new bent-wood boxes

 As you can see, I'm making significant progress on my new design of Scandinavian bent wood boxes. My Norwegian ancestors would be pleased, and this is great preparation for my summer classes. Each box will be a slightly different shape, and each will be clearly hand crafted. What could be more lovely than a unique box, each invested with both creativity and ancestry.

This weekend, the Eureka Springs Indie film is being held and I happen to be in two films. The first one is about my Wisdom of the Hands program and was financed by the Historic Arkansas Museum and the Arkansas Department of Humanities. The second film is feature length and is called Eureka, The Art of Being. It is about the artists of Eureka Springs and the arts erving as the foundation of community. Both will be shown tomorrow.

There are two ways in which American public schools are graded. One is that letter grades are assigned as a means of reporting and measuring progress. The other is that student progress from one number grade to the next as a description of where they are in the educational process. At Clear Spring School, we are moving into an ungraded position, in which students will not be in a grade, nor will they be assigned grades. The point is to escape artificial constructs and do authentic assessments that represent students having done real things.

Yesterday the lead attorney for my small environmental organization, Save the Ozarks, made a final filing before the Arkansas Public Service Commission asking for a rehearing to demand that the Commission side with Save the Ozarks and compel the utility, SWEPCO, to pay legal fees. The utility was obviously waiting for us to make the next move, as within 7 minutes, they had filed their own motion for a rehearing to demand that damning evidence of their misbehavior be stricken from the docket and from being heard by the Arkansas Court of Appeal when we make our next move. We are also drafting a settlement proposal that would open the door for the utility to adopt a more generous stance toward our local community.

Make, fix and create...