Learning to Write Like a First Grade Teacher

By Bobby Neal Winters

I’ve always been a clutz.  I’ve had poor hand eye coordination. My handwriting is horrible and my printing is hardly  better. Over the last year, however, I’ve made a discovery: I can put a Phillips screwdriver into the top of a screw without thinking about it.

That last prepositional phrase, “without thinking about it,” is a necessary part of the sentence.  If I think about it too much, my conscious mind gets in the way, and I miss.  My hands have an intelligence guiding them that is separate from my conscious mind.

When I first noticed this, my mind popped to a phrase from the 137th Psalm: “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget her cunning.”

The Psalmist recognized the hands as having a separate intelligence of their own.

I’ve also discovered that I can print like a first grade teacher if I take my time. That’s what my teachers always told me: I should take my time.  

I think this is all happening now--long after it would have helped any of the teachers who’ve suffered through my handwriting--because I’ve taken up woodworking.

In learning, I’ve always been an adventurer, from the very beginning.  I didn’t listen to my teachers when they told me there was a right way to form my letters.  I figured out how to do it on my own and did it my way. (Queue up Sinatra on the background music.)  My way “worked” but there were better ways that I didn’t even look at because I already “knew” how to do it.

I’ve been a fool.

By the Grace of God, I am what I am, and by His Grace, I’ve lived long enough to see it.

I started woodworking almost exactly one year ago.  I’d found my father-in-law’s old, old Harbor Freight table saw.  By old, old I mean pre-OSHA.  It terrified me.

It terrified me, but I set myself to learn how to use it.  In doing so, I began the habit of study.  YouTube, which I’d found to be useful in other learning endeavors, became my best friend.  In learning how to use this table saw, I became hooked on woodworking.

I’ve learned the skills that my Kindergarten teachers, my grade school teachers, and all the rest had tried in vain to teach me: Take your time; follow the steps; don’t work ahead of the class.

If you want to make a groove in a board, you can do it.  There are a lot of ways to do it, but most of them will put you at risk of getting your fingers cut off, so maybe use the method you are being taught, at least until you know what you are doing.

When you build things with wood, you start with basic shapes, basic joints then you build up from there.  The short way of saying this is that everything is a box.  In this way, woodworking is very mathematical.  The difference between woodworking and mathematics is that in math, when you make a mistake, you can just erase it.  

In woodworking, there are things you can do to fix it, but it’s more expensive than an eraser. You learn to think further ahead; to take care; to take time.

You slow down.

I can now print like a first grade teacher, but I do it very slowly.  I suppose that I would learn to be faster if I practiced at it more.  Maybe I will, because it calms me.  I slow down and think about each word, each letter, breaking the letters into their pieces. 

Letters can be broken into separate pieces just like chairs and cabinets. It only took me sixty years to learn this.

While I don’t use my new skill in printing much, I am using my ability to “stab a screw” because I’ve been transforming my garage into a workshop.  As I write this, I’ve almost finished installing sheetrock onto the ceiling.  I’ve got chalk dust in my hair to prove it. I’ve gained a respect for another line of work and have no regret for missing out on that particular career.

If I were to die today, there would be people who would look at my age in the obituary and say, “Well, he had a good run.”

I would refute that with a line from Tennyson: “Life piled on life \ Were all too little, and of one to me \ Little remains: but every hour is saved \ From that eternal silence, something more, A bringer of new things...”

If God, in His Grace, gives me the time, I will build my shop.  My hands will learn their cunning.

Bobby Winters, a native of Harden City, Oklahoma, blogs at redneckmath.blogspot.com and okieinexile.blogspot.com. He invites you to “like'' the National Association of Lawn Mowers on Facebook. Search for him by name on YouTube. )