Pip: Art With Korb, where the Chromebook battery is bulging and the clay is just getting started — a normal week in an art room, by any measure.
Mara: Frank Korb’s latest post covers three grade levels moving through very different materials — clay planning, digital photo editing, and wheel throwing — and the throughline is what it takes to actually get better at something.
Pip: Let’s start with hands in old school clay and new school technology.
Week 12: Hands in Old School Clay and New School Technology
Pip: Three grade levels, three completely different processes running simultaneously — and the question underneath all of it is the same: how do you get good at something that takes years of repetition before it starts to feel natural?
Mara: The pottery wheel section puts a number on that. Warren Mackenzie’s words are quoted directly: “The first 10,000 pots are difficult and then it gets a little easier.”
Pip: Ten thousand pots before things ease up. That is not an encouraging timeline, but it is an honest one — and it reframes what practice actually means in a ceramics classroom.
Mara: The eighth graders are already coming in during lunch to log more time on the wheel. The post notes there have been strong advances from artists putting in that extra practice, which tracks with the Mackenzie idea — the only path forward is more throws.
Pip: Meanwhile the sixth graders are nowhere near the wheel yet. They’re in the planning stage for keepsake boxes — thinking through what a keepsake even is before a single slab of clay gets cut.
Mara: The post walks through that vocabulary carefully. Templates are introduced as paper shapes cut before the final clay slabs, explicitly to save time and effort later. Terms like scoring and slipping, green ware, and bone dry are flagged as things students need to identify.
Pip: So the sixth graders are learning the language before they touch the material — which is a different kind of rigor than throwing ten thousand pots, but it’s still rigor.
Mara: The seventh graders are in a completely different medium. They’re deep in Adobe Photoshop, working on non-destructive editing and masking layers for a Visual Biography project — layering personal photographs with gathered images to build composite portraits.
Pip: Non-destructive editing is one of those concepts that sounds technical until you realize it just means you can always go back — which, honestly, ceramics could use.
Mara: The post closes with a reminder aimed at art teachers specifically: staying active as an artist matters, even outside the classroom. The ideas in your head should be made into art, big or small.
Pip: Onto the closing.
Pip: Ten thousand pots, a keepsake box that hasn’t been built yet, and a Photoshop layer that can always be undone — patience runs through all of it.
Mara: More from the studio next time.
