I have been sacrificing getting my stuff ready to act as Mother Hen over the kids so that the amount of mishaps - never zero - is kept to a minimum. I actually prefer that they make mistakes, because they learn faster and the lesson is retained longer. But the mistakes must be controlled so that it is not a complete disaster. Thus, my teaching style is: let them fail, up to the recoverable point, and then step in before it is a complete wash.
I just now (8:19pm, Tuesday, October 29th) finished rigging up my planned pieces to cast. I will show you them in a second. I've kind of decided that I should do more than just document these things, but to present them as pieces of art in and of themselves. So, that's how they are presented...
These are the cockroach like plutonium poppers, or something like that. The first batch of them failed, and I am keeping the failure as an teaching object for almost every casting defect you can get. And the failures were all in the rigging of the pieces. These, rigged more properly, should work fine, but we shall see...
This guy, upside down, is a Tipsie Driver, or a Tipsie Herder.
the first time we taught a class on what we do, everything that could go wrong did. not all at once but throughout the process and with different student's work each time. so they learned not only how to do it but how to recover from the inevitable mistakes.
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