The hands speak for themselves

The written word has lost some of its power to incite. The power of images and particularly of video has grown enormously through the internet. A few years back I showed some plans to one of my students who pushing them aside complained, "I'm a visual learner." "These are visual plans," I suggested. "Not that kind of visual," she protested. "I'm a youtube visual learner.

And so, with careful editing, we can be led from the truth.

Not so, when the hands speak for themselves.

"It is easy to juggle with words, to argue in a circle, to make the worse appear the better reason, and to reach false conclusions which wear a plausible aspect. But it is not so with things. If the cylinder is not tight, the steam engine is a lifeless mass of iron of no value whatever. A flaw in the wheel of the locomotive wrecks the train. Through a defective flue in the chimney the house is set on fire. A lie in the concrete is always hideous; like murder, it will out. Hence it is that the mind is liable to fall into grave errors until it is fortified by the wise counsel of the practical hand."––Charles H. Hamm.

The human hand is constantly seeking the truth and finding it. By leaving laboratory science and wood shop and the arts outside of education, we have diminished our children in both character and intellect, and diminished human culture.

What you see in the photo are 22 bluebird houses being made at the Clear Spring School for the Northwest Arkansas Master Naturalists to place and attend in our local Lake Leatherwood City Park.We diverged slightly from the published plans, in that I wanted them to have sloped roofs to shed water and add longevity. We also added predator protectors on the fronts that can prevent snakes from getting a foothold and entering the nesting box.

Make, fix and create...