Monday October 27

Another Monday -- the beginning of week 5, the midway point of the quarter -- and another Week In Preview at the Pio...

Arrangements have been made with Italiaidea in order to speed things along. Rather than Italian classes stretching toward December

...the Italiaidea grading system has been reworked so that credits will be shown on our transcript as Pass/Fail

and our final crits, we will have longer class days but fewer of them. Get there a little earlier, stay a little later, have it done with sooner. And although the University of Washington offers equivalent course credit for our Italiaidea classwork, there are some students who don't need the distraction of hustling for a good grade point in a language course when, Layne reminds us, our main objective in coming here is to Make Art. To that end, the grading system has been reworked so that Italiaidea credits will be shown on our transcript as Pass/Fail. Which, though it was a relief to some in the group, was really Layne's newest way of reminding us that we have no excuse to not get busy in the studio.

Layne also feels it may help stir up the elements if the undergrads and grads take part in the process of critiquing each other's works, so tonight's Grad Seminar will be something of an open house, with undergrads urged to offer their opinions in the crits of the grad students' work, and the grad students equally giving their assessment of what they see in our projects.

So after an Italiaidea class which not only did I not blow off but which started half an hour earlier, I went to the Pio to take part in a crit of the grad students' thesis work in progress....