The School in Rose Valley

Attending kindergarten and grade school at the School in Rose Valley (SRV) was my foundational educational experience.  That's a formal way of putting it, but you get the idea.  What made SRV so impactful were the women who ran it.  Progressives to the core, women like Grace Rotzel and Peg Nowell set the tone and standards of the place.  They were sharp-eyed agitators of young lives.
Part of their inspired method was challenging youngsters to do and learn things that didn't come easily.   For me, that included skills that were foreign to my parents - like shop.
The principle (Grace Rotzel) wrote in 1934:

“The shop is the center of the school. Working with tools furnishes one of the best disciplines a school can offer. Up to this point in a child’s life, his discipline has come almost always from some person emotionally close to him. With things like tools, he is free to impose his own discipline. He wants the result, or frequently, in a very young child, he merely wants the satisfaction of the act of sawing and hammering. In any case, the desire to make things is so general in children that they are willing to go through much hard work to reach their ends. This is discipline.”

When my brother and I attended in the 1950s, our shop teacher was Clarence Freeman, an African American with huge, skilled hands and a kindly manner of instilling discipline in his charges.  I trace my woodworking interests and proclivities back six decades to the shop he oversaw.