Who Taught the Pottery Class? Tracing a 'Quantity Wins' Story

The famous pottery class, in which the group graded on pounds of pots beat the group graded on one perfect pot, was reported by one of its authors as a university photography class. The teacher was probably the photographer Jerry Uelsmann. The pots were an editorial swap, and the story has never been backed by anything beyond the authors’ word.

I went looking for the class after finding the story told four different ways in four places. Here is the trail, oldest first.

What does Art & Fear actually say?

David Bayles and Ted Orland published Art & Fear in 1993. The passage describes a ceramics teacher who divides his class in two. One side is graded on the weight of its output: fifty pounds of pots earns an A, forty a B. The other side must turn in a single pot, and it has to be perfect. The line people remember is that “the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity” (this wording comes from a LessWrong post that cites page 29; I did not have the book open).

Notice what is missing. No teacher is named. No school, year or number of students. The book has no notes or bibliography, so there is nowhere to chase it. And “highest quality” is never defined, so we do not know who judged or how.

What did Jeff Atwood add in 2008?

Less than the story’s reputation suggests. Atwood’s Coding Horror post of 2 August 2008 (its address ends in “quantity-always-trumps-quality”) opens by saying a reader, Nathan Bowers, had pointed him to “this five year old Cool Tools entry” on Art & Fear. He quotes the ceramics passage from it, hedges that software is perhaps “craft” or “engineering” more than “art”, asks “Where have I heard this before?”, and ends with advice to keep building until you get one that works.

So Atwood did not misreport a class. He relayed an excerpt that Kevin Kelly had posted on Cool Tools on 9 December 2003, which itself quoted the book. What he contributed was the bridge to programming, and the bridge is what made the story travel through the software world. His post names no teacher and no source beyond the quote.

Was there a real class?

Probably, and a different one. In July 2016 a Hacker News user named kens emailed Bayles and reported that the reply said it was not a ceramics class but “a university level photography class”, and that apart from the medium it was “the literal truth”. That is second-hand, and I could not see the thread itself. On 18 October 2016 Orland wrote to James Clear that the book “faithfully captures the scene as Jerry told it to me”, with photography replaced by ceramics, and that the retelling allowed “some literary license”. The Jerry is Uelsmann, who taught at the University of Florida; he died in 2022 and, as far as I can find, never confirmed the story himself. (My Bayles and Orland quotations come via the LessWrong post and search summaries. I read Clear’s page directly.)

If you read my earlier piece on Ira Glass and the gap, you have met the Uelsmann origin already. What is new here is the paper trail: who said it, when, and through which hands.

How did Clear and Kleon retell it?

James Clear’s Atomic Habits (2018) tells the photography version in chapter 11. As Clear has it, Uelsmann grades one group on volume (100 photos for an A, 90 for a B, 80 for a C) and the other on a single near-perfect photo. The quantity students keep shooting and experimenting; the quality students “sat around speculating about perfection” and end with one mediocre print. Orland’s email sits in an endnote. The numbers here differ from the book’s pounds of pots, which is consistent with the book’s version being adapted.

One oddity: according to LessWrong’s reading of archived pages, Clear’s own website still told the ceramics version without the footnote as late as May 2018, before the book came out. That is the story mutating in public. Austin Kleon, on 10 December 2020, retold the pottery version and then wondered why Clear had switched to photography. Clear’s endnotes answered him.

What does ‘quantity’ mean for a habit?

Take the anecdote at face value and the lesson is narrower than “do more”. The quantity students had a countable unit (a pot, a print), a deadline, and a finished object that someone else could look at. That last part is the difference between a repetition and a rep. Clear’s other famous counting story, a stockbroker moving clips between two jars, has its own missing context.

For a habit, I would define quantity as repetitions that leave a trace another person can check. Ten hours of “working on the novel” has no trace. Ten pages posted to a friend every Friday does. Clear makes a related point about repetition versus time, and the ice-cube plateau explains why early reps feel wasted; the pot weight is the antidote, because the pile grows whether or not any single pot is good.

Waking up shows the same shape in miniature. An alarm that you can dismiss produces zero countable reps. A rule that requires a short video within 30 seconds, as DontSnooze does, produces one dated clip per morning, and the clips pile up like pots. I would not claim that makes anyone better at waking, only that it turns an intention into a countable thing. For creative work the equivalent is a weekly deliverable with a witness who actually looks.

So is it true?

As an anecdote, it is real enough: a teacher probably did run such an exercise, and two authors who knew him vouched for it. As evidence, it is thin. There was no random assignment, no blind judge, no definition of quality, and no way to rule out that the students who chose volume were already the keener ones. Nobody can say whether the effect would hold for you, or how large it would be.

What survives is a small mechanism. More completed attempts mean more chances to see what went wrong. If you want to test it, do it on yourself: pick a unit, count it for a month, and ask someone to look at the pile.