The Centipede's Dilemma

The centipede was happy, quite,

Until a toad in fun

Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”

This worked his mind to such a pitch,

He lay distracted in a ditch,

Considering how to run.

-Katherine Craster

The magic happens on the morning of the second day.

I have noticed a certain pattern in my woodcraft classes. Regardless of the subject, the first day is a bit of a hot mess.  I like to think I am offering solid instruction and good tips, but there is so much for students to keep in mind–how to present the blade safely and effectively, how to control the bevel, and what shapes and designs to pursue–that they are on overload. From a brain science perspective, their logical, prefrontal cortex is simultaneously juggling instructions and directing the body’s actions.  Students internal dialogue in a turning class might be something like: “Bend your knees, place your tool on the rest, grasp the flute with the left hand while the right hand holds the handle against the body for stability, now present the gouge with the flute closed and “find the bevel,” then twist the flute open about 20°, adjust the tool handle 20° toward your body and the cut will start, drop the handle for more sheer and less scrape, remember to float the bevel and not press too hard into the surface, quiet your upper body, picture the curve you want to create, transfer weight from your right leg to your left leg slowly in a movement that looks similar to Tai Chi, and off you go.”  There is a lot to think about, and it is exhausting. 

On that first day, students practice what psychologists call “explicit monitoring.”  When you are first learning a physical task, the prefrontal cortex watches closely and tries to direct the action.  This logical “commentator” part of the brain does its best to perform this new task, but its direction is often clumsy, herky-jerky, and almost always late.  It is a bit like asking the brain to tell the hands to lift the legs in order to walk. Or if you are learning to play the drums, by the time the “commentator” side of their brain says “now!” and the hand moves to strike the drum, the moment has passed, and the sound comes late.  All of this takes a lot of energy. By some estimates, the caloric demands of a hard-working brain are as much as 20% of the body’s total glucose stores.

With practice, tasks shift from the prefrontal cortex to the cerebellum, which is the portion of the brain that controls learned motor skills.  This is the “doer” part of the brain, which we access when we ride a bike or press a car brake when the light turns red.  It allows us to act automatically, smoothly, effortlessly, without conscious thinking. Once the cerebellum can perform a task, we have achieved “muscle memory,” allowing us to move fluidly and instinctually, like an athlete playing a game or an artist creating a gestural drawing, and freeing up space for the prefrontal cortex to think about other things. 

   

Obviously, it takes time to shift knowledge from the prefrontal cortex “commentator” to the cerebellum “doer” (to my students’ great distress).  That said, there are teaching practices that can accelerate this transfer.  Here are a few:

Slow-Burn Repetition: Engaging the cerebellum involves establishing neural pathways, and nothing does this like repetition, especially slow, mindful repetition.  When you increase the time under tension, muscles establish more neuromuscular connections, activating more muscle fibers and teaching the brain greater coordination.   Like learning scales on a guitar, careful and deliberate practice is the key.  In a multi-day carving class, have students practice knife grasps on practice sticks, being mindful of feeling the bevel, skewing and drawing the blade across the wood, thinking about what muscle groups are being engaged, making micro adjustments to the grip and posture. 

Visualization: Ask students to visualize themselves performing the task before they actually perform it.  When learning a new skill, visualization on its own is nearly as effective as actually doing that task in developing neuromuscular pathways.  One great strategy is to ask students to visualize an action right before they perform the action.  Be sure that students visualize the steps in the process, not just the final result. That said, being able to imagine the shape you want to create is an important part of creating sculptural forms, and drawing those shapes is an invaluable part of visualization.

Compression: When teaching a complex skillset, it is a good idea to find ways to help students reduce those skills to a manageable size.  

• First, select the most important ideas to teach and avoid the temptation to cram everything into the first few hours of class.  I have seen some pretty spectacular craftspeople make the classic new-teacher mistake of talking for half of a day about everything that students need to know while the class gazes longingly at the tools, or worse, glazes over. Instead, first teach just enough to get them safely started, especially the gross motor skills and the big movements, and let them at it. Once students have the basics down, you can then make the fine adjustments to their technique.  Trying to impart the subtleties of a craft to a student who has not yet experienced the basic movements is a bit like trying to hang ornaments on a Christmas tree that is still lying on the ground.  

• Second, help students make associations to related ideas.  I begin every class by asking students about their experience with woodworking and other forms of handwork.  If I know that a student has an understanding of casework, I might reference how skewing a hand plane or a draw knife is similar to how we skew a sloyd knife.  

• Third, “scaffold” your instruction by teaching skills in a sequence that builds on the ones already learned. For example, in a carving class, I teach knife grasps in an order that builds on the grasps already learned. 

• Fourth, “chunk” ideas into small patterns that are memorable.  For example, when I teach turning, I talk about the “ABCDs” of taking a cut: Anchor, Bevel, Cut, Dance.  

• Finally, name the skill when a competency is performed.  My students often remark on how excited I get when they do something right.  What they might not recognize is that I am both reinforcing the behavior and helping them recognize what they are doing correctly as they are doing it.  “Yes!” I exclaim.  “Nice push cut!” 

Recall.  We learn when we are asked to recall and synthesize information, putting ideas into our own words and integrating them into our existing mental framework.  The more often we recall information, the deeper the lesson nests in our brains.  In a classroom setting, teachers might use the Socratic method, habitual journaling, or regular quizzes to achieve this.  In a workshop setting, craft educators may teach a series of steps and then ask someone to summarize back what they are going to do.  Or when a student is about to perform a task, I might ask the student to describe what steps they are about to take.  Often, more experienced students will offer guidance to other, newer students in class.  I encourage this, as teaching is one of the best ways to recall and synthesize what you know (just make sure they are giving good advice!)  Finally, I provide my students with extensive notes on everything that we discuss in class, so that they have something to review once they get home.

Rest.  We learn through bursts of intense effort followed by rest.  When we rest, even for just twenty seconds, our brain plays back the lesson at ten to twenty times the speed at which we learned it, compiling information and beating paths across our neurons.  Like exercise, the benefits of hard work are only realized after a period of rest and recovery.  This learning cadence is called the ultradian cycle–learn, rest, learn, rest.  For the craft educator, habituating regular breaks is super important, but it can be hard for students to take a break, especially if they are really invested.  If you explain your process to them, set a timer (say every 90 minutes) to announce the start of a break period, and force them to put their tools down, stretch and hydrate, walk around to admire each other’s progress, for maybe 10 or 20 minutes, your students will see great benefits.  Not only will their brains process more, but they will also see their own work with fresh eyes or in a new light, and even build community and connection with their classmates, which makes for a better experience for everyone.  

Finally, related to rest is the importance of sleep.  I don’t mind teaching quick, one-day classes, but the benefits of sleeping on a lesson are really obvious.  When we sleep, our brain replays what we have learned that day, building pathways across our consciousness and internalizing lessons.  It is while we dream that ideas are transferred from the prefrontal cortex to the cerebellum, and when we wake, our muscles remember.  (Fun fact: some studies show that when we sleep, we are actually replaying what we learned in reverse.  Bonkers!)

If I do my job right, on the morning of the second class day, something truly special happens.  Students enter the class, stare blankly at their projects, and exclaim, “I have forgotten everything!” I assure them that it will all come back, offer a few prompts about where to start, and they pick up their tools and begin again.  

And then the room goes silent. 

They might ask for a few reminders here and there, but for the most part, the students are “flowing” through their tasks.  They are simply doing.  It makes me want to hold my breath, afraid of breaking the spell, not wanting to be the toad in the Centipede's Dilemma.

Looking out at 2026

In August of '24, I had the good fortune of joining several highly respected craftspeople at a lunch hosted by Peter Lamb in Kittery, ME.  The guest of honor was Jögge Sundqvist, who was touring the U.S., teaching classes and visiting friends.  Jögge, a renowned craftsperson and woodworker from northern Sweden, creates pieces that are colorful, playful, and poetic.   

(photo from Joel Paul)

The lunch was a humbling experience, to say the least, and personally inspiring.  Jögge kindly listened to me prattle on about my challenges with market, how I make stuff, sell stuff, and then struggle to make enough for the next event.  All good problems to have, don't get me wrong, but the process has left me wanting, wanting to make more meaningful pieces that push form and meaning in new directions, and wanting not to feel like I need to turn more tops.  Jögge, nodding in understanding, turned and said: "It is all sculpture."

I was reminded of this exchange while teaching at Haystack Mountain School of Crafts this summer.  Haystack is a highly respected craft school, drawing the very best artists and craftspeople as instructors from around the world, so it was a true honor to be there.  But the experience left me feeling out of my depth.  Or, more accurately, I felt out of my field.  Listening to other instructors talk about the meaning of their work, what exhibitions, museums, and television shows had featured their work, and what books they had published, I found myself navigating a space that felt very unfamiliar.  While various classes asked students to give "form to the self through non-representational sculptural narratives" or "explore storytelling through fiber art," my class sought to teach students to turn a bowl on a pole lathe. That's it.

I want to be clear: I am not at all looking down on—or casting aspersions toward—the other wonderful instructors at Haystack, nor on the School’s more artistically oriented approach. That said, the experience left me with a sense of yearning: a desire to say more through my work.

While teaching craft skills is important and vital work—and work I genuinely love—I want to dedicate part of the coming year to producing a body of work that is more intentionally focused on a theme, a form, and/or a technique.

All of the instructors were asked to give a ten-minute presentation on their work, and I chose to speak about craft pedagogy, slöjd, and embodied thinking.  

(Photo: Eric McIntire)

This is a deeply important part of my practice right now, and I feel passionately about it. At the same time, the experience made me realize that I don’t even have a portfolio of my own work.  I make.  I sell.  I repeat.  In the new year, I want to change that.  I will still do a few markets, but my studio time will be focused less on production and more on creation.  I have a few leads on galleries that want to show my work next winter.  Now all I need to do is make a body of work!

That said, I have even more teaching gigs next year, and a few at schools new to me, so I will be busy!  In April, I will be teaching a five-day introduction to spoon carving and pole lathe turning at Peter Galbert's Workshop.  Instructors at Pete's read like a whose-who of the green woodworking world, and I am really honored to be part of the lineup.  In May, I will be teaching a five-day introduction to wood turning at Snowfarm, another truly impressive craft program.  Finally, I will be teaching classes at the Nantucket Historical Association for about two weeks in July.  I will run short-form adult classes in carving and turning, as well as kids' classes in carving.  Alyssa will come along for a little vacation, and as luck would have it, my friend Michael Frassinelli has an artist's residency on the island at the same time.  It should be a wonderful trip.

Lastly, I am working on two articles for woodworking magazines.  I don't want to say too much right now, but stay tuned. One should publish within the next few months.

That is all (phew)~!?!

Have a wonderful New Year's Eve, everyone.  Stay safe and hug your loved ones.

Thanks for a great 2025!

Happy Holidays, everyone!

    As 2025 winds down, I wanted to express my gratitude to all the individuals who have supported my small business throughout this year and beyond.  It has been a formative year for me professionally, as my craft and my teaching continue to grow.  

    I taught for nearly fifty days in 2025, which was a new record for me.  A healthy portion of that was "Carving Club" at Tinkerhaus, in Newburyport, MA.  This after-school class for kids in grades 3-5 seemed to be a big hit:

We carved soldiers, and made thrones for them:

We made dice, both big and small:

And we received a generous gift of tools from the Flexcut company:

    I continued to teach many classes for adults at the North Bennet Street School in Boston, MA, and at Sanborn Mills Farm in Loudon, NH.  Both of these schools have been major supporters of my teaching, and I want to say a special thank you to them.  I also taught at several new schools, including Haystack in Deer Island, Maine, Historic Eastfield in New York, and the Newburyport Art Association in Newburyport, MA.  It was a real honor to teach at Haystack, as it is widely considered one of the most important craft schools in America.  The space is truly lovely--set on the coast, with mid-century modern architecture.  The quality of the craft and the instructors there was really something else, and it got me thinking in new directions about my own work.  I will reflect more on that in a future post on my goals for 2026.

Haystack was magical

Haystack, right on the coast of Maine

    I set up at markets one weekend a month, at North Andover and Newburyport, and learned some important lessons.  It has taken me several years, but I am starting to learn that there is a season for woodcraft sales.  While you might get a few good days around Father's and Mother's Days, and occasionally you will have a patron who cleans you out, for the most part, I need to concentrate my efforts on fewer events closer to the winter holidays.  I will continue to show monthly at the Newburyport Farmers' Market through the summer, as it builds ties to the local community, but will wait until after Thanksgiving for more market weekends.  

    One final highlight for me was traveling to the Vesterheim Museum in Decorah, Iowa, and even getting into their archives to study some interesting boxes and canisters.  I then went up to Milan, Minnesota, for the Spoon Gathering and had a chance to catch up with Alex, Paul, and Ty. 

So, once again, thanks to everyone who has supported my teaching, learning, turning, and carving in 2025.  I am humbled that so many folks want to follow along in my journey.  And most importantly, I want to say thank you to my wife, Alyssa.  Without her support, none of my craft work would be possible.  As she said when I was contemplating stepping away from my high school teaching job and taking on craft full-time, "You can be paid poorly doing a lot of things--teaching is only one of them."  Her encouragement for me to take a leap mid-life and pivot professionally, and her steadfast financial support while I get on my feet, make all of this possible.  

Sloyd as Subversive

     Educational Sloyd was born in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, which makes sense.   Handcraft education in public schools would seem an obvious response to the age, if you assumed the goal was to increase worker competency and efficiency. And indeed, many handcraft movements of the day were established for exactly that, as training grounds for future industrial workers. The Russian System, for example, sought to bring the nation up to speed as Britain, Belgium, and to an extent France, raced away with their industrial capacity. Focusing on repetition and precision, the Russian System made students produce the same joint over and over again, without ever completing an entire project. Sounds miserable…

    Yet Educational Sloyd was created for very different reasons.  Rather than preparing students for industrial jobs, Sloyd classrooms sought to counteract the effects of industrialization.  Sloyd was a resistance movement.  The founders recognized that something was being lost among the kids of the Industrial Age–a creativity, an industriousness, a way of thinking. Once you can buy cheap versions of things you used to make, you lose the “craftiness” necessary to make objects for everyday use.  The primary purpose of Educational Sloyd was never to teach kids to make things, but instead to help children develop the mental dispositions that came out of making things, like creativity, grit, and love for whatever labor you decide to undertake.   

    Today, as schools try to respond to the latest revolution, I see similar patterns.  In this Information Age, we see an emphasis on STEM and the expansion of computer programming classes, as schools seek to fit students to the new economic and social order.  At first glance, the Maker Movement might be considered part of that effort.  As Clapp et al. point out in Maker-Centered Learning, educators were initially drawn to the maker classroom for two reasons.  One was an economic argument that such classes would “foster the development of an anticonsumerist, do-it-yourself mindset on an individual level and spawn a wave of innovation and entrepreneurialism” (15). The second was an educational argument that the Maker Movement increases young people’s proficiency in STEM, which, of course, simply circles back to the economic argument.  At first, maker classrooms groomed students for the information economy.  

    That said, much like the Sloyd classrooms of the nineteenth century, the Maker Movement holds deeper values that seek to oppose the modern age.  When researchers look at what really goes on in maker classrooms, they discover that the primary goal of such classrooms is not to reinforce the dominant order but to cultivate among students a sense of their own agency to shape the larger order. In the face of many challenges that feel insurmountable (a capitalist system that no longer serves the people, a climate crisis that we can hardly get our arms around, a sense that reality is not as it appears on screens), maker educators aim to show students that their world is malleable—that objects, systems, and communities can be redesigned. In that sense, the Maker Movement, like Sloyd before it, is a form of resistance. 

    Again and again we come back to a central truth: making is a subversive act.

Sloyd and Momento Moments

 I am sure teachers out there can relate:  

    You are sitting in a faculty meeting or at a professional development conference, learning about some new initiative, state mandate, or educational theory, and you think, “Isn't this what we used to do, or what we already do, but called by another name?”  Your “jargon translator” kicks in, and you add to an ever-growing list of synonyms in your head. “Ah, where the slöjd movement spoke of the benefits of handwork, Dewey’s pragmatists championed “learning by doing”, Piaget promoted “constructivism,” today we are discussing the benefits of “Maker-Centered Learning.”  This probably happens in other professions as well, but as a high school teacher I often felt that we had a sort of professional amnesia, doomed to revisit the same epiphanies over and over, like some real-life replaying of the movie Memento. 

Over time, and with a little perspective, I got to a place where I was less frustrated and more intrigued during these moments of pedagogical deja vu. If smart folks across time say similar things, I should be paying close attention.

    As I mentioned in earlier posts, this week I am kicking off an afterschool program for grade schoolers in wood carving and craft called “Carving Club”, and I have been using this as an opportunity to read up on the 19th-century educational slöjd movement, a system of handicraft education that is still practiced in Scandinavian schools to this day.  For those unfamiliar with slöjd, it was founded in 1865 by Finnish educator Uno Cygnaeus.  “Slöyd” or “slöjd,” derived from the Swedish word “slog” meaning “skillful. In English we might translate slöjd as “crafty,” if we focus on denotations like “skillful, clever, and artful” and less on connotations like ”guileful, designing, and tricky.”  The primary purpose of slöjd is not to make more woodworkers.  Indeed, slöjd class often focuses on materials other than wood, including fiber and paper folding.  The primary goal isn’t even to improve manual dexterity, though that is a secondary benefit.  Instead, the main goal of educational slöjd is to develop thinking habits and mental dispositions that can only be learned through handwork and tinkering.  In the mid-nineteenth century, Cygnaeus recognized that something significant was being lost in child development as the world rapidly industrialized.  Kids were no longer making the things they needed and, as a result, they were not developing thinking dispositions that came with making. Self-reliance, persistence, resilience, love for work, and neatness were all taught through making, and Cygnaeus wanted to include these lessons in primary school.    

    Since then,- educational movements have regularly circled back on the same ground covered by slöjd 160 years ago, from student-centered learning to the maker movement, from “grit” to “growth mindset”.  To help me get my head around the similarities and differences between slöjd and other educational movements, and in an attempt to identify best practices that seem to pop up repeatedly over time, I hope to write on some ways that slöjd fits within a larger educational context, including the work of John Dewey, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Howard Gardner, Ron Ritchhart, Dan Pink, Project-Based Learning, and the Maker Movement, name a few.  I am sure that list will change as I dive in, but, for now, that is where I am headed.  

Thinking with things

It has been nearly three years since I stepped away from teaching high school history, and while there is a lot I don’t miss about that job (like grading), I am still fascinated by pedagogy.  Thankfully, I have a few craft teaching gigs that scratch that itch, and one in particular has me really excited.  Hopefully, if we can fill a class, I will lead an afterschool slöjd class/“Carving Club” for third through fifth graders starting this March.  In preparation for this, I have rationalized that I must read up on educational slöjd and the history of teaching handicrafts.  And so my book pile is growing as I bounce from one read to another.

A lot of what I am reading has me thinking about my former profession in a new light.  The subjects that I taught, primarily U.S. History-related, were pretty cerebral.  I spent a lot of time weaving details together into a tapestry of intersecting stories that, I hoped, helped explain past and current events.  But the craft education that I am engaged in now has students “thinking about things” less and “thinking with things” more.  It is not that we only “thought about things” in my former classrooms. We certainly thought with things, like textbooks and notes, artifacts, and primary-source materials.  But in the craft classroom, there is a level of bodily engagement, reliance on senses, and manipulation of tools and materials that feels very different from the way I used to teach.  What are the best ways to teach a manual task, and what are the cognitive benefits of learning through one’s body?

Sarah Kuhn, in her book Transforming Learning Through Tangible Instruction, makes the case that thinking is “embodied,” and that the western/Cartesian mind/body split undermines learning.  As I mentioned in an earlier post, she argues that our bodies are the means through which our brains perceive the world, that sense perception and cognition are so intimately related that they are hard to tease apart, and that engaging our senses and most importantly manipulating things are central to learning.   While this may seem obvious, it is also clear that our classrooms and our pedagogy have become increasingly focused on rationalism and have lost touch with embodied thinking.  Our classrooms are laid out like sensory-deprivation chambers and our students are told to sit still in orderly rows and not to fidget.  If learning is “embodied,” isn’t such a classroom culture depriving students of learning?  How much of the recent explosion in ADHD diagnosis among our students is the result of better diagnostic tools and a greater sensitivity to neurodivergence, and how much is a result of frustrated educators medicating students so that they better fit the old classroom culture?  I don’t have answers for this, but it does make me excited to teach educational slöjd because that system is very much about “embodied” learning.

It is strange to me that today’s educational system has lost sight of notions like “embodied learning,” “tangible instruction,” and “thinking with things.”  There is a long history in western thought about the importance of learning through the senses.  Aristotle challenged Plato’s rationalism when he asserted that by trusting what our senses tell us we can understand our world and build knowledge.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau in the eighteenth century followed suit, arguing that “our first teachers in natural philosophy are our feet, hands, and eyes.  To substitute books for them does not teach us to reason, it teaches us to use the reason of others rather than our own” (39).  John Dewey and other Progressive educators of the early twentieth century made the point that it is only through experience and active exploration, what he called inquiry, that people learn.  This inquiry is the “conversation between a person’s interior states and the external circumstances in which she finds herself” (25).  Despite this rich tradition, Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” mind/body split nonsense seems to have won the day, and our classrooms and our teachers regularly treat kids like disembodied brains, whose bodies' only purpose is to get them to and from school.

A case in point that proves how much we have suppressed embodied learning is Kindergarten.  Invented in Germany by Fredrick Froebel in the mid-nineteenth century and introduced in the US by German immigrants, it was founded on the notion that education occurred through play and that by structuring such play one could accelerate understanding.  Up until about the 1910s and 20s, Kindergarten involved teachers giving students a series of “gifts,” —balls, dice, cylinders, blocks, etc…— and assigning a sequence of tasks that would encourage children to explore patterns, shapes, and symmetry, and thereby support the development of inquiry and experimentation.  Along with singing and gardening, this system of structured play would stimulate sensorimotor development and encourage children to build understanding through interacting with their environment.  The Kindergarten classrooms of today retain almost none of their original pedagogy, such that we now only consider Kindergarten as the grade before first.  But Americans did experience many decades of this type of education, and I can’t help but wonder what impact on cognitive and personal growth such a classroom might have.  Anecdotally, from these classrooms came the likes of Piet Mondrian, the founders of Bauhaus, and other modernists who explored a new geometrical aesthetic, as well as Buckminster Fuller and Frank Lloyd Wright who brought us geodesic domes and geometric architecture.  Fuller and Wright both spoke about how central playing with blocks was to their intellectual growth.  Even Robert J. Oppenheimer, a product of a related pedagogical system, described his three passions when he was ten to twelve years old: “minerals, writing poems and reading, and building with blocks still—architecture” (48).  What thinking skills and cognitive patterns have our students lost as we turned away from tangible instruction?

And so, I am enjoying wading into course design again.  What carving projects and skills will I teach, and in what sequence will I teach them, so that students build the dexterity and strength to handle a slöjd knife?  How will I break complex tasks into elemental steps in a way that helps students develop that faculty in themselves?  How will I create a classroom culture that values self-reliance, grit, creativity, love for work, neatness, and most of all, fun?  

Locking Lidded Box, finishing the notches and tabs

Someone who follows me on Instagram asked that I explain how I carve the notches and tabs for locking-lidded boxes.  Here you go.