Waiting for the Click

The method I use to teach people to saddle a seat pretty much sums up my approach to teaching.

1. I draw everything out on a whiteboard or a piece of cardboard (aka the “brownboard”).

2. I demonstrate the cuts. Hold the tool this way. Skew it this way. Pull with your body and not your arms.

3. I begin to saddle the seat and let people watch me make the cuts. When I sense they are itching or bored, I send them off to work on their seats.

4. After about 20 minutes I walk around to see how they are doing. I correct the people who forgot the lesson. I encourage the people who have not.

5. I go back to my bench, I work and I wait for the click.

What’s the click? It’s when the sound of their tool changes. It goes from chucka-chucka-shit-f*&ka–chucka to sccccchwick, sccccchwick.

I can’t push you over the line from chucka-chucka to sccccchwick. You have to make that step yourself. And the only way to make that step is work the seat with the tool.

I have tried different approaches. I have interrupted the chucka-chucka process to show them: “Here, look, sccccchwick sccccchwick. Get it? Now you try.”

It doesn’t help. Students have got to spend 30 minutes, an hour or 90 minutes with the tool to find their sccccchwick.

So far, almost everyone I’ve taught has found it. Sure, some of their seats look like irradiated moles tried to cornhole the poor thing. And that seat might not be ideal in the end. But they got it. And their next seat will be better.

This is how I teach. I hate my process because it doesn’t engender a personal connection. But I can’t change because this is how I learn to make things myself.

One of the great privileges of my life is getting to watch great woodworkers do great teaching. They find the metaphor that unlocks the idea. They hone in on what each student needs to move forward (including holding their literal hands to make a cut – wow). And they bond with the students in ways I cannot (I have trouble looking people in the eye at times. You want a bond? Let’s cyanoacrylate our spleens together.)