day two

Today was day 2 of my box making class at Marc Adams School of Woodworking. I demonstrated making finger joints, putting a raised panel top on a box, and began demonstrating other techniques including keyed miter joints. Yesterday we talked about design, the range of techniques, and how forgiveness plays an important role in helping us learn and become creative. After a thorough study of the principles of tool safety and some demonstration to get the boxes rolling, it took the students only a few minutes to scratch their heads and begin work. As one student informed me, she had been in classes where everyone made the same thing, but after the class, leaving the influence of the teacher, no one had learned enough to do again what they had done. And so the whole process of learning is based on a dance like movement between the concrete and abstract, and the use of the hands to make clear what must happen in the mind for learning to become real and replicable.

As we were in class yesterday, the worldwide financial situation became deeply troubling. We will have leadership based on either rhetoric or reality, and it seems we have one when what is needed is the other. In order to have reality based leadership, we need reality based education and as we don't have it, we can expect to watch our culture and economy go to hell in a handbasket with leadership twiddling their thumbs and running off at the mouth, as that seems to be all they have been trained for and all that we've been trained to expect. When the members of congress are MBAs and not makers of real things, you can expect their notions to be; abstract and unfounded. God help us. We will each have to take matters into our own hands. Parents, grandparents, teach your children well.

Make, fix and create...