by KP | Jun 11, 2014 | Education, Journalism, Social Issues
This past weekend, a school colleague challenged me to ‘get a selfie with the president.’ As I watched President Obama leave the State Room where he had just spent the last hour talking with about a hundred of us about education, I heard one young woman in...
by KP | May 31, 2014 | Ceramics, Education
The ending of a school year is never easy. I’ve often thought that school should be a year-round job, with the consistency of daily rhythms and relationships throughout the calendar year. Summer means severing ties, saying goodbyes and see-you-laters, and...
by KP | May 13, 2014 | Education, Social Issues
In the spring of 1993, I received a letter that changed my life. I’d been accepted into the Pennsylvania Governor’s School for the Arts – a 5-week summer program for the visual and performing arts.  Over 2,000 high school sophomores and juniors applied, and 200...
by KP | May 11, 2014 | Education, Social Issues
It is May.  The seniors are finished with regular classes, but still wander in and out of the studio. The art show is finished and slowly disassembling itself.  I’m somewhere between a sigh of relief and the anxiety of what’s next. For the last week or so, a student...
by KP | Mar 2, 2014 | Ceramics, Education
It’s early in a new semester, and my Ceramics I students are beginning to throw on the potter’s wheel. Fumbling hands dry out with friction, bodies rock back and forth with the pressure of two pounds of spinning clay.  In the first couple of days, a student or two...
