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I got one passable piece off the pottery wheel tonight. A wide bowl with a little bowl rising out of the center. Sort of a big candle-holder type thing. I must remember to go into the pottery studio tomorrow and place it on the greenware cart to be bisqued because we're not allowed to work on things past Friday? Which means that most of my bowls will go unglazed? It would've been nice if someone had told us this before.

Actually, my teacher's exact words had been, "You'll be able to use the studio until the end of the month." That was last week. This week is an entirely different story. Now we only have til Friday. Which means, goodbye everything that was thrown in the last two weeks. There's no consistency with this woman. She's an awful, awful teacher.

Today she gave a slideshow of her work. It lasted over an hour. Usually her slideshows feature other artists and go by nice and quickly. This one dragged, because she felt it necessary to tell us her life story. More than half the slides were of her travels from the past 25 years. I shouldn't have been relieved when she finally started showing pictures of her ceramic work, because, as it turned out, her work is all about female circumcision. It's very disturbing to look at-- incredibly ugly, and I understand the power of her intended message-- and accompanying the slides was an endless, terribly graphic lecture about the horrors of female circumcision.

I'm all for educating the people. But, for god's sake, I've been over the female circumcision issue in countless anthro classes, as well as a feminism class. I've got it. To pound it so relentlessly into the heads of people who were there to learn how to throw and glaze pots was unnecessary.

But, she kept repeating, the primary intended audience of her work is Western women: us, those of us sitting there in the class. (What about the men in the class? Could they have gotten up and left, then?) She feels it is necessary to educate and inform Western women because we "have it so good" and we "need to be woken up". While I'm not denying the truth in this, in many cases, I found her implicit messages insulting and racist. And although her slides from her trips to Asia and Africa were interesting, they weren't ceramics.

I wanted to get up and leave, get back to glazing my pieces, but I didn't. Good thing, too: I found out later she had locked us in. That's gotta be a fire hazard. And us so close to blazing kilns.

We filled out the instructor evaluation scantrons tonight, and I was brutally honest.

Why are you in Tavie's head? 10:53 PM | shower me with attention