by Alec Foege
It didn’t surprise me, therefore, though it was something of a revelation, when I stumbled upon what struck me as one of the most insightful voices regarding the nature of tinkering running a summer program in Northern California. His name is Gever Tulley.
CHAPTER 10
A DIFFERENT KIND OF SCHOOL
SEVEN OR EIGHT YEARS AGO, Gever Tulley, who is now in his late forties, finally confronted his own childhood. It happened around the time when all of his friends started having kids. Since he had no kids of his own, Tulley hadn’t thought much about his own upbringing lately. He recalls a time in his early thirties visiting a friend with young kids. They were talking quietly about nothing in particular when the friend suddenly yelled at her son, who was innocently brandishing a stick, “Is that a stick? You know the rule. No playing with sticks!” He would, from that time, question the various “rules” we have for our kids, and the unintended cost of our obsession with safety.
As Tulley makes it clear, his own childhood in Mendocino, California, was different. His parents were remarkably free of the rules that bound other kids, as were those of many of his friends. “In those days, they’d boot you out the backdoor in the morning,” he says. “And they’d be like, ‘Be home before dark.’”
Maybe he’d go to a friend’s house, maybe they’d head out on their bicycles. Nobody knew where they were or where they were going. Maybe they were out in the woods with some tools and wood, building a castle in the trees. Maybe he’d jump off a high rock into some water. “You developed a true sense of risk and danger really through a series of minor bumps and scrapes—and maybe a broken arm here and there,” he told me.
Tulley does not seem scarred by those experiences. Instead, they seem to have imbued him with an eternal sense of wonderment about the world. It would be tempting to call Tulley’s perspective childlike, if it weren’t so complex and mature about the way it manifests itself in his current day-to-day existence. His vision may be best described as “Tinkering 2.0.”
I met with Tulley in New York City. He was passing through on the way to Europe, where he was booked to reprise one of his now wildly popular TED Conference presentations. Tulley gave his first TED talk, titled “Five Dangerous Things You Should Let Your Kids Do,” in March 2007. On the original list were play with fire, own a pocket knife, throw a spear, deconstruct appliances, and either break the Digital Media Copyright Act (by converting a digital music file from a paid format to the MP3 format) or drive a car. Tulley’s point in each case, delivered with plenty of humorous asides, was that these taboo activities all provide valuable hands-on learning experiences for children while also building confidence and self-reliance skills. The video stream of the talk on the TED website has been viewed more than 1.5 million times.
TED talks—“TED” stands for technology, entertainment, design—are typically about innovative ideas that run counter to conventional wisdom, and are often delivered by well-known leaders in their respective fields. Past TED speakers include Bill Gates, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Google cofounders Sergey Brin and Larry Page, Jane Goodall, Gordon Brown, Richard Dawkins, and various Nobel Prize winners. When Tulley first delivered his talk, he was neither a leader nor well known. He was a contract computer programmer who recently had founded his first summer program for children, known as the Tinkering School.
Tulley was born in Mendocino, California, three hours north of San Francisco, to parents he describes as beatniks rather than hippies. They predated the hippies, he says, and listened mostly to jazz, not rock and roll. Mendocino was an old logging town that nearly vanished in the 1940s but underwent a revival as an artist colony around 1957, when the Mendocino Arts Center was established. Cheap land drew hippies from San Francisco up to California’s north coast where communes thrived in the 1960s and 1970s, and marijuana became a major cash crop. Tulley describes his father as a “fisherman-slash-beatnik poet,” someone who naturally took to the area’s alternative lifestyle.
His strongest recollection of that period was how his parents’ friends, a varied mix of artists and other creative types, treated him with the same respect as an adult, even when he was a young child. It left a lasting impression: there was no need to talk down to kids.
Soon after Richard Nixon was reelected president in 1972, his parents elected to move the family to the small Canadian town of Nakusp, British Columbia, as an act of protest. Eight years old at the time, Tully had a hard time making the adjustment from Mendocino’s temperate climate to the harsh western Canadian winters. When foot after foot of snow fell during the winter, the roads would be closed, and school would be too. But when the lush wilderness thawed, Tulley and his brother reaped the benefits. The family’s property had a creek on it where the boys would jump on an inner tube and float five miles downstream. Along that route lurked limitless adventures that brought them close to nature; they frequently saw bears, mountain lions, and other wildlife.
But it wasn’t all fun and games; the inhospitable climate meant having to come up with inventive solutions to unusual problems on the fly; in the winter, the family had to build an ice dam to ensure it would have enough water for the season. The Tulley family would stay in Canada for both of Nixon’s terms, during which time Tulley experienced what he considered the far superior Canadian grammar schools. By the time they returned to California in 1975, just in time for him to attend middle school, he was far ahead of his classmates. He would face several years of boredom, but with this boredom came an opportunity.
As relief from the mind-numbing review of lessons he was already familiar with, Tulley spent a lot of time “being in my own head in the classroom.” He kept to himself mostly and entertained himself with his own thoughts. Tulley had always had an active inner life, and this was simply a full-time chance to indulge it. Thankfully for him, in his first year of high school, his school introduced a program known as the Community School, which offered more creative learning opportunities for unorthodox students like the one he had become, as well as what he calls “the feral children of Mendocino County,” kids who needed hands-on attention from the school’s educators.
It was around this time that Tulley was diagnosed with spondylolisthesis, a helical twisting of the spine due to a congenital defect. As a result, at age thirteen he began suffering painful sciatica, including a constant feeling that a hot poker was being jabbed into his left leg. He would require surgery involving light traction while four vertebrae of his spine were welded together. Afterward, Tulley was placed in a body cast that went from his knees to the top of his head; a kind of a hard-shell space suit. He was then suspended on spokes inside two giant hoops to keep him in the proper position for healing. And so he wouldn’t get bed sores, the hoops were placed in a tray with rollers that allowed him to turn himself over. The whole contraption was then put on wheels, so he could push himself around with his gloved hands.
He would be a prisoner in this horizontal rotating cage for about three months. Fortunately, a woman who worked at the Community School offered to pick him up every day and take him to school, since his parents were both working. The woman arrived each morning with a van, and with the help of a ramp, got Tulley into it and strapped his tray down in the back. Once at school, he could wander the school in this bizarre, horizontal position. “My legs were slightly spread, I had these Velcroed sweatpants that would fit around the spokes so that I was discreet in public,” he says. “And that was my life at that period of time.”
It was perhaps a tribute to the free-thinking outlook of the school, and students attending it, that Tulley was able to pass through a good part of the school year in this fashion. Indeed, since many of the kids in the program were permitted to take on any educational project they could conceive of, his unusual state of being was hardly remarked upon. Apparently some students mistook his ailment for some sort of wild experiment. Around this time, something clicked in Tulley’s head: if he could live through this, he could get away with anything. Freed from the fear of bei
ng stared at for appearing different, he became determined to pursue his passions no matter where they led him.
It was during this otherworldly experience that Tulley believes the seeds were sown for what would become the pinnacle of his life’s work, an alternative education program called the Tinkering School.
His bedrock principle was that kids could do real work. The work didn’t have to be abstracted for students to understand it. Never mind reading a physics textbook; why not build a physical thing that expressed the same ideas? The same approach, Tulley decided over time, could be applied to music and art, even history and philosophy.
Around the age of six, Tulley recalls, he began asking adults visiting his family’s home if he could tag along to wherever they were going. He was interested in finding out more about the things adults did. At first he got a lot of friendly stares and polite nos, but around the age of nine, people began to say yes. Among his early experiences of this kind was hitchhiking to San Francisco with an adult family friend, spending a couple of days with the friend in the city, and then hitchhiking back.
After graduating high school with a GED, due to his unorthodox schooling, Tulley applied to and was accepted to the University of California, San Diego; coming from a poor family may have helped him. Although college was his first experience with conventional educational methods in quite a while, including attending classes and taking tests, there was some question already whether it would be of any value to him. Tulley had already been making a living as a computer programmer for three years before matriculating. At fifteen, he had been hired to write code for medical devices.
Not surprisingly, college was not a good fit for Tulley. He began getting that old bored feeling again. While he enjoyed his film and creative writing classes, he experienced little else of value to him. He would last just one quarter.
He remained in San Diego while his girlfriend at the time finished out her year of college there. When she transferred to Santa Cruz, he decided to follow her. Meanwhile, Tulley quickly found a job repairing some of the first portable computers, the Kaypro and the Osborne, at a little cutting-edge computer shop that also sold typewriters. A typical problem he saw: two floppy disks shoved into the disk drive because users didn’t know to remove the first one when prompted to INSERT DISK 2 by the computer. It was 1981.
For many young people, such a lowly job might have seemed like drudgery, but for Tulley it was an instant education. “When the Kaypro II came out, they’d solved a lot of the problems in that second generation,” he says. “That was kind of a marvelous thing, to have been so intimate with the construction of the first Kaypro, and then to have the Kaypro II come out, and open it up and these simple changes fixing the electromechanical problems of the first generation.”
Tulley later realized that while his unorthodox upbringing in Mendocino had exposed him to alternative ways of looking at the world, it didn’t channel into his notion of ambition and accomplishment. “There wasn’t a culture of getting out and making something of yourself,” he says. “It was okay to lead a low-key, moderately productive life. Not that people were lazy, but the grand ambition was kind of uncommon. It was okay not to have it.” A lot of people had moved up to the Mendocino area to escape the city and lead a semiagrarian life.
Tulley associates the drive to tinker that he and other Americans feel with the westward expansion in the United States in the mid-1800s. The exhortation by the US government in that era to get out west and finish populating this giant country had a lasting effect on the young nation. Sure, there were other motivators, such as the prospect of gold in California. But the notion of pushing farther into the unknown frontier bleeds into almost everything Americans do, whether there’s a need for it or not. There’s a natural tendency to believe that things could be just a little bit better. Good enough is never good enough. Americans never leave well enough alone.
Of course, not every American goes on to be a tinkerer, but the potential sits lurking in the heart of many a citizen, raised to believe that fame, prosperity, or maybe just recognition awaits those who try just a little harder.
Take the French fry, for example. Invented elsewhere (just exactly where is forever up for debate), the thin strips of deep-fried potatoes were perfected in the United States by the J. R. Simplot Company in the late 1940s. Founded by J. R. “ Jack” Simplot at the age of fourteen, the Idaho-based company mass-produced a frozen fry concocted by Simplot’s scientists. In 1967, Simplot agreed, in a handshake deal with Ray Kroc, to supply McDonald’s with all of its frozen French fries. But the perfect French fry was not enough. More innovation was demanded. The result? Ripple-cut fries, waffle fries, curly fries, Tater Tots—the variations are endless.
“The taxonomy of French-fry-making machines is just ridiculous,” say Tulley, with a chuckle.
Tinkering School began as a six-night sleepover summer camp program in 2005. Tulley’s first campers were his niece and a few of his friends’ kids. One child flew all the way from France to participate. Another two jetted in from Connecticut. Quite a remarkable turnout considering Tulley had no camp accreditation and the only publicity for the camp was posted on his blog. To make things more challenging, Tulley still held a full-time job as a software engineer during the first session. Then there was the infamous document parents had to sign before their children could attend. They actually had to print the words “I understand that my child may be injured or killed at this camp.”
That first year of Tinkering School, the kids arrived to find a huge pile of plywood plates and two-by-four blocks. Their charge for the first day: build chairs. Tulley began by taking all the chairs out of his studio. He asked the children to take a seat. After a nervous chuckle from his campers, Tulley suggested they build some chairs. The next day, they built a twenty-foot-long truss-beam bridge that connected the studio’s deck to a tree and carried the weight of the entire class. On the third day of camp, they built some towers of various heights. The tallest ones allowed the campers to climb up onto the roof of Tulley’s studio.
On the last two days of the program, the kids built a working rollercoaster out of wood with the help of Tulley and few other adults. In the name of continuity, Tulley wishes he had inserted one more interim project relating specifically to wheels, but he feels the same effect was achieved indirectly. “When you look at what a rollercoaster is made of, it’s basically a chair sitting on wheels riding over a series of bridges and towers,” he says. “So the kids had this vocabulary of skills and what was strong, and why it’s important that when you screw two blocks of wood together, that there be no gap between, because you end up with a loose joint.”
Tinkering School’s first curriculum supported a key tenet of tinkering: the value of building on previous inventions. Tulley contends that, due to the week’s previous projects (the chair, the bridge, and the towers), the kids were better equipped to solve the problems related to erecting a rollercoaster. “It basically was two days of building and then tinkering with it to tune all the corners and things like that,” he says. In the end, the campers built 120 feet of track.
The Tinkering School’s days are broken up into segments, and for each successive segment, Tulley has built in some additional options, based on the assumption that different groups of children will progress through tasks in different ways. For the initial group, they could have built ladders before building towers, but Tulley decided they were sufficiently handy to skip that step. Instead of a rollercoaster, they could have built a drawbridge, in the style of London Bridge, with two towers, suspension architecture, and a moveable roadbed. “But I could tell by the kids’ velocity,” says Tulley, “that we could pull off the rollercoaster by Saturday morning.”
One of Tulley’s main guiding points for Tinkering School is that all of the projects have to be real. No fake tools or preordained conclusions. In other words, if the campers are going to build their own boats (which they did one summer), they are going to try them out in the water. If they
don’t float, the kids sink.
Tulley’s theory is that if children get a sense that their experiences and their classroom education are following a script–—in other words, that the authorities in their lives already know the conclusions—they pick up on that and it lessens their interest in the topic. That is not to imply that he has no ulterior motives behind some of the projects.
“For the bridge, I wanted to get the kids to understand why when they look at so many things in the world, they are made out of these triangles,” Tulley says, sketching a few on a blank page of a notebook that he carries everywhere he goes. All the kids had were twenty-four-inch and sixteen-inch chunks of wood. After that, he moved to plywood: four inches on one end and either twenty-four or sixteen inches on the other end. “And we had four-by-four-inch two-by-four chunks. Those constraints gave them a problem space to work within.” The idea is for the kids to learn how to make their project work with what they have—the essence of tinkering.
Tulley, however, swears that he had no idea how he and his campers would build the rollercoaster until they actually did.
Tulley held the Tinkering School for the first three years at his house, as the roster of campers quickly grew. Then he moved it to a farm that he rented some fifteen miles away. Seventy-five percent of the ten campers in each session paid tuition, which now is $1,450 per week, and helped fund the other 25 percent, who didn’t.
Somewhere along the line, friends of Tulley recommended that he attend the annual TED Conference. The first time he went, he paid his own way, as an attendee. Then TED leader Chris Anderson sent out an invite informing guests that for half a day before the conference began, any attendee was welcomed to propose their own topic to talk to the other TED attendees about.