by David Ballantine (adapted from The Wooden Post, vol 14, December 2019).
Future of Mentoring: “in the Classroom”
One of the best ways we can advance the Kez movement beyond our current programs is for our membership to actively volunteer their time to help foster outreach programs with youth. Even though the trends are running against the future of wood shops in high schools, there are definitely schools bucking this trend and looking for ways to connect with expertise to expand their programs. Several programs of this type are already being done in Japan, where an expert in joinery helps by teaching simple layout and the kids use their own hand tools. This year KEZ USA has begun a pilot program in the Anderson Valley – Northern Mendocino County.
Bringing skilled Kezurou-Kai USA members into the classroom is more than exciting, it’s genius. There are many reasons why Japan has the oldest wooden structures in the world despite earthquakes riddling their country and why that country still has vibrant forests despite wood being so integral in every facet of their society. The values and attitudes that afford these wonders are worth teaching and carrying forward to new generations in our part of the world.
A few years ago an administrator asked if I would like to teach high school shop classes. With twenty-five-plus years of working as a carpenter, construction supervisor and designer-draftsman, I had more than enough background and experience to earn my Career Technical Education (CTE) credential to go along with my English credential. But I cringed at the thought of working with teenagers and power tools. I’ve seen my share of accidents on the job and know more than a few trades workers missing digits on their hands. Three years later, however, I can say that I have never loved doing anything as much as what I am doing right now. The delight on student faces and confidence in their voices after using a hand saw to cut their tenons or a chisel to chisel out a mortise is priceless.
When I attended my first Kezurou-kai USA event this past summer, something clicked. The engagement and camaraderie for three days in El Cerrito was exactly the atmosphere I work to create in the classroom. The log preparation, metal forging, plane sharpening, sawhorse building all require intense concentration of the sort that teenagers are rarely used to and desperately need more of. And I want every one of those activities to be commonplace in my school.
I teach at the Anderson Valley Jr./Sr. High School in Mendocino County. In its heyday my building housed an impressive wood shop, architectural studies, auto shop, machining, welding and an aviation program that led to students earning a pilot’s license. Through the 80s and 90s it produced contractors, carpenters, mechanics, machinists and loggers that still work and live in the area.In the last twenty years, however, funding was practically nonexistent. The program and the building suffered. It has only been the last few years that grant monies, along with the push for PBL (Project Based Learning), have reinvigorated Anderson Valley’s vocational programs. My plan, however, is to reinvent the idea of shop class. We now house several 3-D printers, a CNC router table and we teach several software programs from CAD (computer aided drafting), Photoshop, to CAM (computer aided manufacturing). Instead of auto shop with combustion engines, we are planning an EV (electric vehicle) program. Yet, the core program remains hand tool use for a variety of reasons.
The single most important change in education of the last two decades is that we have gone from a society of secretaries, managers, and assembly workers to one that requires critical thinking skills. Students now aren’t preparing for their future, they have to be prepared to invent it. Every one of the skills I watched being performed at the weekend Kez in El Cerrito required incredible focus and thoughtfulness of individuals as they chiseled straight mortises for perfect tenons, adjusted and readjusted their plane blades to achieve fine, even shavings, and watched feet and toes as they swung their broad axes while balancing on a log.
This is the sort of activity that fosters real learning. We now have mountains of data that show retention of standardized testing material drops as low as thirty percent within six months after graduation. I know, however, the student that used Pythagorean Theorem to square a shed foundation will remember the 3-4-5 rule for the rest of his life. Japanese woodworking, with the excitement it generates, becomes a gateway into Biology and Forest Stewardship, History and Anthropology, Engineering and Math. There isn’t a subject a student wouldn’t gladly tackle once tied to the magic of Japanese Joinery.
I have started slow, having my first year students making mallets and quickly graduating them to Japanese toolboxes. Wanting the classes to reflect the needs of current realities, we laser and CNC route our names and logos onto our boxes. We draw them on SketchUp and other CAD programs. But when students host our Community Exposition Night, they and their parents linger around the toolboxes explaining how their lid slides in and how the grain wraps around their box because they cut it just so. Kezurou-kai is a way to expand the program into something special with a curriculum that can really challenge them.
The building and tools still have a long way to go but what others see as in serious need of repair, I see as an opportunity. We are slowly remodeling the classrooms as we train new students. We are planning a water retention garden next to the shop and it will need benches and perhaps a gate. There is a cement slab behind the office in need of a pergola. This year we will be building several saw horses to accommodate some walnut slabs that were donated for workbenches.
When I asked Karl Bareis for a set of plans for the sawhorses, he forwarded the request to Ryosei Kaneko, who built a sawhorse for my program instead, so that the students can take it apart in order to understand how it goes together before they build it. And there have been others volunteering. Jay Van Arsdale, who is beginning his 21st year teaching woodworking in the California Community College system, has kindly created a template for creating a program for high schools.
This, I feel, is the beginning of an exquisite story that builds on a culture of forestry and woodworking in the Pacific Northwest so that its youth might come to fully appreciate the treasure that abounds in their backyards.