October 14th
The papers were right. Getting to work with your hands, get messy, and make mistakes all in an attempt to solve a problem seemed to be the way to go with my students. I had asked them to think over the weekend about what they might be interested in writing a myth about. I broke down the ancient story structures into a few different, 3rd grade friendly formulas. We had talked briefly as they were packing up the following week about heroes, villains, hubris, morals, and all those little tidbits that are familiar in ancient mythology. They were far more excited about making their own Percy Jackson esc. main characters, kids that looked like them and got to interact with a fantastical world beyond their own. I figured it was fine, as accessibility points like Percy Jackson were a key touchstone in keeping the kids excited about learning.
These ideas were to be used in the project for this particular day: pottery making. Before the class started, Mrs. Lawson and I set up the supplies at each desk for each student. When they arrived, I pried their attention away from the supplies at their desks and instead directed them to a presentation I had prepared. I told them it was a challenge: I was going to introduce them to the broad periods of ancient pottery, and by the end, they were going to have to look at a piece and identify what category it belonged to. We learned about how myths were represented in different ways, some more abstract, some directly from the stories that survive to us. Taking my challenge like a veritable test from the gods, they aced my final quiz.
The reward would be to sculpt their own pieces. I gave them a few options to choose from to sculpt, mostly simple drinking cups, and told them to run wild. When their pieces were dry and “fired,” they would get to paint their black figure vessels with scenes from their myths.
At first, the sheer joy of sensory stimulation through getting to stick little fingers into slimy red clay was the overwhelming feeling.
A few minutes later, however, the mood got a bit more grim.
“I can’t do it!”
“It’s too hard!”
“Nothing’s working! It’ll never be finished!”
The feeling was familiar, at least to me: high ability frustration.
When I was a kid, I had grand visions of what I wanted to achieve in art class. I watched movies, read comic books, saw art pieces, and wanted to funnel all of that into the literal best piece of art ever created by anyone ever. When it didn’t look like a masterpiece that could rival the old masters, the rage set in.
No matter how many times I told them to try, try, try again, keep working at it, they just were disappointed with themselves. They knew it was just for fun, not graded on neatness or design, but they weren’t going to let themselves have fun until it looked good.
Then, one voice piped up. One that was a shy perfectionist that was always frustrated with her own work: “If it looks all crackley and bad, that just means it’ll be more realistic!”
I cheered her on. “That’s right! When we see pottery in a museum, it’s been put back together by experts. It never looks perfect at first.”
“How did they do this without Walmart?” Another exasperated voice asked. I laughed, but it was a good and genuine question. Folk craft is a passion of mine, so passing a skill down to kids who couldn’t believe someone could sculpt pottery larger than their bodies was a mark of pride.
Sure, the little drinking cups were a little lumpy and not very historically accurate. But what they were was done, and that’s all I could ask of them.
