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By Joe Zavala February 05. 2016 8:14PM Sikskiyou students embrace Middle School Fridays Ellie Berg, 14, weaves scraps of material into a rug using a floor loom during The SisKiyou School's "Middle School Fridays." Daily Tidings/Denise Baratta Liam Sturgill slowly pulls a metal rod out of a mailbox-sized furnace and carefully inspects, from a safe distance, the half of the roughly 2-foot long pole that sat searing in the hot zone only moments ago. It glows a bright sunset orange but, he decides, is still not quite ready for sculpting, so Solomon, protected by a pair of massive leather gloves, slides it back into place with the other five rods. “This class is awesome,” said Sturgill, raising his voice slightly to compensate for the metal on metal clanging of The Siskiyou School’s blacksmithing class. “We’ve made dinner bells and coat racks so far. And right now we’re making snakes.” Asking a half-dozen middle school students to customize lava-hot metal using little more than their bare hands, mallets and a blazing furnace may sound like a one-way ticket to the Asante Ashland Community Hospital burn unit, but The Siskiyou School’s sixth, seventh- and eighth-graders are in good hands during what the school has dubbed “Middle School Fridays.” Some of the classes are taught by The Siskiyou School teachers, but most are handled by locals who are experts in their field, such as Bryan Pancheau, who leads the blacksmithing class. The students select from eight courses at the beginning of each quarter — by the time they move on to high school each student will have been exposed to about 15 career-type electives. Other classes, and teachers, include print-making (Molly McKissick), pottery (Annabel Lee Allen, who takes students to her pottery studio), weaving/fiber arts (Laura Hotlsberg), fitness/strength training (Ben Gaskin and the YMCA staff), cooking (Kristine Pandey), drawing (Claire Burbridge) and journalism (head of school Lisa Barry). The Siskiyou School instituted its Middle School Friday program about seven years ago and it’s been a huge hit, says pedagogical chair Karl Johnson. “It’s a chance for the middle school students to really choose an area that they want to go into and experience for a quarter,” Johnson said. “It’s been hugely successful. You can see, they’re all engaged, really loving it and getting into it. It’s also a co-mingling of the three middle school classes, so you get sixth-graders rubbing shoulders with eighth-graders, and that has some good effects. They see the maturity of the older students and their advanced abilities.” Pancheau supervised a group of about a half-dozen students Friday as they worked through the steps to turn metal rods into colorful, twisting snakes, first heating then pounding in pairs before finishing with a quick spray paint job. By the end of Friday’s 90-minute session several rainbow-colored snakes swayed like wind chimes on the outskirts of the blacksmith center. “The coat hook, that was pretty fun because we got to twist it,” sixth-grader Amelia Evans said. “But you can get burned pretty easily.” In McKissick’s print-making class, students sketch whatever they choose onto a rubber, tile-sized square pad then use a gouging tool to etch out their creation. From there, they use a roller to apply a layer of paint onto the surface of their rubber design, which can then be pressed onto white paper for the finished product. McKissick looked on as one of her students carefully rolled over her rubber tile Friday, gently correcting her after several quick swipes. “I would try to get one clean stroke top to bottom,” she said. “And now you’re ready. One stroke is what you want because we’re trying to get it really evenly on there.” Seventh-grader Elan Soloman was erasing pencil lines on his drawing as he was wrapping up his rendition of a city street seen from high above, complete with skyscrapers jutting up and out. Soloman hopes the 3D illusion will be enhanced once the picture is transferred to paper. “I didn’t really know what to do so I just did this,” he said. The drawing class is led by Burbridge, a professional artist who moved to Ashland from London five years ago. She had perhaps the quietest class on campus Friday, each student's head tilted in concentration as their hands delicately scraped white pencils against black paper. The exercise, she explained, is designed to help the students shake up the brain’s tendency to switch into auto pilot when recreating common features. “It’s a different way of looking it,” Burbridge said. “It’s to trick them out of their symbol system. At this age they know what an eye looks like, they know what a nose looks like, and lips, and this is to try to make them actually observe.” Johnson said it’s no coincidence that Middle School Fridays weren’t instead placed in the middle of the week or beginning. The fun learning day has always been held on a Friday because it was placed there strategically, as a sort of reward. The Waldorf school’s oldest students study hard all week, so by Friday it's nice to have a little fun while still learning a skill. “This is sort of an out-breath after a hard week of working on their academics, and they get to do all these activities,” he said. While explaining the concept, Johnson looks up and notices an inscription on the wall next to the main office that sums it all up. “It’s like this saying up here,” he says, “which really encapsulates the whole of Waldorf education. 'What the heart says is good and true, the head can plan and the hands can do.’ There's a real effort to have a balanced education that's not only intellectual but also works on a social and emotional level. It's about strengthening their will to do the things that they imagine they can do. To have the ability to envision it and then to be able to do it." Joe Zavala is a reporter for the Ashland Daily Tidings. Reach him at 541-821-0829 or [email protected]. http://www.dailytidings.com/article/20160205/NEWS/160209890 © 2016 Copyright © 1995-2011 Crain Communications Inc. All Rights Reserved. Terms of Use Privacy Statement -->