Division: Lower School
Teaches: Third Grade
Outside of school, one of my hobbies is … woodworking, which I’ve been doing for 10 years or so. As a teacher, I think it’s important to be a learner all the time, and I’ve always liked making stuff. There’s this woodworker and furniture maker, George Nakashima, and one of his big concepts is this idea of the soul of the tree, and that you’re giving it a second life as a piece of furniture. That’s very appealing to me.
I taught myself woodworking … by watching a lot of YouTube videos. I also find experts and bug them as much as they’ll let me. I fail a lot and waste a lot of wood. I’ve taken some classes, like workshops at the Philadelphia Woodworks in Germantown, but mostly just learn through doing and asking people questions. I also learned a lot from Eli Scearce, who used to teach woodshop here at GFS. Rachel Fuld, our current woodshop teacher, and Patrick Curtin, who works on GFS’ maintenance crew, have also both been so helpful.
My first projects were … plant stands, and other little things, like birdhouses, which require little skill but some imagination. I figured out some joinery along the way, and made a lot of picture frames. When my friends and I started having kids, I began making stuff for them, like rocking horses.
I can see how my woodworking has progressed when … things go wrong, and it’s clear to me how to solve the problem, or I can tell right away why something’s not working and what needs to be done. I made some stuff over the summer that in the past would’ve taken me months, but now I can knock it out in a morning.
A bigger lesson woodworking has taught me is … that if you want to go fast, go alone—if you want to go far, go together. I’ve asked for help with a bunch of things I’ve made. That’s actually something that working at GFS has really taught me: if you want to get something monumental done, you need to work with other people.