Each and every person who has at some point attended school has some expertise in its success, its effects, and its failings. We have placed too much emphasis on statistical frameworks constructed of abstract data, while real learning is built on the foundation of experience... personal experience. Until we have called upon students, teachers, administrators, parents, and politicians to confidently explore their own very personal experiences in the classroom and to judge for themselves the effect, we will be diddling away the hours, dooming our children to boredom and preventing their greatest success. If you think brains in the beltway will come up with new plans for the necessary revolution in education you may just as well forget about it. They've been thinking about it for a long. It will take hands-on expertise expressed through hands-on teaching to do the job.
Today in the wood shop, I am joining parts using yet another interesting mortise and tenon joinery technique. The photo above shows the joint in process. The stop block clamped to the sled controls the position of the tenon as it is cut. You can see in the photo below, two more steps. In the first the interlocking finger joints of the tenons are cut. In the second, I used the band saw to cut away waste, allowing the two tenons to join from both sides of the mortised piece shown.
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