today in the wood shop...

Walnut and maple

I have prep work to do today for Monday's classes. My high school students have prepared designs for boxes they want to make. They mostly lack general drawing skills, but have come up with  materials lists to allow me to have sufficient material on hand for their use. Each is designing a box that comes ready anchored to their own personal interests. As all of life is experimental, learning, too should be experimental, and so we will voyage together in this.

The past couple days, I spent cleaning my home wood shop  and preparing parts for making a variety of box sizes. Shifting gears and moving in a new direction is par for the course, and the box parts, so recently abandoned will wait in trays until I have time to do more milling of the joints that fit them together.

I continue reading William James and finding value in what he tells about teaching and psychology.

“No matter how scatter-brained the type of a man's successive fields of consciousness may be, if he really cares for a subject, he will return to it incessantly from his incessant wanderings, and first and last do more with it, and get more results from it, than another person whose attention may be more continuous during a given interval, but whose passion for the subject is of a more languid and less permanent sort. Some of the most efficient workers I know are of the ultra-scatterbrained type. One friend, who does a prodigious quantity of work, has in fact confessed to me that, if he wants to get ideas on any subject, he sits down to work at something else, his best results coming through his mind-wanderings. This is perhaps an epigrammatic exaggeration on his part; but I seriously think that no one of us need be too much distressed at his own shortcomings in this regard. Our mind may enjoy but little comfort, may be restless and feel confused; but it may be extremely efficient all the same.” - William James, Talks To Teachers On Psychology; And To Students On Some Of Life's Ideals, 1899

The photo above is a box I had made a few years ago, and was taken to show a possible customer.

Make, fix, create and help others to do so, too.