repost - teahing kids woodworking - great story

While googling "Krenov" I came acrossed this story posted here in 1996. Couldn't find the beginning of this tale but what I did find seems worth reposting. ========================

(Steve Turadek) Subject: Re: teaching kids woodworking (long!) Date: 20 Feb 1996 23:01:56 GMT

deserve some wood to work with now.#  He pointed into the far corner of the bench room.  All Janna could see there was an old broom.  |Sweep,# he said.  |Not everyone needs a tidy shop to do good work, but this dust drives me nuts.#

o

Janna swept out the shop.  Every day after school she went to the shop. Every day Krenov told her to sweep.  Sweeping wasn+t hard and it gave her time to talk to the people working in the shop, and to watch them work. For one year, every day after school, she swept and talked and watched.

o

In the third year she sharpened the tools.  She learned how to keep the waterstones flat.  She learned how to operate the hand grinder.   She started by sharpening chisels and plane irons, and, after a few months of this, she invented a faster way to sharpen these things using a piece of glass and many different kinds of sandpaper.  The people in the shop just laughed at her when she started experimenting with the glass and sandpaper.  They teased her about some of the tools she had ruined when she had first learned to sharpen with the waterstones.  But it wasn+t long before she was making edges sharper than anything they had seen before. They liked the tools because they cut better than anything they could sharpen themselves.  They weren+t laughing at her anymore.  They were instead feeling a little guilty for not having experimented more during their third year.  And they were asking Janna to teach them about using the paper and glass.

Near the end of her third year, she was sharpening saws and files, and putting special touches on the big power machines as well.  She knew all the machines and hand tools now, and she knew how to make them all better than they were when they were new.

o

In the fourth years she seasoned the wood.  Wood comes from trees with a lot of water in it, and it+s called |green# wood.  Some kinds of furniture can be made with green wood, but at Krenov+s school, dry hardwood was required.  The wood had to be cut into boards from logs, and then it had to be carefully watched for years as it dried.  It had to be turned, and wood that was cracking badly had to be sold off so it wouldn+t take up room in Krenov+s shop.  Special woods had to be identified early on, so it could be prepared for projects that would respect its nature.  This was heavy, hard work.   The planks were big and heavy and had to be moved around a lot, both so she could see how the wood was doing, and so that she could slow down or speed up the drying.

By the end of the year, she could look at a log and decide how it should be cut, or even if it wasn+t worth the trouble.  And she knew about places all over the world where she could buy logs.  She treated all of the wood in Krenov+s shop as though it was her baby, borne of her body, and in many ways, it was.

This was the only year she ever had a fight with someone in the shop.  One of Krenov+s students had stupidly cut a plank in two, destroying a special whorl-pattern in the wood that Janna had been fighting all year to keep intact.  The board wanted to split, but by cleverly slowing down the drying, Janna had been able to keep the board in one magnificent piece. This student, this rock, this less-than-senseless thing, had destroyed the board by being careless.  Janna was so angry she did not return to the shop for three days.  She might have never returned if Krenov had not asked her.

|Sometimes the things we love are taken from us for no good reason,# he told her.  |This will happen again.  Don+t throw away years of good work over it.#

o

In the fifth year she made boards, and panels.  She took rough planks from the drying room and turned them into smooth boards with even sides.  She learned to glue narrow boards into wide flat boards.  These were the same boards she had been drying the year before.  These were her children.  She knew where each board wanted to wind or warp.  She knew just how to cut such a naughty board so to make it nice.  She knew just how much of a surface to plane away to get at the secrets of the board inside.  She knew that sometimes it was not enough to be able to hear the wood speak. Sometimes the wood lied, or told stories, or just didn+t know.  To really know a piece of wood, she learned, you have to grow up with it a little. You have to raise it, and teach it things.  You have to be its mother.

Her panels were delicious and flat, and they stayed at way.  When she gave a panel to a more senior apprentice to be used in a cabinet door, she watched how the wood surrounding the panel was selected and worked. Sometimes it hurt her to watch that.  Sometimes she would see her panel shining out, disgraced, from a pile of junk.  Sometimes her panels fell into the hands of an apprentice who could hear the wood speak, and who could understand the message.  Or sometimes a dumb apprentice would just get lucky and everything would turn out well.  It made her happy when that happened.

o

In the sixth year, she kept the books.  She learned the business of the school, how much it spent for wood, how much it paid to rent the buildings, how much the machines and hand tools costed.  She once traveled to meet the Merchant of Ashby to buy some old planes.  She could look at a one hundred year old plane and tell if it had been used well or poorly, and she knew just how much it was worth.

She learned about how much a fine, handmade table would cost to make, and how much money it would bring the school when it was sold.

She was very confused when she learned the selling prices of the pieces made at the school.  Most surprising was that much of the stuff didn+t sell for much more than the machine-made furniture sold in ordinary stores.  She also learned that the price had more to do with who was buying the furniture rather than how well it was made.   Only a very few of the school+s customers and galleries seemed to understand the worth of a piece.  A very few indeed.  All the rest, she learned, was just fashion.  The right color, the right shape, the right maker+s name. Little else mattered.

o

In the seventh year, she made joints.  She learned mortise and tenons, dovetails, and many variations of these.  She learned that some joints took a very long time to make but were no stronger than other joints that took only minutes.  And she learned that tools she had sharpened herself cut straighter and closer than the tools the current third-year apprentice worked on.

o

In the eighth year, she waxed and polished.  She knew that most of the furniture in stores were heavily stained, and coated with layers of chemicals like plastics, and this year she learned why: simple finishes on wood only made less-than-perfect surfaces look even more less-than-perfect.  Still, the quality of the work done in Krenov+s school was high, and, at the beginning of this year, she was more apt to ruin a nicely done cabinet than enhance an average one.  By the end of the year, she could repair a stained antique finish, or protect a pearwood cabinet from the dry air or winter damp.

o

In the ninth year, she made cabinets and chairs.  Janna know knew every step, from sawing the logs to carving the door-handles of a showcase cabinet.  She made six or seven cabinets that year, but only two survived.  She would finish a piece and step back, and say to herself: |This cabinet is done at a very high level, but still, it doesn+t quite breath.#  She would saw out the joints and return some of the boards to the drying room, keep a few of the boards to be reworked into her next idea.

After watching this happen several times, Krenov asked her if she had some time that evening.  Janna always had time for Krenov, and she missed him now.  The school had grown and her master was a busy man.

They closed up the shop together and went around the corner for a beeriJanna was by this time a young woman.

|#I saw you cutting up that cabinet today,# he said.  |Again.#

Janna stared at the bottom of her cup.  She wasn+t sure why she destroyed the cabinet.  She just knew that when it was finished, it wasn+t what she had intended to make.

|Sometimes,# Krenov said, |our children don+t grow up to be who we expected them to be, who we wanted them to be.  No.  Most often, they grow up to be more than we expected.#

Janna looked at him. She wasn+t sure if she was angry or confused.  Krenov said: |When our children grow up, we have to grow up a little too.  We have to learn not to be disappointed by different.  We don+t control every little thing.  Sometimes we have just let things be better than we planned for them to be.#

Janna finished her beer.  The next day Krenov and Janna worked together. They had never done this before.  Actually, over the past nine years, they had spoken to each other very little.  This day, they spoke to each other even less.  They each just knew what they had to do.  It was not unlike watching two quiet people in a good marriage.

o

In the tenth year, she had an apprentice of her own.  A horrible eight year old boy who came around to the shop after school and stole things. And dawdled with the cart.  And made the customers and the other apprentices angry.  Somehow Krenov had allowed this little egg of a craftsman to infect Janna+s life.  But Janna got used to him being around.  After all, he wasn+t around much, he was usually out with his cart making deliveries.  And Janna, when seeing this little boy, often recalled what she was like when she was eight years old.  How she almost always forgot to flush the toilet and turn off lights and close doors behind her, how her shoes were always untied. How sometimes she was so eager to play that she would forget to put on a jacket before going outside.

And most of all she remembered how an eight year old dreams.  A child like that doesn+t know what+s impossible.  A child of eight has fantastic thoughts.

And something strange happened to her work that year.  A little fantasy crept into her cabinets.  No, nothing careless or sloppy.  A curve here, a thinness there, put there not to show off, but to be playful, to show that its possible.  Even if she thought it was impossible to make it that way.

Her work that year was at a very high level, just as always.  It was serious work.  It was serious work that never frowned.

o

One day late in that tenth year, she arrived at the shop after school and asked Krenov what she should work on.  Krenov took her into the machine room and showed her the little push cart.  |I need for you to make a delivery,# he told her.

Janna+s heart sank a bit.  Ten years of work, all of it careful and thoughtful, and now her master was giving her the work of a first-year apprentice.

Krenov put a package wrapped in paper and blankets into the cart.  Take this to Mrs. Formata,# he said.  |I think you know where she lives.#

Janna now felt a sense of dread.  Every year, Mrs. Formata asked Krenov to send over the finest cabinet produced at the school that year.  Janna made the delivery only once, in the first year of the school.  But she knew the story of Mrs. Formata.  Every year, for the past ten, she had rejected the cabinet.

Off Janna went to Mrs. Formata+s house, ready to again experience her rudeness, her rejection, her evil cats.  This time it would be worse, because instead of rejecting the work of her master, Mrs. Formata would reject the finest work of a school that Janna had for the past ten years helped to build.  This would be very personal.

Just like that first time, Mrs. Formata was waiting outside the house when Janna turned the last corner.  Again, Mrs. Formata began shouting for Janna to hurry as she came into sight.  Again Janna was rudely ushered into the house carrying a heavy package.  And again Janna watched bits of paper being scattered around Mrs. Formata+s parlor.

But this time, it was a little different. This time, instead of seeing the work of her master revealed, she saw a cabinet of her own, the pearwood cabinet she had rebuilt three times.

This time, when the package was unwrapped, Mrs.Formata slipped heavily into a chair, crying.  |It+s beautiful,# she said.  A white fluffy cat jumped into her lap and she began to stoke it.

Reply to
charlie b
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Here's the beginning, with part 2 added... sorry for the awkward line breaks. Original post is at

Reply to
Dave Balderstone

Damn, had I been able to find the first part of his post with the "Not putting it in public domain" claim I would've posted a short summary and link to the google page.

It does raise an issue though. Once it's on the net it seems to be out there forever and accessable to everyone. At what point does it become public domain - only when it's used for profit?

But it is a great story.

charlie b

Reply to
charlie b

Not making it public domain means he is explicitly retaining copyright. Considering it was posted in a public, archived medium to begin with I am not terribly concerned about the implications of reposting.

djb

Reply to
Dave Balderstone

Beautiful story :~)

Reply to
luis

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