A few days ago, I helped my son with a little project he had to do for shop class in high school. He was making a scale door in a frame. I think the door was to be about eight inches tall or so. Anyway, I helped him by setting up the micro lathe and cutting a small block of wood for him to shape into a door knob.

Of course, I couldn’t actually leave that alone. First, I had to rough it down to cylindrical for him. I didn’t want there to be any risk he would end up with chips flying into his face.

Then I showed him how to mark out with a pencil where he should start shaping it and how he should cut in at those lines so they don’t disappear once you do start shaping.

Then I showed him how to hold the chisel to cut in without having it bang or dig into the wood. And I showed him how to get the smoothest cut out of the rather lousy little chisels I have.

By the time I was finished showing him everything I needed to show him, the lathing operation was practically finished.

I’ve done that before, and I’ll do it again. I don’t have much patience for watching someone fumble over anything that I can just outright do for them. I know the point of the education system is to let people do whatever needs to be done, but I’m not in any particular hurry to let or encourage that to happen.

Plus it’s more fun just doing it.

I have fond memories of my own shop class in high school and the sudden bang of the chisel shooting the wall behind the lathe. I’m sure some shop classes had face shields for the students. Mine had cringe and duck. Several bits of ugly candlesticks regularly broke under too much pressure from dull chisels in brutish hands and went randomly clamouring across the room from the lathe.
But the best, of course, were the huge chunks of wood people sometimes attempted to mount in there, off center, which would promptly start to make a horrendous noise once the machine was turned on at its regular speed of maximum. It sounded a bit like a helicopter was landing in the corner until it too went flying off at some random degree.

Duck and cringe.

My teacher was a psychopath who thought nothing of wood chips embedded in eyes or fingers reduced by the band saw. What he didn’t like was talking while sweeping up. There was a nice big barrel of sweeping compound we were supposed to throw all over the place and then spend the last five minutes of class sweeping up the bits of broken spindles, the curves cut off promising cribbage boards, and the dust from endless name plates with the letters router-cut. We were supposed to sweep under and around our own benches in complete silence.

One day, someone made a joke. I don’t remember what it was.

The teacher came rushing over and slammed his broom handle down as hard as he could across the bench in front of the offending student.

The broom handle snapped in half with one sharp end flying across the room at half the speed of light. It didn’t kill anyone.

No one said anything.

Cringe and duck.