By Tom McGowan
I was teaching young school children how to do stage carpentry, how to wire a model of a house, about solar energy, and other useful things long before we had Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) teaching and STEAM (which added in the arts). Such teaching by outside volunteers is now promoted nationwide.
An early example in Grant Park was for ANCS when it was a primary school with all eight grades. They filled the entire auditorium with all ages of children and my pitch that day was about work and about jobs. I had a handout that listed the many things I’ve done from my first “real” job as a paper boy at age 12 to today. I gave two of the children jobs – one to run the cables to the projector and another to hand out the handouts. A helpful teacher came up and took the handouts from the child and started to hand them out. I had a quiet word with her, saying “I gave that child a job…” She flinched just a bit and gave the child back the handouts. My point is this: We should give children jobs and let them work to gain experience. It need not be paying work at first, but gaining experience will lead to better abilities – and then to paying work – and a sense of being a capable person.
In 2025, I taught a design class at ANCS middle school. It was great fun, and I recall the two smallest children, boy and girl, were naturals at hammering, far surpassing many older and bigger students. After six weeks, their original designs were transformed into wood and metal finished products. They learned to sketch, measure, saw, and use “fasteners” and were anxious to fill me in on their progress on my bi-weekly visits.
At Maynard Jackson High School, I started with some 30 students, showing them a PowerPoint presentation on what it is to be an engineer, how plants run, and how there are jobs from everybody from admins, to running the truck scale, to engineers and PhD scientists in the lab – something for everyone.
With a smaller group of around seven students, I taught them about the tools in the pockets of the apron on the outside of a sheetrock mud bucket, with the bucket itself there to hold my drill and supplies for the job at hand. I explained to them that they could keep a roof over their heads and food coming in just with what was in that bucket. And they didn’t have to be a handyman; it could be a sewing machine, or a ladder and a paint pail, a roller, and a brush, all without a big, huge investment. If not their life’s work, certainly it would be a way to pick up weekend cash jobs, help someone out, help yourself out, and feel good about yourself and confident in your skills.
I asked the seven or so students that remained if they had jobs and no one raised their hand. I then asked if any had done construction. One had helped his uncle build a deck, and that’s a start, watching and learning from others so that one can do it all by themselves.
