Teaching Bliss

The fall semester at the community college starts on August 18. I just checked my rosters. I am teaching 2 sections of the 4 credit Introductory Psychology, both of which are overloaded with 43 students each at this point. My supervisor asked me yesterday if he could double me up and give me 90 students in each of those classes. The more the merrier, I guess. We'll see how many more actually sign up! One section is Mon/Wed morning for two hours, the other section is Tues/Thurs morning for two hours. He says he'll try to get me some more money for doing this, which would be nice. For the Tuesday evening Ceramics class I will be teaching, there are three people signed up so far. I should look up the difference between "Ceramics" and "Pottery", since I think of what we will be doing as pottery rather than ceramics. Ceramics to me has the association of slip cast Halloween ghosts with faces from "The Scream" and Easter bunnies glazed with Cone 04 'magic crystal' glazes that make little runs of green and yellow through the pink base color. Not that I am totally offended by kitsch, but that is not what I am going to teach my students! Guess it's time to start thinking about syllabi - syllabuses?- and course assignment lists. The beginning of a new semester is always fun - so many possibilities! Next Thursday, I am going to do a little barrel smoke firing with my friend, Julia. So, before then I need to make a few coil pots and pinch pots to put in the barrel. Busy, busy, busy....

High Fire fire.....

The Cone 5 firing came out very nicely. One pot had a glaze than ran a lot, but it was fortunately placed one of the kiln shelves that had been most recently and thickly covered with kiln wash, so it did exactly what it is supposed to. The glaze ran onto the kiln shelf, but as the shelf cooled, the pot just popped loose from the shelf, so the owner of that pot can just grind down the glaze edge, and the pot looked great. All the pots look great - I think it is a very successful kiln. Once again, credit to the students who worked carefully to create successful pots. I'll post a couple pictures in a minute here. My celadon glazes dragonfly bowls and cups look great. The experimental Coyote Clay shino glazes are all also very nice.

Low fire fire....

Here's the low fire kiln, just opened - it's still pretty warm in there, but the student pieces turned out well. The students in the summer class were a good group, with all showing talent in some area or another. Many had an eye for color, as can be seen here. I did some glaze experiments with abandoned student pots from a few semesters ago, and started up the Cone 5 firing. Didn't get it started until 12:15, so I am going to wait until Thursday to go in and unload it - I know it will take longer to cool than the Cone 05 kiln did. After spending so many years doing therapy, part of why pottery is so satisfying to me is simply the concrete products that are the result of all that work. When the kiln is unloaded, there is the result - pieces you can hold in your hand, and see immediately if the pot is intact, if the handles are firmly attached, if the glaze melted the way you planned, and the overall effect is pleasing and centered, or out of balance in some way. See how I use the same vocabulary I used to in therapy, but now applied to tangible bits of burned earth and colored glass, instead of to people's subjective internal experience and objective presentation to the world? My lama would tell me I am analyzing too much, again. It's all just celebratory display of the unitary awareness that is existence in this moment, and I need to analyze less and love more. "Love this world" the lama says. I believe I will make a pot with that on it.

Pots and Fire

Friday I ran a bisque kiln, fired to Cone 05, at the community college, and I unloaded it today. A couple of students had made thick pots, but I was assured the clay was well wedged and the pots had been drying for a month, so I put them in the kiln reluctantly.

I opened the kiln this morning to find that three pots really exploded, and two others had large pieces of the thickened areas flake off. I'm sorry I didn't take a picture - most of the pots that broke were on the top shelf of the kiln and it really made a mess. Fortunately, no pots made by other students were damaged by the ones that broke. This is a good experience for me - when I am teaching next semester, I will have this immediate information to emphasize and enforce the "Skillful potters make thin-walled pots, and only thin-walled pots get fired!" rule.

I then loaded the kiln with low-fire glazed ware, and am now firing the kiln to Cone 06. I had reservations about some of these pots also - I washed the bottoms of a couple of them which had raw glaze smeared on them, and stilted several of them. Hopefully it will all come out ok. We are very low on kiln furniture - need to order a wider variety of stilts and props.

Tomorrow, I will unload the low-fire ware, and run a Cone 6 kiln. I will take pictures of the unloading and reloading process.

This whole process is satisfying to me in a very basic way. Here is a picture of one of my favorite pots that I have made since starting doing pottery again. This pot has Cone 5 glazes on it, but I think it got over-fired a bit - the normally stable grey glaze on the base of the pot got more runny and shiny than usual. You can see one of the fat little drips. I like that effect when I get it on purpose, but accidently, it is a puzzle.