so after buying the transfer I had $19 in loonies, twonies, and quarters, which I pocketed. So when my wallet and I parted ways, I still had $19, which would be enough to get me through the next few days, if it came to that.” * The guy at the transit system’s customer service centre managed to strike a formidable balance between I’ve-dealt-with-this-sort-of-thing-a-hundred-times -before professionalism, and nothing-is-more-important-to-me-than-your-case compassion. He took my name, and told me that every bus is swept when it gets to the end of the line, and that this bus in particular would be back at my door in an hour going the other way, and if I wanted I could go try to catch it.” * I did, and explained my case to the driver, who stopped his bus and let me on to try to find my wallet, but informed me that he hadn’t found a wallet when he’d gotten to the end of the line and doubted that it was here. Still, though, he’d take a few minutes to look, as would all twenty people on that bus. Alas, nothing. But then the driver asked me when I’d gotten on the bus.” “Seven twenty,” I said.” “Oh, this bus was at your stop at seven-oh-five,” he said. “So your wallet wouldn’t be here.”" “So is the next bus going to be the seven twenty one?” I asked.” “No, that bus goes back to the lot,” he replied.” I thanked him and and he let me off. A passenger at the front, a woman of around eighty who minutes before had been on all fours to check under her seat, wished me luck.” * But what does a bus driver know, I thought; I knew the schedule, and there’d be another bus coming by in exactly fifteen minutes, and it would be the seven-twenty bus, no?” So I waited, and the drizzle gave way to pouring rain, and fifteen minutes later I was drenched, but there was a bus. He stopped, and I explained my situation.” “You weren’t on my bus,” said the driver matter-of-factly. “I’d remember you.”" “Yes, I was, I got on at the beginning of the line at seven twenty.”" “Naw, this bus came ’round your way seven thirty-five.”" Very well.” * Back home, I called customer service again, and got a woman who took my name. “You saved me a phone call,” she said. “We just got word that a wallet was found, has your name in it.”" “How much cash is in it?” I asked. All of it.” * “All of it” was under a hundred dollars, as opposed to the ten thousand-odd dollars that you read about every now and again in front-page articles around Christmastime, in which some homeless person finds a wallet full of some obscene amount of money, leaves it all there, and then doesn’t accept a reward. I was glad that I hadn’t left ten thousand dollars in my wallet because I didn’t want there to be a front-page article about me. By the way, for what it’s worth, if I found a wallet with that sort of cash, I would return all of it to the owner, but I damnwell would expect a reward, and I would accept every penny. Because I returned a wallet to someone who walks around with ten thousand dollars in cash.” * Got it back the next day.”Longtime readers may contrast the relative ease in obtaining money from the transit authority with to the crazy-making ordeal of acquiring same from the Employment Insurance office. I wonder if we could streamline the Employment Insurance system by having employers place cash in wallets on buses, and have unemployed people collect their benefits directly from the transit authority.