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.
LEADING UP TO THE TEST
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.”
—FREEMAN DYSON, “IN PRAISE OF AMATEURS,” THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS, DEC. 5, 2002
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: 1. To improve my family’s home life by taking an active role in the things that feed, clothe, educate, maintain, and entertain us.
2. To gain a deeper connection and sense of engagement with the things and systems that keep us alive and happy.
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 t
o 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.
My DIY experiences have boosted my confidence about things I would have shunned a year ago. I’ve installed two toilets (with plenty of leaky mistakes). I’ve repaired and installed a number of electrical outlets and light fixtures around the house. I’ve started teaching myself how to program a microcontroller so that I can make a device that automatically turns over a jar of natural peanut butter every twenty-four hours to mix the oil and the solid ingredients. I’m not as afraid of new challenges because I know that with enough perseverance, I’ll eventually get them done. It’s a great feeling.
The most persistent obstacle in trying to achieve these goals has been finding enough time to do them. It would have been easier to accomplish everything I set out to do if we had dropped out of our current lifestyle completely, but we tried that in 2003 when we went to Rarotonga, and it didn’t work out. So I have to squeeze my DIY projects in between my work hours and the time spent dealing with other non-DIY-related domestic chores, like house-cleaning, driving the kids to school, and paying bills. That meant that most of my leisure time was spent on DIY projects, which cut into my usual leisure activities, like watching TV, drawing and painting, and reading books. Fortunately, working on DIY projects has been so much fun that I don’t feel bad about missing out on those other things.
I’m not alone in my discovery of the joy of using your hands to build a richer, more meaningful life. In the last few years, I’ve witnessed a growing interest in DIY projects. Make magazine’s Maker Faire, a giant DIY expo held yearly in San Mateo, California, started in 2005 with twenty thousand attendees. By 2009 attendance had grown to seventy-five thousand. The pickle and sauerkraut workshops I’ve helped run in Los Angeles get bigger every time they’re held. Our beekeeping club has gone from a dozen members to more than fifty in a few months. So-called “hacking spaces”—where people can gather to work with power tools, soldering irons, and signal analyzers—are popping up all over the country, offering guidance and workshops on everything from sewing dresses to programming microcontrollers. Corporations like Adobe regularly offer hands-on project workshops for their software developers as a way of breaking them out of their virtual-reality ruts.
The growing interest in DIY is charging a virtuous circle—individuals who make things enjoy documenting their projects online, which inspires others to try making them, too.
I’ve joined this virtuous circle myself. Whenever I build a new guitar or a new gadget for my chicken coop, I post a description or a video about it on my blog. Many people have e-mailed me to let me know that my projects have spurred them to do their own projects. They’ve told me that making things has changed the way they look at the world around them, opening new doors and presenting new opportunities to get deeply involved in processes that require knowledge, skill building, creativity, critical thinking, decision making, risk taking, social interaction, and resourcefulness. They understand that when you do something yourself, the thing that changes most profoundly is you.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This book wouldn’t have been possible if not for the hundreds of truly inspiring people I’ve met through Make magazine and Maker Faire. I can’t name them all here, but the following were especially helpful and deserve recognition: Mark Allen, Chris Anderson, Kirk Anderson, Gerry Arrington, Russell Bates, Gareth Branwyn, Daniel Carter, Laura Cochrane, Shawn Connally, Larry Cotton, Kelly Coyne, Collin Cunningham, Julian Darley, Roy Doty, George Dyson, the Evil Mad Scientists, Limor Fried, Kyl
e Glanville, Arwen O’Reilly Griffith, Saul Griffith, Bill Gurstelle, Keith Hammond, Sherry Huss, Tom Igoe, Brian Jepson, Kip Kay, Erik Knutzen, Todd Lappin, Andrew Lewis, Steve Lodefink, Kris Magri, Terrie Miller, Forrest Mims, Goli Mohammadi, Sam Murphy, Julia Posey, Tim O’Reilly, Mike Outmesguine, John Edgar Park, Tom Parker, Celine Rich, Phil Ross, Adam Savage, Amy Seidenwurm, Donald Simanek, Paul Spinrad, Becky Stern, Eric Thomason, Phillip Torrone, Gever Tulley, Cy Tymony, Marc de Vinck, David Williams, Katie Wilson, Dan Woods, and Lee D. Zlotoff. I’m especially thankful to my friends Mister Jalopy and Charles Platt, who generously shared their time and workshops with me, and who changed my idea for what this book was going to be about. I would like to thank Dale Dougherty, the founder of Make, for inviting me to join him and for providing me with many insights about the nature of DIY that found their way into my book.
My father, Lew, a DIYer his entire life, taught me many lessons that I didn’t pay much attention to while growing up, but which became invaluable when I made the decision to become a DIYer.
Thanks go to my co-editors at Boing Boing—Cory Doctorow, Xeni Jardin, and David Pescovitz—as well as to the readers of the blog, who offered constructive feedback on my projects that I posted there.
The copy editor, Candy Gianetti, did a top-notch job of tightening my copy and catching quite a few factual and chronological errors, and for this I’m grateful.
I couldn’t imagine embarking on a book without Byrd Leavell of Waxman Literary Agency at my side—thanks for being the best, Byrd.
Tim Sullivan, the editor who approached me with the idea of writing a DIY book in March of 2008, provided great advice during the early stages of the book.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to work with David Moldawer again, the editor of my previous book. David’s guidance, creativity, and enthusiasm were essential ingredients in this project and I’m lucky to be able to work with him.
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