today in the woodshop.

I have only three classes today at Clear Spring School as my upper elementary school class is on their school trip. My middle school and high school students are finishing their guitars. In my home shop I'm needing to finish a few things to be able to get them out of my way and into galleries to be sold so that I can make room for new work. A complete cleaning and reorganization is in order from one end of my life to the other.

I noticed in an article in Time Magazine that colleges and universities are once again wrestling with admissions standards. They need diversity of thought and diversity of appearance within the student body to sustain higher standards of institutional self respect. Grade point averages and test scores proved to be a poor means of assessment to predict student fit. Now they are using other tools including social media as a metric. Makes sense, right? If during lectures for which parents or benefactors have paid enormous sums of money for students to attend, the students are paying attention to facebook instead, then perhaps grades and assessments in university courses should be based on facebooking skills. But are there such things?

We know that the purpose of each new iteration of software and hardware is to make things easier. The idea of technology is to take things that were difficult and make them easy for all those who can afford to buy in. And yet, the true rewards that come to us are through those skills that have remolded the character, the intellect and the sense of self through the effort we have applied to learning.

One thing about technology that should be noted. It is always spinning beyond itself, and beyond its practitioners who are always left awaiting the next big thing. But we can choose where we buy in.  We can choose to do things that are difficult and rewarding. Or we can choose not to discover our own real power.

The boxes above are among those awaiting finish.

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