day 4...

Steven shows his skill

This will be day 4 of Scandinavian box making at the Eureka Springs School of the Arts, and my students will each have two or more boxes to show in our afternoon studio exhibit. Today things slowed down enough for me to take some photos.

I have been experimenting with other designs from Scandinavian box making and demonstrating a variety of techniques.

Student work is shown in the photos.

My excellent students have been encouraging my own exploration of techniques, and I am reminded that learning is always experimental, and must by its very nature, be experimental to be at its best.

Steven's box

Sometimes the experiments in public education are rather large, like the one in LA to put an iPad in each student's hands. At this point it's results have disastrous, as described in this article in Education Week: Q & A: A Hard Look at L.A.'s Troubled Digital Learning Initiative.

Many educational policy makers would like computers to have the same effect on education they've have had on business. In that view, teachers can be hired as cheaply as check-out clerks to manage information delivered by device. Teachers in that fanciful view of things, can be tracked in their performance as easily as one can track the exchange of cash for merchandise

Jerry's box

But students are not like the products you find on supermarket shelves. They each have unique qualities that will be expressed in their work. And as much as educational policy makers would love to make schooling as efficient as Walmart sells stuff, we'd best not head in that direction.

The Los Angeles School Board pulled the plug on the 1.3 billion dollar iPad program and has asked Apple and its partner Pearson Education for a refund.

Make, fix and create...