Reminiscences of an Experiential Learning Experience

Watching the Shelter Institute video on the wiki Experiential Learning page brought back memories of my own experiential experience as an apprentice woodworker. I had just moved to Minnesota and had very few job opportunities with a French degree outside of teaching high school, so I decided to explore other options since I wasn't having much luck finding a decent job. I had helped an architect friend who designed and built furniture and decided to look into furniture building as a career because I loved the process of sanding the wood until it was polished (about all that she could trust me to do). Through word of mouth, I found a woman woodworker who was willing to take me on at no cost to her as long as she would take me past sanding and teach me the finer arts of furniture building.

I was extremely lucky, she was both an artist with wood and master craftsperson. She could take a belt sander (a heavy piece of hand machinery) and carve realistic images in wood: horses running across a headboard, dolphins leaping out of a mirror frame. She worked with hand tools as well and knew every type of joinery that you could use in building solid, quality furniture. Best of all, however, was that she was an excellent teacher. The first thing I had to learn was safety and she required that I take responsibility for any snafus that I might cause (outside of a flaw in the wood) to the point that I might have to reimburse her financially. Luckily, this bred caution so that I never broke anything. She would explain everything in detail including design principles, drawing designs in proportion, and the math involved in breaking down a design into its components. She monitored my work until she felt comfortable to let me run with it. I worked for two years in her shop. Long enough to realize that while I loved woodworking, it was not lucrative enough of a field to make a good living.

What I learned went far beyond design principles, how to use power and hand tools, and how to best work with wood. I learned how to learn. I became the handy person in our home. I did (and still do) the basic electrical and plumbing work, I learned to plaster walls, I built garden structures, and I fix broken household machines as well as take care of any building/structural work that we need in the house. Basically, it gave me the confidence to know that all of this is part of a system and the key is to break down or try to understand the system and its principles and you can figure out how to put it back together again. And before all else, proceed with caution.