His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on.
This sounds like an awfully easy system to game in any case. One can simply make a single pot out of over fifty pounds of clay.
Of course, it probably won’t bake very well, even putting aside the fact that it’ll probably be a poor piece of handiwork, but quality is explicitly a non-issue.
I don’t think fifty pounds of clay would fit on a normal potter’s wheel. One pound of clay is enough to make a mug—a big mug, if you know what you’re doing; one with really thick walls if you don’t. But you could make ten five-pound bowls. (I say bowls because they’re easy to get by accident if you’re trying for cylinders.)
I suspected this was probably the case, but then, the pot doesn’t necessarily have to be made on a potter’s wheel. There are pre-wheel methods for making pottery, but they’re mostly pretty slow, so I would probably experiment with the method of jumping up and down on a fifty pound mass of clay to create a depression, and shaping the clay around that by hand.
I suspect that if that grading procedure were applied in real life, you’d get some wags like me for whom willful perversity would trump efficiency, who would insist on making a single pot even if it turned out to be more difficult than making a handful of really heavy ones, and also a bunch of procrastinators who made all their pots in a rush at the last minute and thus failed to benefit much from practice, turning out a bunch of crappy pots.
If the professor wanted to encourage students to get the benefits of practice, they’d probably get better results asking the students to bring in a new pot every class.
This sounds like an awfully easy system to game in any case. One can simply make a single pot out of over fifty pounds of clay.
Of course, it probably won’t bake very well, even putting aside the fact that it’ll probably be a poor piece of handiwork, but quality is explicitly a non-issue.
I don’t think fifty pounds of clay would fit on a normal potter’s wheel. One pound of clay is enough to make a mug—a big mug, if you know what you’re doing; one with really thick walls if you don’t. But you could make ten five-pound bowls. (I say bowls because they’re easy to get by accident if you’re trying for cylinders.)
I suspected this was probably the case, but then, the pot doesn’t necessarily have to be made on a potter’s wheel. There are pre-wheel methods for making pottery, but they’re mostly pretty slow, so I would probably experiment with the method of jumping up and down on a fifty pound mass of clay to create a depression, and shaping the clay around that by hand.
I suspect that if that grading procedure were applied in real life, you’d get some wags like me for whom willful perversity would trump efficiency, who would insist on making a single pot even if it turned out to be more difficult than making a handful of really heavy ones, and also a bunch of procrastinators who made all their pots in a rush at the last minute and thus failed to benefit much from practice, turning out a bunch of crappy pots.
If the professor wanted to encourage students to get the benefits of practice, they’d probably get better results asking the students to bring in a new pot every class.