Taking shop seriously

Now that we’re getting into graduation season it’s probably a good time to remind folks of how education really pays off. I mean, just last week I know I saved better than 50 bucks because of something I learned in school.

Do that every week and in just 26 years or so you’ll have paid for a year at Harvard.

But then, I didn’t learn this particular skill at Harvard – so that might be a bad example. This particular bit of lifetime knowledge is the product of good ol’ garden variety, taxpayer-supported public education. To figure out how much my learning this cost Dad we’d have to tease that number out from the rest of the stuff on his tax bill – roads, bridges, upkeep on the governor’s mansion – but I doubt if it would have covered much more than a subscription to the Crimson and two tickets to the Harvard  homecoming game.

But I digress, even if I’d gone to Harvard I wasn’t in need of  Harvard-grade knowledge to save me the price of a new lamp, ‘cuz more than 50 years ago I was taught how to fix my old one.

Now let’s understand, old here is really a matter of perspective. The lamp in question wasn’t some relic straight out of the Arabian Nights, there was no genie involved and it hadn’t set there on my end table from much more than half a decade. As old goes it didn’t hold a candle to the Great Pyramid or even the vintage Monkey Ward deep freeze reliably chilling on the back porch. Actually, aside from a bit of damage to the shade where the dog had miscalculated a leap in pursuit of his tennis ball -- virtually unnoticeable so long as it’s turned toward the wall, the only thing wrong with the lamp in question was that the three-way switch had mutated into a one-way switch, and an intermittent one at that. That two-click deficiency threatened to dispatch an all but perfectly good shade, cord, and whatever they call the thing that holds the shade, bulb and whatever up in the air on a one-way truck ride to the regional landfill.

So it was with no great joy I resigned myself to the apparent inevitable and went lamp shopping, only to stumble across, tucked away in an odd corner, an inconspicuous display of lamp parts and felt the ghost of Mr. Janikowski tap my shoulder. “You can do that,” he reminded me.

Now even though the Student Handbook said we weren’t supposed to, I don’t think anybody ever called Mr. Janikowski anything but “Janny.” For as long as I was there and some time before and a good while after, he taught shop at Caledonia High. All day, every day of a long career he rode herd on, kept track of and generally maintained some degree of order among 30 or 35 teenage boys turned loose in a big room full of saws, lathes, drill presses and various and sundry other power tools capable of instantaneous laceration, amputation or decapitation. A braver man I doubt I shall ever know.

And in the course of keeping all those student bodies intact he passed along a plethora of practical skills with the prescient certainty that a person never knows when they’ll be called upon to tool some leather, laminate plastic, cast pewter or repair a table lamp.

So last week, Janny saved me the price of a lamp. It was far from the first time I’ve put to use not just the neophyte skills I picked up amid the raging hormones and social crises of junior high, but the confidence gained from hands-on experiences to consider a task, look at my hands and think, “you can do that.”

Janny taught what Harvard doesn’t. When we pass over shop class in favor of STEM we risk depriving kids of skills and knowledge they’ll put to use far more frequently than they’ll ever solve quadratic equations.

Thanks to Janny I have light to read by … and 50 bucks still in my pocket.

That’s value in education.