Sunday, February 3, 2008

An immaculate recipe

Sister Corita Kent, of the Art Department at Immaculate Heart College, drew up a list of rules for her classes. I'd like to tattoo these on the backs of my students' hands.
  1. Find a place you trust and then try trusting it for a while.
  2. General duties of a student: pull everything out of your teacher, pull everything out of your fellow students.
  3. General duties of a teacher: pull everything out of your students.
  4. Consider everything an experiment.
  5. Be self-disciplined. This means finding someone wise or smart and choosing to follow them. To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.
  6. Nothing is a mistake. There is no win and no fail. There is only make.
  7. The only rule is work. If you work it will lead to something. It’s the people who do all of the work all the time who eventually catch on to things.
  8. Don’t try to create and analyse at the same time. They’re different processes.
  9. Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It’s lighter than you think.
  10. “We’re breaking all of the rules. Even our own rules. And how do we do that? By leaving plenty of room for X quantities.” - John Cage.

Helpful hints: Always be around. Come or go to everything always. Go to classes. Read anything you can get your hands on. Look at movies carefully often. Save everything, it might come in handy later.

There should be new rules next week.

3 comments:

Unknown said...

I love those rules. I'm going to print them out and hang them on my wall.

By the way, Ash said everyone was very, very impressed with your talk at Hendrix - on your subject matter and your style. Wish I could have been there, but I had to work.

the secret knitter said...

I'm printing these when I get to work tomorrow. Thanks for sharing them.

Anonymous said...

I get in trouble when I save everything (because it might come in handy). Justin sighs a lot. And pouts. And glares.