Robert Rauschenberg, White Painting [three panel], 1951
It is a mistake to think that the painter works on a white surface. The figurative belief follows from this mistake. If the painter were before a white surface, he could reproduce on it an external object functioning as a model, but such is not the case. The painter has many things in his head, or around him, in his studio. Now everything he has in his head or around him is already in the canvas, more or less virtually, more or less actually, before he begins his work. They are all present in the canvas as so many images, actual or virtual, so that the painter does not have to cover a blank surface but rather would have to empty it out, clear it, clean it.
Read that carefully. It should test your ability to read closely and critically, and we should discuss what you find difficult about its language in class. The point of a metaphor, however, at least in this kind of instructional post, is to elucidate an idea. It should move us closer to an understanding of a process, usually so we can refine that process.
So the gist of that paragraph is this: You create from what is already in your head. You add value into the world based on who you are as you go about the business of creating. The canvas isn’t blank; it contains all its possibilities already. It’s a version of Michelangelo’s angel in the stone.
A Humanities makerspace leans on this philosophy. You can’t just study the work of others; you have to create, too. And the most important creation is your self — the person you create through your choices. How do we create the best version of ourselves? How do we create meaning on the blank canvas of the self?
Those questions are clichés, but so are roses on Valentine’s Day. There’s a lot of power in clichés, and irony has to yield to sincerity at some point. You can’t always talk in memes.
‘Waiting’
So. You’re a blank canvas. Every three or four weeks, this course gives you a chance to reset your assessment of what you put on that canvas. We’ve been experimenting with that triptych model for about a year now, and it seems to work.
For those of you who want to create and explore and learn things, this is sort of unimportant. You take stock of yourself every so often, get a reward for doing well, and recognize that it’s all right to use a few extrinsic motivations to prime the intrinsic ones.
You share a space with another group, however, and they are reading this now with a different purpose. Whenever we reset, it’s also a chance to slough off the burden of mistakes. It’s a chance to start over.
Three or four weeks of hard work in a makerspace will yield the evidence for one of those top profiles:
Click to load the entire set of profiles, poster-sized.
It takes three or four weeks to do that. Filling a canvas with purpose is time-consuming, contemplative work. It’s an aggregate process, not a subtractive one. You don’t start with a perfect piece of artwork and lose beauty from it.
On the other hand, it takes only a moment to damage a canvas.
Lucio Fontana, Spatial Concept ‘Waiting,’ 1960
That’s the real lesson: Destruction is always faster and easier than creation. Some of you walk into a new opportunity for growth and immediately slash the canvas, instead of searching for what’s inside of you that can be brought forth. Your reasons are incredibly important, but there’s also this: You destroy the canvas. It can’t be undone.
As a result, some of you are going to find a new number in a new column in the online grade book. That number will be clearly labeled as a work-in-progress assessment score. It is inactive. It will never affect your “average,” because it exists only to provide feedback to you when you need it.
The number corresponds, as always, to a grade abatement profile. It reflects, at this point, your choices over a single period of learning: Monday, March 121. The number tells you, in other words, if you took a knife to the blank canvas as soon as you could.
And the number doesn’t care if you meant to damage the canvas or not; it’s a number based on evidence, and that’s all. It can’t be undone. Fortunately, you always have a way to start over in here. You acknowledge that this particular canvas has been slashed/burned/covered in spilled coffee, and you get a clean one.
The rest of the feedback this number gives you is built into the language of the profiles. Read them. The classroom is filled with every other tool you need. You have a few weeks to use the new canvas in front of you to create something meaningful. There is time to earn a very good profile score, which will mean that you’ve created meaningful work.
First, take some time to look at the calendar for your course again:
The learning and content goals for every unit are listed for you. This is the blueprint, if you want to switch from painting to architecture. Use those goals to set up your choices, and look to the lessons for each day or week for what’s expected of you.
If you’re told, for example, to spend a Monday doing test pre, you have to do that. If you’re told to read the first chapter of The Catcher in the Rye, you have to do that. Not doing what you’re asked to do, especially without any sort of discussion in advance, is what leads to low performance and low skills and low interest and so on.
Next Steps, or TL;DR
If you have a number online to look at, look at that number. Read this post2 with that number in mind, examine your recent choices and current mindset, and then talk to me about how you’re going to make better choices to get into a more productive mindset.
Look to your peers, too, since they ought to help you to make better choices. If your peers don’t help you make better choices, your first choice ought to be to distance yourself from them for the 42 minutes you spend in our space each day.
Almost all of this boils down to staying on task and getting work done. Those choices have been tied into profiles that reward hard work and amenability much more than performance on tests and quizzes.
Which means, in our class, that low grades indicate a student who is not following directions, not responding to feedback, and not completing assignments. Those are probably the three easiest elements of learning to control, and the rules of the room are simple, forgiving, and logical.
Let’s talk in the comments.
Having to cobble this post and its feedback together ate up our snow day on Tuesday, so your GAP scores for the work done through March 9 will be a little late. The solution to this really is that everyone focuses and works hard, by the way. The design of the course means that universal hard work would make the scoring process perfunctory, while the feedback process became much more enriching. ↩
There is no TL;DR for meaningful information. Read the whole post. ↩
The metaphor of a slashed canvas is an interesting one. What students have done to earn those numbers cannot be undone: their actions are set in stone. However, everyday provides another canvas that can either be slashed, left blank, or, preferably, turned into a beautiful masterpiece. The choice is up to us.
Personally, I need to realize my full potential in helping my peers turn their slashed canvases into artwork. We are all slightly at fault for the failure of our peers, especially in a makerspace like ours. In the future, it will be my goal to vocalize to those around me how they can improve their in class focus and, consequently, their GAP score.
I think that the unique metaphor of the slashed canvas is a really good reminder of how to stay on track. Not to be confused that if you fall of the track it is no big deal, but it is reassuring that if you happen to have a bad day (we are human, it happens), then you still get the opportunity to redeem yourself with a new canvas each day. Your actions are not forgotten, but the way that you choose to mend them in the future speaks volumes. It demonstrates your ability to learn from your mistakes and prove the kind of student you strive to be. Like Florence, my goal also is to work with my peers more to help us all not slash our canvases. The more collaboration that is done, the less peers that will fall off the wagon and into a hole that they cannot dig themselves out of. We should all help each other to succeed. It is not a competition to get in the fourth tier, as a matter of fact, we can all be in that tier together.
I agree that this metaphor is very interesting. It gives me a new outlook because I do not think of every day as a new opportunity, but that is what it is. It is a new opportunity to either make artwork and create something or “slash” the canvas. I will definitely think about this more often and like Florence said, try to be aware of helping others not slash their own canvases.
These new scores, from what I’ve seen, have been making all of us very nervous, because it seems like the higher the number the worse the student we are. I know that that’s not the intention of the Crossing the Rubicon score and the WIP GAP score, but when someone uses a number to tell you whether or not you’re doing something bad, it can feel inhuman in the way that it just makes our goal to just lower the number. It makes it so instead of genuinely wanting to be focused during class, we are doing it just so our GAP score doesn’t drop. I think the Crossing the Rubicon score in theory is a good idea, because it helps students realize how they can improve, or act as a wake up call when their score is high, but the effects of students seeing a number in the portal just make it seem like another bad or good grade. Maybe in the future it would be helpful if you added comments in the portal of what exactly you notice when we get off task just so it feels more personalized and instructed rather than just another number.
I found this metaphor interesting solely because, if someone “slashes” the canvas it does not mean it’s ruined and you don’t need a new one. Working together and reflecting on ourselves can help us turn that same slashed canvas into something beautiful. I think each class period is another day to work on that same canvas to improve it. I particularly like using this metaphor because it can be looked at in many different lights, just as we as students should look at the ” canvas,” we are given.
I agree with Erica. This has been something reoccuring in my writing. The aspect that yes although in theory these numbers are supposed to help us, they aren’t exactly the most beneficial without added comments and instruction. When I see a number in my portal I almost choose to ignore it since I have no knowledge of what I did wrong. All I know is I must’ve did something to receive this, but I don’t know how to correct it. I think an improvement that is essential for this to have a beneficial outcome would be to add in a small comment if the number is extremely high or out of the norm.
A line in this that particularly stood out to me was “Destruction is always faster and easier than creation.” We all experience this all the time when it comes to grades. You can seemingly earn 90-100s all quarter and then get a 65 on a quiz and all of the sudden your average goes down 10 points. This is another reason why traditional grading is inaccurate- it doesn’t account for off days. You can be a consistently good student and then have a rough day and all of the sudden your stellar average, becomes average. But it’s not just with grades that this quote is true, its with anything in life; it’s easier to demolish a building than it is to build it, its easier to lose trust than it is to gain it, its to eat than it is to cook. Why? Well, I’m not so sure how to explain.
After reading through the comments posted in the days after this instructional post was uploaded, I couldn’t agree more with Olivia’s comment. The whole idea that destruction is easier than creation when it comes to good grades is why conscious students are nervous even for small quizzes. I’ve had teachers tell me in the past that “it’s just one test” or “it’s just one quiz” when I have expressed my nervousness but in reality, that quiz or test can make or break your grade for that quarter. Similarly in our makerspace, our choices and actions in the classroom and our work can affect our GAP score, put a slash through our canvas. However, with this system, we have control as opposed to unpredictable test and quizzes.
This metaphor is well put, and a very optimistic one. I believe that even slashing the canvas has a positive spin because you can slash the canvas one day and ultimately learn how to fix it, while on top of that, create a beautiful masterpiece as well. Slashing the canvas is’t the end of the world, and the slash can contribute to the masterpiece. However, it’s important that we minimize the times we “slash” the canvas for GAP purposes, and help each other reach our full potential, remaining on task, focused, and diligent to create these so-called “beautiful masterpieces”.
To continue with the metaphor topic, I believe that it is very well put. The fact that the masterpiece takes so long to create is similar to the entire time we work on generating evidence for the GAP scores. The slash can come at anytime however and we need to catch ourselves before we do too much damadge. The less we do, the easier it is to fix. Like Cameron and others mentioned, the slash isn’t the worst thing in the world. Think of this metaphor as a real world example. If you were to paint something almost super magnificent, all you needed to do was add one more stroke of paint and you slipped and cut the painting, you could sow the canvas back together. Think of the movie Brave. The daughter rips the tapastry that the mom has been working on. It gets fixed but it isn’t the same. The same is true with the GAP and our work. If we mess up, we can work hard to fix it, but it will never be the same.