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. ↩