Yesterday at the Clear Spring School we were visited by Claudia Daggett, head of our Accreditation body, ISACS. The acronym stands for Independent Schools of the Central States, and we have been a member of ISACS for over 20 years. In fact, we are entering our fourth round of accreditation review which takes place in 7 year cycles. Claudia was visiting the ISACS schools of Arkansas and she took this photo for her Twitter account.I have decided that some of my students are suffering from a lack of imagination that comes from their play with video games. They come to wood shop wanting to make the kinds of weapons they are trained by those games to seek... swords, and axes and the like. And so part of my responsibility is to push them beyond those things, and into the wide arena of lovely and useful things that can be made from wood. The birdhouses being made for the Northwest Arkansas Master Naturalists are only one small example.
Make, fix and create... Assist others in imagining their own roles as makers of beautiful and useful things.
Not sure this interest in weapons is just from video games--I seem to recall having a keen interest in these things well before playing video games. But even with these there is a learning opportunity: while "redwood" sounds like a great material for a sword, don't bring your painstakingly crafted redwood sword to a stick fight with brutes wielding doug fir...
ReplyDelete