Class away from class
By Jodelle GreinerArticle Photos
MARSHALL - Have fun while you learn. That could've been the motto of the Young Artists Conference at Southwest Minnesota State University on Friday.
A total of 700 kindergarten through eighth-graders from an 18-county area converged on SMSU to take part in the 15th annual conference.
"It's an opportunity to get the students interested in the various arts and activities that they probably can't do in their local school district," said Sue Gorecki, coordinator of student activities at SMSU.
Students could take part in three classes and pick their favorites from 24 selections. One of the most popular classes is the wheel thrown pottery making because "most schools don't have kilns," said Gorecki.
It's also one of the toughest classes to get into. If a student has taken it once, "we don't schedule them again," Gorecki said. That's because the three classes taught by Jim Swartz, who teaches the subject at SMSU, are limited to just 15 students each. Swartz said that's the maximum he can handle because there are only 14 wheels.
"One young man thought he got left out, but he got a treat," Swartz said. The boy actually got to make two clay containers: the first by hand and the second on the wheel when one got free.
Maddy Sook, a fifth-grader at Marshall Middle School, had never thrown pottery on a wheel before.
"It's turned out pretty well," she said of her still-wet sculpture, which she intended to be "a pot like a teacup."
With her hands covered in wet clay, she admitted with a grin that it was messy, "but very fun" and she definitely wants to do more. "Yeah, a lot," she said enthusiastically.
Unfortunately, Sook and the others couldn't take their creations home with them. The clay must dry, be fired in a kiln, glazed and re-fired to be harder, said Swartz. The kids got to pick the colors for their pottery. After the processing, the pottery will be shipped to the schools.
Swartz figures he's taught in all the Young Artists conferences and continues to do it because teaching the youngsters is "refreshing." He says he can throw pottery literally blindfolded, but says the conference "causes you to see it through the eyes of someone doing it for the first time. Young kids have no fear."
It's not just fun for the kids. Nicole DeBoer wished the classes were available for adults after watching her son, Deacon, a Marshall fourth-grader, make a wire sculpture in the class led by Michon and David Weeks. Nicole DeBoer volunteered to help the students drill holes in a wood base for their wires.
Deacon had never tried wire sculpture before, but "I like it," he said, adding that he will "probably" keep doing wire sculpture in the future.
It was his second year to come to Young Artists and Nicole DeBoer was enthusiastic about the experience.
"People just love it," she said. "I love it because it's inspiring."
Michon Weeks, a painter and teacher in the art program at SMSU, has participated in almost all the Young Artists conferences and thinks they are important.
"So many rural schools don't have art teachers," she said.
"They get a real art experience and get to be expressive and creative and work with new material that they don't usually get to work with."
Usually she has 25 kids in her class, but so many wanted to take part this year, she recruited her husband, David, to help so they could do 50 in each class.
"They're so enthusiastic and I enjoy it," she said.
Making glass beads is "much like chess: easy to learn, hard to master," said Garret Bitker, who taught the class at the conference.
The students proved him right.
Bitker, who teaches science at Walnut Grove Middle School, instructed the sixth- through eighth-graders in safety and how to create a glass bead with a hot metal rod, dry clay and melting glass. Both the rod and glass have to be hot for the glass to adhere to the rod, which is covered by the dry clay. Without the clay, the glass would stick to the rod and never come off, Bitker said.
One who got it right the first time was Alex Bofferding, a sixth-grader at Lakeview, who admitted making glass beads wasn't what she'd expected. She thought it would take longer than it did, but said she had "a lot" of fun and would like to keep making glass beads, even though she wasn't sure what she would do with the one she had made.
It's the experience that counts.
