I was talking to Dan about his recent speech class finale and how it reminded me of high school. Basically I had a policy in high school of not doing any work for a class outside of the class itself. There were very few exceptions. Most classes at my high school required very little effort to excel at, so I just did the homework on the day it was due during the class itself. For the most part, listening to what was being taught was not really a requirement.

The other rather embarassing aspect of my high school experience that I remember clearly was my ceramics class. It was one of those electives that people took because it was an easy A, the teacher was generally out of the room and thus you could smoke during class, and there was no homework or tests of any kind. I think I took it because I was running out of electives to take. The school had a requirement that you *had* to take a study hall if you weren't enrolled in a language class (wha??), so most people took no language and then were forced to not take an elective in its place. I was enrolled in Chinese throughout my highschool career, so I had the option to take electives every term and I did. Unfortunately, because so few people were taking electives, there weren't all that many offered and in the end I had taken the bulk of what was available.

Anyway, the teacher clearly couldn't care less about the actual instruction of the students or whether or not we gained anything from the class. He graded on a points system, where each project you successfully completed was given a "grade" between 1 and 5 points. Your grade in the class was based on your total accumulated points. So, while each project was graded for quality, the end grade in the class was essentially based on quantity of output. If you got 40+ points during the term, you would get an A, even if each of your projects was a worthless zero-effort piece of crap. There was no zero point option in the grading system.

And everyone knew this going in. My understanding is that occasionally someone would come through the system who actually was interested in sculpture and they would make interesting projects and do well. Everyone else just cranked out 40 identical bowls with generic glaze and no thought to them at all.

I got so pissed off about the complete worthlessness of the class that I started making kiln-bombs. These were baseball-sized solid spheres of clay which I would cut in half with a wire, use my thumb to put a large dimple in the center, then re-seal the sphere together. Essentially, it was a thick-walled spherical shell with a big hollow center. I'd dress the outside to look like the Death Star or a Beholder or whatnot, but that was just to get it past the instructor's inspection and allowed into the kiln.

Of course, air bubbles in clay cause the project to explode when heated... and the thicker the walls the more powerful the result.

Sadly, the Death Star was destroyed in the Kiln Wars just as it was in the movie. And it took the entire rebel fleet of shitty half-assed bowls with it. No one really cared; I made certain that there wasn't actually anything interesting in the kiln before I did this, and for the most part the rest of the people in the class thought it was great fun anyway. They already had their 40 points as well.

What a joke.