Teaching Styles

High Angle Block Plane

 

There’s a story about teaching told in Joe Posnanski’s great book called “The Baseball 100″. In it he tells the story of Honus Wagner who may have been the greatest shortstop ever. He was lightning fast leading the league in triples and stolen bases many times over. Wagner won eight batting titles. He was also baseball smart and generous to everyone around him. But some years after Honus had retired, in the 1930’s, he was asked to coach Arky Vaughn, the slugging but error prone Pirates’ shortstop. No one remembers the great Arky Vaughn.

 

Posnanski writes, “After a few days, someone asked Arky how it was going. ‘I’m not sure,’ Vaughn said. ‘When I asked Mr. Wagner what to do he said, ‘You just run in fast, grab the ball and throw it to first base ahead of the runner.’ But he didn’t tell me how.”

 

I remember when I first started woodworking, there was no one I knew of in Portland who did the kind of fine work that I wanted to do. There were cabinet shops but I didn’t want to build kitchen cabinets. My friend Jim had told me of his neighbor who was doing some woodworking. Here’s my chance, I thought, To get some real information from a real woodworker! This was great. I went to this guy name of Joe and asked him how I could become a furniture maker. His terse reply spelled it all out for me.

 

“You just do it,” he said.

 

What advice! I just do it. Of course!

 

His advice did presage Nike’s slogan by some 20 years but woodworking relies less on natural athletic ability and more on patience, perseverance, and lastly, and most importantly, forgiveness. But I took this Joe’s advice and taught myself some methods which, along with some wonderful British books, helped me to build furniture. Self-taught folks are stubborn I think and walk with their own peculiar kind of limp in the shop.

 

These two stories do speak however to teaching styles. You can be supremely skilled in any field but it doesn’t make you a good teacher. Once I started teaching I realized that it had nothing to do with woodworking. It was a completely different endeavor and over the years I have learned about ways of teaching and types of students and ways of learning. I have witnessed frustrations and shame from some students who could not face their own ignorance or their simple lapses in judgement. It’s too bad some folks see a failure as a statement about their own self-worth. It’s not. Ignorance, I will always believe, is fixable. It’s stupidity you can’t outrun. And failures teach us far more than succeeding. Trust me, the more you do this work, the more failure becomes a familiar tune.

A teacher also has to give out information in a number of different ways because not everyone learns the same way. Some need to see the technique demonstrated or they need to try it once themselves or they need to write notes.

There are also filters we each carry to the messages released in a class. There are biases towards men or women or haircuts and then there are first impressions. All sorts of stuff goes into that first five minutes of a new class. My goal is simple. Get folks to relax and see my style and then we can dip our toes in and do some work. It will take some folks longer than others to get it. Some require more help. That’s the job of the teacher, looking to see who’s getting it and who is faking it and who needs help.

 

At Highland Woodworking this past June I had the great opportunity to teach a two day

seminar on Building a High Angle Plane. Ten students hardened and tempered tool steel for a wooden body hand plane suitable for planing the most difficult of grains in a board. Fun class. Good group and lots of learning styles walked through that door. I would tell this one guy exactly what I wanted and he would nod saying, “I got it”. Then he would go and do it some other way entirely.

 

That’s my bad. I needed to watch him and I figured that out eventually so his success rate started to increase. But he did make us come up with some interesting fixes for his creativity. No mistakes in woodworking. Only opportunities.

 

Anyways, Highland Woodworking and I are beginning a partnership in education. We are going to work together on providing folks with quality tools and information. I’ve never done this with any company before because I never wanted to work with any company before. Chris Bagby and his longtime staff at Highland Woodworking are different, and so is their store. Check out the website at https://highlandwoodworking.com.

 

Their selection of tools is unique because they have the big name models, you know, the SawStops and Festool and Lie-Nielsen tools. But they also have stuff like froes. Who sells shingle froes along with travishers and Japanese chisels and band saw blades like the Wood Slicer? It is an amazing store, a full service kind of place and I’m happy to partner with them and let you know about their store.

 

As for me, I’m still working on the new shop. I’m shooting for a full class too in the Setting Up Shop video series. Please check out our website for more information on the Setting Up Shop series.

Stay cool.