It is just half past September, with 12 weeks left to go (if you count Thanksgiving as a week, which is questionable, because as of mid-November no one is thinking about anything but turkeys -- both the edible and relative kind). We're still in the beginning of the semester, but I am already feeling a panicky crunch. I'm counting the weeks left and wondering, how on earth am I going to fit it all in?

It isn't a heroic amount of projects, really. Just four in each class. Standard stuff. Walk into any design class in any higher ed institution and I promise you they are designing series' of book covers, logos, stationary suites, event invitations. The desired result is standard as well: to have students create work they can use to populate portfolios, to obtain internships and eventually full-time employment. It is the same goal of every program of applied art since the dawn of programs in applied art.

My conundrum isn't a unique one either. With each lesson, with each lecture and critique, there is so much material to cover. So much to transform from shadowy rumor to clear understanding. Because, as we all know, you don't know what you don't know.

In my wild dreams, I want to present mundane challenges in type, spend drudgerous weeks forcing the yet uninitiated to design uncomfortable and unglamorous reply cards to utilitarian perfection because there is so much to learn from simply designing a form properly (think of how much easier life would be if someone had provided this lesson for the neanderthal designing our income tax forms...). I want to have a student rework a logo until there is no question of it's conceptual solidity or it's aesthetic merit. I want to push a class to have big BIG ideas and distill them to the point that they seem simple and effortless -- like watching figure skaters swirl into a fluid finale. Beautiful, elegant, and effortless to comprehend but complex, arduously practiced and purposefully executed in conception.

Ultimately, it is the luxury of time I long to give to my students. A figure skater will spend countless hours practicing a single program. I wish for the same countless hours for the design student to think long and hard, to work and rework, to fail and falter, doubt and despair, and then after weeks of critique ultimately persevere. True accomplishment would be more than gaining a pretty portfolio piece, it would be to gain understanding of process and reveal a true solution.

Isn't that what school, what education is all about? Isn't that what we all want, really? Time to think, to experiment, to play languidly with letters and images and ideas until they submit to our desires. What an utopian idea!

And an unrealistic one. It may have been proven that multi-tasking makes us less, rather than more, effective, but we do it. We may know that solutions created from a few quick weeks (or days, or hours) of application are less effective but that is what is expected of creative professionals, and so this is what we expect of ourselves. No client would want to pay for months of languid discovery and I don't blame them.

But, in educating the undergraduate, is the solution to temper expectations from the gradual revelation of intimate understanding to the instant flash of dim awareness? To confront through a buffet of projects how much there is yet unmastered? To compensate by stressing the importance of pushing one's self into internships, contests, magazines and design showcases? Because a portfolio needs 8-10 projects, not 2-4. Before portfolio day, even accomplished students worry that they don't have enough, because a breadth must be shown, or we fear what would be missing.

But I wonder, what are we missing? Because, as we all know, you don't know what you don't know.