Carrots, Sticks, Students, and Cedar

By Bobby Neal Winters

I go back to teaching full-time next Tuesday, as I write this. I am looking forward to it, but I’m a little nervous.  I’ve held it out in front of myself like a carrot on a stick. 

Think about that metaphor for a moment. The idea is that you hang a carrot on a stick and dangle it out in front of your horse to keep him moving.

He never gets the carrot. 

But I do believe that teaching is what God put me on this Earth to do, so I believe I will keep on moving even when I get the carrot.

I’ve been told that the students have changed.  I’ve been told that they are harder to teach in these post-Covid days.

We shall see because we have to work with what we have.

This is Biblical.  You can read this in Genesis. God approaches those who would do his work and he works with the talents they have: Noah, Abraham, Jacob, Joseph, Moses. He takes their strengths and works with them.

I am working on a new project.  I’ve set out on it, and I am determined to do it.  I’ve got a bunch of cedar wood and I am making a chest from it. I’ve made a lot of boxes.  A LOT of boxes.  But a chest is a bit different.

It’s bigger.

On one hand, the geometry is the same. It’s just a big box. On the other hand, the physics and biology are different.  By that I mean that the box exists in the real world and I have to make it out of real wood. When boards get bigger, they...well...get bigger. Sometimes they can be awkward for an old man to handle. After a certain point, I don’t have clamps that are big enough to hold it all together at one time. This will affect how I do my joinery.

The biology comes in with the cedar.

Cedar is a beautiful wood. The color is, no, the colors are amazing. There is more to it than just the reddish brown.

I came into a windfall of cedar. A friend of mine and I got a couple of pickup loads of it from one of the good men north of Arma. It’s beautiful and fragrant, but cedar has issues.

At this point whenever I am telling this to someone in person, they will chime in and talk about the knots.

Yes, cedar has knots.  The knots are not my main problem.  My problem is with the cracks. Cedar is brittle and it likes to crack. As I take the rough cut cedar and mill it into boards myself, I’ve had difficulty cutting pieces long enough. They get to a certain length and have a crack in them.

In the first couple of rough-cut planks I processed, I had difficulty getting any piece much more than 16 inches long.

But this is my project, and this is the wood that I have, so I’ve got to work with it.

What I am doing is taking two pieces of wood and gluing them end-to-end to extend them.  There are many different ways to do this, some of them really bad.  (For those of you who know about this stuff and want to know, I am cutting half-laps on the ends of the board and gluing them together along the rabbets. If there is a better way, catch me over coffee and let me know.) 

After the glue dries, I run them through a planer, and it’s beautiful. You can see the break, but if you work at it, you can do it in such a way so as to make it pretty.

It’s going to take me a while to do this. Every board in the chest is going to be its own individual creation.

I will make the boards; I will glue them together into panels for the top, bottom, and sides; I will attach them to a frame.  The last part is because of the constraints of my shop. I don’t have a vise big enough to cut the dovetails.  I don’t have clamps big enough to glue it all at one time, so I will need to attach it to a frame.

But--potentially, depending on my skill--this could be beautiful.

We work with what we have, and if we care, if we take our time, if we have patience, something beautiful can happen.

Post-Covid students are different.  They did lose something from going online. We knew they would, but we did what we had to do. Now we work with that.

Given patience and skill, we can make something beautiful.  

I think I just heard the school bell ring. I need to go try to catch that carrot.

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.