Made by Hand (28 page)

When my father saw what had happened, he didn’t get upset. He drove back to work (at the IBM plant near Boulder) and brought back a piece of equipment called a degausser, which allowed him to fix the tube and make the picture perfect again. I was impressed by his skill and knowledge. He taught me how to solder, and for my third-grade science project we made an electric eye—a photoresistor connected to a battery and a small light bulb. Shining a flashlight on the photoresistor turned the light bulb on. Similarly, he helped me make an alarm that would sound a buzzer when someone walked through the door to my room.

My two daughters had little or no exposure to electronic circuits, and I thought it might be fun for me to teach myself more about electronics and let them hang around and ask questions or try things out. One morning, during the winter holiday school break, I pulled out an electronics kit I’d purchased a couple of years back but had never used, RadioShack’s Electronics Learning Lab: A Complete Course in Electronics. It was designed and written by Forrest Mims. The main component of the kit was a black plastic box the size of a laptop computer containing a solder-less breadboard surrounded by switches, dials, LEDs, a meter, a photoresistor, a buzzer, a speaker, and several knobs. The kit also came with a bunch of resistors, capacitors, transistors, and integrated circuits. The two workbooks, both by Mims, had instructions for building two hundred different projects.

I sat down at the kitchen table with the kit and started wiring up the first project in the first workbook—a simple LED flasher. The girls saw me and started asking questions right away. I told them what I was doing, and Jane volunteered to help me make the circuit. Sarina soon lost interest and wandered away to play Club Penguin, her favorite online social network at the time.

I showed Jane the bag of resistors and pointed out the different-colored bands printed on them. “Some of the resistors are like fat drinking straws that are easy to drink from,” I said, “and others are like very thin straws, like coffee stirrers, that make it hard to drink juice. But instead of juice, electricity goes through them.” She helped me find the three different resistors we needed for the project. I asked her if we should use a red or green LED. She said she wanted them both. “OK, but let’s just start with one to make sure the circuit works, and then we’ll try to add the other.” She chose red.

I pulled a 555 timer integrated circuit from a strip of pink electrostatic foam and pushed it into the breadboard. I explained what I was doing as I went along. I pointed to the schematic in the workbook. “See, this drawing tells you where to connect the wires and the resistors and the light. Pin 1 on the chip needs to go to the negative side of the electricity. Pin 2 and pin 6 need to be connected to each other.” Jane asked me how I knew which pin on the chip was which. I showed her the drawing of the 555 timer chip, and how the circle on the top of the chip was next to pin 1, and that you went around in a circle from pin 1 to pin 8. I was happy that she was asking questions. She had already learned a great deal about electronics in just a couple of minutes! “All of your toys that light up or make noise have this stuff inside them,” I said.

I continued to wire the circuit, but it was taking a long time, and Jane’s attention began to drift. I didn’t ask her to concentrate, because I knew that she would rebel if I tried to force her to pay attention. She asked Carla if she could play chess with her—which Carla had starting teaching her the day before—and they set up the board on the other end of the kitchen table.

While they played, I finished the circuit, but it wasn’t working. The LED was on, but it wasn’t blinking. I checked the connections, polarities, and parts but couldn’t find anything wrong, so I pulled everything apart and started over. This time it worked, and when I showed Jane, she smiled and said she wanted me to add the green LED. I did that, and we saw that the red LED became dimmer because the circuit was powering two lights instead of one. Another valuable lesson learned!

Sarina was plopped on the couch with a laptop. I walked over with the circuit and showed it to her. It elicited a halfhearted “cool,” but it was no match for the action taking place on the disco floor in Club Penguin land. I wanted to ask her to quit playing and sit with me, but I remembered Dr. Gray’s advice about not trying to force things on my kids. I felt like I was already pushing it by tutoring her with math.

As the day of the test approached, Sarina and I continued to work together on the math problems in the sample ISEE test book. I concentrated on remaining calm when she became frustrated, and refraining from interrupting her when she was intent on solving a problem the wrong way, because I’d learned from experience that she would get agitated if I stopped her to demonstrate the correct approach. It was better to let her fail and realize it on her own, and then show her the correct way to solve the problem.

We’d been practicing together for weeks, and I was sensing progress. Now when we sat down to study, I didn’t have to begin at square one as I had earlier. She had acquired a set of skills and knew how to use it. Carla was concerned that we weren’t studying enough, but I felt Sarina was getting enough practice and didn’t want to burn her out.

The night before the test we ran through some of the different kinds of math questions she’d be given. She did a good job. In the morning, on the way to the test, I asked her how she felt, and she said she was confident. When I picked her up a few hours later, she said it went well. Now all we had to do was wait for the test results. “I hope we did the right thing,” said Carla. “If your experiment didn’t work, Sarina’s going to be the one who suffers.”

“Don’t worry,” I said. “She knew the material. She’ll do fine.”

A couple of weeks later the envelope arrived while I was out of town. Carla called me. The news wasn’t good. Sarina had scored in the thirtieth percentile for one math area and the fiftieth in the other, compared with the other students who’d taken the test.

What had gone wrong? I can only guess that Sarina had more trouble with the test process, format, and setting than she had had with the actual math involved, because I felt that our work together had really helped her learn fractions, decimals, and percentages. I realized I should have hired a tutor, one who would have taught her not only how to solve the kinds of questions on the test but also how to
take
the test: budgeting her time, when to guess, how to eliminate obvious wrong choices, when to move on to the next problem, and so on. I’d touched on a few of those kinds of tactics, but a tutor would have known exactly how to help her in test-taking skills.

Thinking about this made me angry. My anger was directed at myself. Faced with a choice of buying into a system I didn’t like or rejecting it entirely, I took a middle road that ended up punishing my daughter. Carla and I aren’t going to unschool or homeschool Sarina and Jane, so I need to accept the fact that my kids may sometimes need tutors who train kids to be better test takers.

My revised goal is to supplement their traditional education with as many undirected, unstructured, play-oriented learning opportunities as possible.

CONCLUSION:

THE RISE OF DO-IT-YOURSELFISM

“In almost all the varied walks of life, amateurs have more freedom to experiment and innovate. The fraction of the population who are amateurs is a good measure of the freedom of a society.”

 

 

 

 

When I embarked on my amateur adventure, my DIY friends warned me not to become discouraged by the mistakes I’d inevitably make. I accepted their advice, but I grossly underestimated just
how many
mistakes that would be. In fact, I never have stopped screwing up. Errors erupt like mushrooms in whatever project I work on, no matter how small or simple. For example, recently, I built some bookshelves for our family room. At the start, I felt as though I’d gained enough skill with woodworking that the project should be a breeze. After all, how difficult could it be to saw lumber, paint it white, and attach it to the wall? After a visit to Home Depot to purchase the necessary materials, I went to work with high expectations. The first piece of lumber I cut was two inches too short. And even though I used a T-square to mark the cut lines, the cuts didn’t end up at ninety-degree angles. After painting the lumber, I realized that the paint was a shade too light—it didn’t match the existing shelves. I poked around under the stairs and found an old can of paint that seemed to match, but it ended up being off, too. When it came time to attach the skewed, off-color shelves to the wall, I couldn’t find my level. I downloaded a level application for my iPhone, which seemed to work pretty well, but somehow in the middle of installing the shelves I accidentally re-zeroed the level, so that it was about five degrees off-kilter. Then I discovered that I had bought the wrong kind of shelving hardware. I could go on and on about the errors I made over the next couple of days installing those shelves, but why embarrass myself further? In the end, though, the shelves ended up looking OK—under casual inspection.

At this point in my journey, I’m so used to making mistakes that I’m no longer discouraged by them. I know that, once in a while, a mistake will reveal a better way to do something. In addition, making mistakes means that I’m challenging myself.

When I started my experiment to become a DIYer, I had two goals in mind:

Now that I’ve been at it for a year and a half, I’m able to assess how well I met these goals.

Our home life has definitely improved. Gardening, tending to the chickens, and preserving food is a great way to spend time together. Jane especially enjoys working with me on everything I do. Instead of playing Nintendo Wii with her, we do a lot of gardening and food preparation together as we did before. She is always happy to help me plant seeds; make
kombucha,
yogurt, and sauerkraut; or tend to the chickens. Even when I’m working on solo projects, like woodcarving or cigar-box guitar building, Jane hangs around, asking questions and trying to copy what I’m doing. I usually give her pieces of scrap wood, sandpaper, and glue and she makes things at the same time I do.

Sarina, being older, is occasionally interested in what I’m doing, but she is usually more focused on social activities with her friends. At her age, who can blame her? Preteens are wired to be social. She does enjoy spending time with the chickens and has been helping me scope out a place to build a treehouse, a major DIY project on my to-do list. The time we spent together studying math was much more fulfilling than I had expected, and now I take joy in tutoring her on all subjects. She’s excited about the memory tricks I’ve taught her, which helped her get a perfect score on a quiz that asked her to name the capitals of every country whose primary language is Spanish.

Carla was the least involved in the projects, but she was keenly interested in what was going on and asked a lot of questions. And she offered a lot of encouragement and guidance, which was invaluable.

Now that I am making and fixing some of my own things, I’ve developed a more meaningful connection to the human-made objects and systems I use. I’m practically addicted to working on DIY projects. When I spend an entire day online—blogging, editing stories, writing—it’s sometimes hard to feel much sense of accomplishment. I’m just flailing around in a flurry of binary data—snatching bits, manipulating them, and tossing them back into the chaos. When I’m in this virtual world for too long, a feeling of vague uneasiness grows inside of me. But when I spend at least part of the day using my hands to make or fix something physical, that uneasiness subsides. I feel like I actually did something.

Making things and being the household handyman has given me a deeper understanding of the way things work. The small degree of autonomy I’ve attained as a DIYer has had a big payoff. I enjoy taking my time when I make something, contemplating the possibilities in each step of the process, and being fully engaged. When I’m away from my workbench, I often find myself visualizing a 3D model of something I’m making, rotating it in my imagination and modifying it as I would with Google SketchUp.

I like knowing that I can make something the way I want it to be. I’m proud of the things I make and use, despite their imperfections. When I haul my kids around in the wagon I rebuilt from scrap wood, the wagon tells me the story about the time we spent together building it—including my silly mistakes, like mounting the axles too close to the wagon, so the wheels rubbed against the wood (solved by adding spacer blocks). When the wagon acts up, I can pinpoint what’s wrong with it and how to fix it, because the construction is imprinted in my mind. It took me all afternoon to make the wagon. In that time, I could have earned enough money writing to buy two or three brand-new, factory-built wagons. But I didn’t make the wagon to save time or money. Slowing down was the point. DIY is similar to the Slow Food movement that started in Italy twenty years ago. The planning, selection of tools and materials, creation of the workspace, method of construction, documentation, and final product of a DIY project are things to be savored, not to be thought of as hassles or expenses. The end result of what a DIYer makes
is
important, but it’s also a reminder of an experience that serves as its own reward.

Even if I’m unsuccessful in an attempt to get something done, like installing a water line to the automatic ice maker in our freezer, at least I gain an awareness and appreciation for it. As an amateur maker, I study how objects are constructed and the materials they’re made of. The appreciation for the things we already have extends to a wariness about things we don’t have. Now, instead of grabbing shiny items that catch my eye at Target or Costco, I ask myself if it really will make my life better or if I am buying it just because it’s new. Recreational shopping, it turns out, is no match for recreational making. We’re now keeping our stuff longer than we used to, trying to fix it ourselves when we break it; and when we do have to buy something, we buy a model that will last a long time or can be repaired instead of needing to be replaced. Because we take care of livestock and grow some of our own food, we’re more observant of the environment and cycles of nature around us. Because we have achieved a small degree of self-reliance, we feel more free.