Teaching With Your Teacher

My first chairmaking students in a class co-taught with Alexander Bear at my home shop, the Kansas City Woodworkers’ Guild. I started teaching chairmaking one year ago, fresh off a week assisting Chris’s Chairmaker’s Toolbox class. I had just a few chairs under my belt and probably wasn’t quite ready to teach anyone else how to make them but I had a willing co-teacher and enough reckless abandon to try. We set off on a ten week adventure, building chairs in three hour chunks on Monday nights. After a few weeks, one of the students came in and said, “I’ve been reading the book after class – you sound exactly like Chris!” Learning to narrate your actions while also maintaining accuracy only comes with practice — which sometimes means messing up in front of an audience. Luckily that didn’t happen here! He wasn’t wrong. I am a self-taught woodworker – the closest thing I had to a woodworking education was The Stick Chair Book, the LAP blog, and two weeks at the Willard Street shop. I…