Missing Industrial Arts.

Mr. Brown was one of my all-time favorite teachers. He was a stocky African-American man with a big presence and a deep voice, who would loudly implore students to “T-H-I-N-K” after posing a difficult question. When one of us would approach him with some sort of complaint, he would reply, “Do I seem to be concerned?,” which meant you were equipped to handle this issue on your own. If he needed to send someone to the principal’s office — which, with a classroom of rambunctious middle schoolers, happened frequently — he would look at the culprit, point at the door, and say powerfully (but not always cheerfully), “Have a lovely day.” Mr. Brown did not suffer fools, but he ran the classroom with a theatrical sensibility that kept everyone interested and laughing. 

He taught something called technology education, which as far as I could tell at the time was some sort of problem-solving class. It was project-based, and we often worked in small groups: Each team was given a design brief and a set of tools, then asked to build something. We competed to see who could conjure the best solution. I remember, for example, having to build a bridge with a certain span, and testing to see how much of a load it could hold. We had supervised access to a few machine tools for the more complicated projects.

The program gave me a sense of agency that I had never felt before. I could learn about a problem, game out possible solutions with my classmates, then craft a solution. I learned what to do when I didn’t know what to do: research, try stuff, ask for help. Sometimes we failed spectacularly — a balsa wood airplane I destroyed during a sanding pass still haunts me — but that was part of the process. I could try again. I absolutely loved how collaborative, creative, and open-ended it all was, and I continued with technology education and its associated student group, the Technology Student Association (TSA), until I graduated high school. Almost every day for seven years, I worked on a TSA project. We competed in events at conferences all around the country. It was the most formative educational experience of my youth.