Numbers

About 450,480 AP Calculus exams were graded last week in Kansas City, Missouri.  Each exam has 6 different questions that must be scored by hand by people.  Are you counting?  That's a total of 2,702,880 questions.  I was right there with approximately 980 of my geeky, calculus loving friends.  We worked 8 hours a day for 7 straight days. Well, except for day #6 when we all stayed 1 hour later (so that's 9 hours) and day #7 when we all came in 30 minutes early (that's 8.5 hours) because we were behind.  It was hard, but I really didn't mind.  I'm hired to do a job.  That job is to work with this really huge team to get all those 2.7 million questions graded.  I'm not sure how many of those individual student exam questions I personally graded.  Most readers are trained to grade 3 different problems during the week.  I was lucky this year and was in a group that graded one of the "special" exams, so I was trained on 8 different questions.  I like that much better since it means that I was doing something different every day.

I came home on Friday, so I was back in the studio on Saturday.  I decided to make bowls.  In particular, I decided to work on making ONE bowl for friends.  It's hard to describe, but I've got to get a bowl that is just the right size to fit inside this metal rack.  The rack came with a bowl, but that one got broken and I'm trying to make them something new that will fit.  The rack thingy is pretty cool.

I stared out with 4 pounds and 5 pounds of clay.  I have 0 ideas about how to measure the size of the bowl that we need, so I thought that I'd make several and see what works in the end.  I wasn't sure if either of those would end up big enough, so I made a 6 pound bowl and a 7 pound bowl.  By that time, there was just a little bit of clay left in the bag that I opened (each bag has about 25 pounds), so I thought it would be cool to do a 3 pound bowl, a 2 pound bowl, and a 1 pound bowl.

Left to right starting in the back - 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, and 1.

Next I loaded a bisque fire.  A bisque fire goes to approximately 1940 degrees.  Lisa was kind enough to start the kiln when she left for the day.  This afternoon when I went in about 4 pm to check on things, the computer on the kiln showed me that it took just over 10 hours to fire and had cooled to about 565 degrees.  The studio itself was a very toasty 95 degrees since we turned the air conditioning off.  It just doesn't make sense to me to run the air to cool a space that no one is going to be in for more than 24 hours. I like for my utility bill to be as small a number as it can be!  I plan to unload tomorrow.  I've also got 7 bowls to trim and will need to work on glazing so that I can fire a glaze fire as soon as possible.  

Oh, by the way, it's officially summer now.  In between trips (I have 2 more places to go this summer), I'm going to be a professional potter for the next 8 weeks.  Happy Dance!!