thinking in black and white...

Yesterday I put my new hinge routing template to use installing hinges for my new chapel shaped cabinets. I will make another similar template for routing the hinge mortises for the doors, which are now cut to shape and ready for further design work. This template will serve as a guide to make the next.

I use a dado clean out bit in a small router to cut within the confines set by the template. The bearing follows the shape while the bit cuts the stock. The corners must be chiseled to fit the hinge, but the template also serves as a guide for the chisel.

In this month's National Geographic Magazine, an article about disbelief in science offers troubling conclusions about American education.

"Scientific thinking has to be taught, and sometimes it's not taught well... Students come away thinking of science as a collection of facts, not a method... The scientific method doesn't come naturally, and many college students don't know what evidence is."

The article makes a mistake in stating that the scientific method is relatively new. In fact the method of thinking exercised in the creation of useful objects is the foundation of the scientific method. You can call it studio thinking, a name given to it by researchers at Harvard, or you can call it maker think. In crafts, you act in an experimental manner and then observe results. What differs between science and crafts comes in the sharing with others the process through which you have achieved results.

The article wonders what we can do to restore a level of scientific understanding and literacy to our nation's schooling. The answer is simple. Allow our students to do real things. In schooling we ask our children to think in black and white,  right and wrong answers but the world of education can come in full color.

Make, fix and create...