moving toward completion.

I have only about 5 more weeks to finish the school year at Clear Spring and some of my students are getting finished with their guitars. Some are naturally done more carefully and quickly than others, largely related to how much interest they have in craftsmanship vs. other things. Students who listen and take instruction well have made greater progress than those who've taken a more experimental approach.

As they finish, I  will offer them time to develop greater skill on the lathe, or to begin short term independent projects of their own design. My upper school students will lose one week of wood shop time due to travel school and may not finish their guitars in time, depending on how well they have been engaged up to this point.

There is a saying about leading horses to the water trough. Just as one cannot force a horse to drink, you cannot force a child to learn the things you hope they might learn, and so rather than waste your time or theirs, it makes sense to make allowances.

Today I'm writing without having much to say, except about the business of each day. The feral pigs returned last night to do further damage to our garden beds. Stopping them seems to be beyond our capacity and beyond our will, in that we are unwilling to have our lives completely disrupted by them. I bought a motion detector that would have warned us of last night's visit but my wife refuses to have our sleeping and waking hours disturbed by every chip monk that runs across our lawn. We'll take photos today to share with our local county government and make a presentation at the next meeting of our county supervisors.

The guitars at left are among those that received strings in yesterday's woodshop.

We had dinner with a friend from Norway on Monday night, and she was a bit delighted that I could understand a bit of her Norwegian.  So in 138 days of studying Swedish and Norwegian using Duolingo.com, I've made progress. Choose a language and study for a half hour each day, and you'll have not wasted your time.

Make, fix, create and extend to others the love of learning likewise.