fellow teachers...

I enjoy association with other teachers, and the teachers I meet at Marc Adams School often reinforce my own observations. My two fellow teachers this last week were John S. Morgan, And Greg Johnson. John teaches graphic design at Auburn and makes interesting hand-cranked automata which you can see in his website. Greg is a phenomenal furniture finisher who had worked for years with Wendell Castle. One of the things we discussed was the way technology is narrowing our focus onto screens leading us to effectively ignore those things that may be important going on around us. And so there is some irony in all our lives. We make use of technology, but attempt to center our lives in things that bring added richness and depth. In John's class, students made a variety of hand cranked mechanisms rooted in the same technologies that enabled coo coo clocks to keep time, and industrial machinery to perform complex processes. In Greg's class students learned a variety of furniture finishing techniques.

“… if we understand the past, we will be better able to continue a culture legacy of beautiful form and effective communication. If we ignore this legacy, we run the risk of becoming buried in a mindless morass of a commercialism whose mole-like vision ignores human values and needs as it burrows forward into darkness..”~Philip B. Meggs

Today we will be driving my daughter to grad school. In my absence,

Make, fix and create...