From Woodworking to Teaching: Transferring Skills and Embracing Mistakes

 From Woodworking to Teaching: Transferring Skills and Embracing Mistakes

By Bobby Neal Winters

As I’ve mentioned in this space before, I will be transitioning from administration to teaching starting in early June.  God put me on this Earth to be a teacher; a teacher is what I am meant to be.  I still have something to do in the classroom.

There are many different styles of teaching.  I like to teach students basic, solid truths on which they can plant their mental feet, as it were, and from there find other truths.  If they know the basics, and if they truly want to learn, they will eventually not need a teacher anymore.  

I won’t always be there with them.

(As I wrote that last sentence, I remember my father saying the exact same thing to me. It was as if he were right in front of me. He was right.)

As part of teaching, I keep learning myself, but not only the material I am going to teach in the classroom.  Those of you who have been following this space at all during the last couple of years know that I am learning the honorable practice of woodworking. This activity helps me in numerous ways.  Hammering on a mortice is therapeutic; hammering on tenured faculty is a felony. (It’s a joke. Never crossed my mind. Really.)

One of the principles I’ve picked up in woodworking that transfers nicely to the academic classroom is this: You are going to make mistakes, so set up your system to take this into account.

Before I go off into detail, let me mention the woodworker on YouTube from whom I’ve learned the most: Paul Sellers.  He’s a good model for a teacher.  He’s endlessly patient, realistic, and skilled.  He not only talks the talk; he walks the walk.

I like to hand cut dovetails, and I follow Paul Seller’s method.  He uses a chisel as opposed to a coping saw to cut out the bulk of the material.  The coping saw is--perhaps--faster, but it is also easier to make an unrecoverable mistake from.  With the chisel which is--perhaps--slower, one can order one’s work in such a way as to make your mistakes recoverable.

How does one recover from a woodworking mistake?  What would make a mistake unrecoverable?  Well, here’s the thing, if there is too much wood left, you can always take it off.  If you cut the wood too short, there is no putting it back.  If you cut it too short, you can patch it somehow, maybe.  But the wood is gone.

With a coping saw, it is very easy to cross from the part of the wood you are trying to get rid of into the part of the wood you want to keep.  When you use a chisel, you can make what’s called a knife wall to keep you from accidentally cutting into the wrong part of the wood. This cannot be done with a coping saw.

The basic technique of making a knife wall transfers into other areas of woodworking other than just cutting dovetails.  The idea of leaving the wood just a little bit long and “sneaking up on the cut” transfers as well.  I often find myself saying (outloud even) as I cut, “Cut what you are going to keep a little fat.”

As you gain in skill, the amount of room you leave for error can shrink, but I don’t think it will ever disappear. 

Not only does this transfer from one part of woodworking to another, it transfers to just about any other area.  We are imperfect creatures; we make mistakes.  Whenever possible, we need to think about what happens in the endgame when we make mistakes, when we are wrong.

As a teacher, the students learn from everything I do.  If I am late to class, they will learn to be late. If my class is disorganized they will learn from that.

In organizing my class, I can do so with the idea that I might make mistakes and in my design, make it possible to recover from those mistakes.  I can also take into account that the students will make mistakes and in my course design make it possible for them to recover. (The students who learn the most from you are the ones who make the most mistakes. Your A students are doing their learning on their own.)

My transition from administration begins soon.  As you think of me, think of me standing in front of a classroom with chalk dust on my fingers and sawdust in my hair.

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.