odds and ends, stems and branches...

The Danish oil finish deepens the color of the wood.

I feel compelled to write a thing or two in the blog each day just to keep in practice. Writing is just like anything else. You get better by practice, but if you don't have anything particular to say, you'd best remain silent.

Silence, in fact, is like a nice straight board of curly maple that with right tools and some skill and vision can be made into damn near anything. But once you begin hacking away at it, the possibilities that lie within it are diminished. You can thus learn valuable lessons from doing real things.

With that said, and recognizing that I'm only hacking away at the keyboard, I will tell that my post office box door treasure boxes are complete. I sent off the Governor's Quality Awards yesterday, and spent part of the day beginning to move tools and equipment to my new smaller wood shop at the center of the Clear Spring School campus. I am looking forward to being more in the thick of things, and making woodworking even more central to the learning experience.

I still have a bit of finish work to do on the boxes I brought home from Marc Adams School of Woodworking, and learned last night that in the coming year, I'll be given three opportunities to teach there... two week long classes and one weekend class. Because my classes tend to fill quickly, I hope my readers will be watchful and sign up at the earliest opportunity.

That academicians and policy makers lost their way, failing to understand the interrelationship between the hands-on activities, making useful and beautiful things, and the development of character and intellect is the source of greatest stupidity in modern education. Since it is damned near impossible for educational policy makers to see beyond their own biases into areas of craftsmanship to which they have never been exposed, and thus would never understand, we must rise up and take matters and materials into our own hands.

Make, fix and create...