This article describes a school residency project which balloons in complexity, difficulty and meaning--making the incomprehensible tangible. The project had started in the spring of 1996, when the social studies teacher of Community Day School in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Mr. Bill Walter, wanted the students to understand the enormity of the Holocaust. He gave his students an assignment: They were to collect the pull-off tabs from aluminum cans, bringing them in until the total was 6 million, symbolizing the number of Jews killed in the Holocaust. It took them almost 5 years to amass the 6 million. In this article, the author describes how she, as the Artist-in-Residence at the Community Day School, guided the students in the process of creating a Holocaust Memorial Sculpture using a truly unusual material: aluminum pop tabs.