101–110 of 134 posts
There’s a story about an art teacher that split their class in half. They told one half of the students that they’d be graded based on a single piece of work, and the other half that they would be graded on the quantity of work produced. Does anyone know of an actual event where this happened, or is it apocryphal? (I don't disagree with the premise, I'm just curious about its basis)
Reminds me of this talk I saw by Ray Bradbury on writing, where he said (I paraphrase): Aim to write one story a week. That gives you 52 stories a year, and I dare you to write 52 bad ones.
I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…
The shorter poses don't let you put in any detail but you learn how to quickly express gesture and delineate important masses and shadow.
For 5 minutes poses you're essentially practicing the first 5 minutes of a drawing intentionally without intending to finish it.
It's essentially a similar idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Newton was just incredible. The man polished his own lenses for his experiments. This, although there were already professional lens makers in England at the time, and they were better than him. Today, these antics would be dismissed as "bad practice", "reinventing the wheel", "losing two weeks rewriting a stupid lens" or some other corporate bullshit. But his great insights on the nature of light came from the very…
He was the ultimate "do it for somethings own sake" type of guy. He had a ton of curiosity, and just spent most of his life indulging it to the fullest. I mean, we in the modern world are so boxed in with our notions of right and wrong (most of which come from "authority"), newton wasn't like that, the man was equally comfortable studying about the bible, alchemy, as we was studying the natural world, building telesc…
What's the point of these posts? It's an opinion based on nothing else than a hypothetical anecdote. Is it motivational posts for HN readers--is this what "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity" these days?
When teaching mathematics I like to always mention that the greats like Ramanujan, while it seems like they just knew everything from pure thought, they all actually did a ton of work by hand. Ramanujan in particular is known for his fastidious notebooks calculating thousands of digits numbers like pi. From writing out the calculations for hours and days, he'd come up with simplification formulas and develop new insi…
Agreed 1000%! I think ‘do the busy work’ can even be applied more broadly: Years ago I ran a small business in my mid-20s, and one of the critical mistakes I made was getting hopelessly behind in our bookkeeping (and by hopelessly behind I mean it - things were going well and the bank account kept going up, so I kinda just piled the sales receipts on top of each other for close to a year). When the company started to…
I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…
I'm reasonably sure that it was a pottery class (or study) in which students/study participants were asked to produce either the best piece they could think of or as many as possible. I think it was actually a study that I read about. It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later. I do not think that it is surprising that practice improves skills though (well, except for people with an exceptionall…
> It might need some internet sleuthing to find it. I'll try later.
The earliest reference I am aware of is the 1985 book "Art and Fear", at the beginning of the section on perfection:
https://books.google.com/books?id=yGf6CAAAQBAJ&lpg=PA77&vq=c...
The book doesn't have footnotes or a bibliography, unfortunately.
I think people take away only part of the lesson from this anecdote, and miss the implication that, since getting an "A" was trivial for the "grade by quantity" group, students were not just encouraged to practice, but were also free to experiment without fear of failure (after all, they could easily make up any shortfall by firing a few unworked lumps of clay to get to 50 lbs).
But I wish we had data on the number of students, distribution of grades, number of pieces each student made, etc. because it should be obvious that we can't extrapolate too much from the fact that some data points on the "high quality" end of the distribution were all from one group. The three best? Ten best? The best half? What was the size of the class anyway? Did anyone try to game the system by just firing 50 one-pound lumps?
In some sense, this is a bit like evaluating software based on SLOC, and we all know how that ends up.
It should also be obvious that none of the students had any particular incentive to explore the "delicate" end of the possible artistic design space, although at least the "quantity" group wasn't penalized for doing so. So, if no students cottoned on to the "50 1-pound lumps" hack, I would expect to see coffee mugs rather than teacups in their work.