It was a desperate March in 1965, when I resolved I would do anything to avoid having to take next year's 8th grade shop class. Perhaps March wasn't desperate, but I was desperate. I had been consumed and spit out from a year of using a woodworking plane in the class, spending all of my weekly mandatory hour repeating the same one activity of planing a board. Well I confess, I planed many boards before the year was over, as they would begin as healthy boards nearly an inch thick, they'd really look promising at first, but as I planed them down they would become thinner and thinner until they got so thin that they would crack in two or more pieces. Even if they resisted breaking apart, they'd end up way too thin for the final product of this completely inconsequential project the shop teacher foisted upon us while he was trying to keep our hands busy for an hour each week. I think he was secretly unhappy about having to teach junior high kids, even if it did require so little of his time. And honestly, it was probably no easy task to educate us human larvae who were in the midst of our giggling-stage about the glories of wood, either.
Planing a board should have been easy to do, for it's not a lot different than ironing a shirt, and I think I've always been able to do that. The board we had to use wasn't all that large in dimension, so it seems it should have been a breeze, but the shop teacher insisted it had to be perfectly square on all six sides before we could begin sculpting it into its final shape and function. I tried from day one, but early in the school year I discovered that planing to perfection was just not my forté. What began in September as a once a week Thursday afternoon hassle for an disinclined 7th grade woodworker turned into a weekly dread of another shop period failure by the time Christmas rolled around and my board was still not finished. By February my weekly planing fiascoes had reduced several full grown pine trees into discarded shards on the shop floor. As springtime arrived my senses and brain just shut down each week as that awful hour of shop class approached. I was the galley slave rowing the ship, planing my board, rowing and planing.
I hated shop. I never hated any class like I hated 7th grade shop.
Other guys, more adept at this sort of handiwork, had gone on to more sophisticated projects early on in the year after finishing with their planed boards, some of them even getting to use power tools, I believe, but there I remained toward year's end, still over in the beginners' corner with the low caste Plane Gang, stuck with my eternal torment of warped wood that defied becoming my masterwork sculpture.
I came close several times to achieving success with my board. I'd get four sides square enough, my hopes would elevate, but then the remaining two sides would rise up and laugh at me, the knot in the middle of the wood would suddenly crack the board wide open, or something else terrible and unexpected would go wrong and I'd be sent back, humiliated, to the wood pile to find a new board and begin again.
Oh I really hated shop.
All of this planing was the prep work to be followed by cutting our perfectly square board into the shape of a pig. After the pig was cut out from this example of perfection, the pig was destined to be a cutting board in our parents' home with knives and cleavers ravaging its perfect surface, making it imperfect once again as they minced up food on the board and chopped through its surface. I don't believe the damned boards we used were more than 12 x 8 inches in dimension, so the eventual pig cutting board wouldn't have been very useful for large kitchen foodstuffs, though I guess one could slice an onion or a carrot on such a small board. But why use such an inefficient shape and small size to do the work for which regular cutting boards were designed so much more efficiently? I doubt if the food or the food preparation expert in any Southeast Iowa home would have cared much if the surface being used to dice the vegetables had once been perfectly square down to the tiniest millimeter, but our shop teacher, whom I imagine never prepared food, cared.
I imagine he cared because he collected such things as pig cutting board disasters, and kept them as trophies from all his failed students, and I figured his house had hundreds of imperfect cutting board pigs in it, drawers full of them, with more hidden under his mattress, walls laden with them hanging on them, pigs everywhere you looked, pigs with knots and knobs and surfaces that weren't perfectly square that he used as saucers and plates when he ate raw meat, pigs with stories that made him laugh when he remembered all the languish they'd caused their creators, and each of these pigs the final gasp of a shop student who started out no different from other students and yet who went mad that last fateful day of their 7th grade career, crazed before the liberating end of the month of May came to rescue them from this experience of woodworking hell. Scores of lost students must have been carted away from the school throughout the years, taken straight out of shop class by unsympathetic paramedics after each of them had their 85th planed board crack into two pieces, and both parts of those boards had animated and begun cackling at the hapless student victims, sending them in a frenzy with their planes headed for the shop teacher's jugular. Yes, I bet he collected these mementos and laughed at the misery he had caused so many as he sent them away to lifelong incarceration. I'm lucky I didn't have that happen to me.
You know, my mother didn't need a cutting board pig because she had a very nice cutting board rectangle, and this fact alone may have inspired a negative attitude on my part which sadly led to my inevitable doom with the project and the whole year of shop class. I think if I'd been making something a bit more useful (for myself, let's say, for I was pretty self centered) I might have been more upbeat about it all. I can't say I learned any great lessons or developed any particular insights from my shop class traumas, and surprisingly enough it didn't leave so many permanent scars in my psyche that they prevented me from building some of my own furniture after I reached adulthood. I even did OK in high school when I took woodworking shop, so I wasn't a complete failure using my hands. However, since the 7th grade experience of shop class, I've always managed to make these things without the use of a plane.
Now I'll be honest; there were several others in this junior high class who experienced a similar plane hell (if you're reading this, you know who you were), and each week they could be found over by me in our corner of shame and anguish, for we were relegated to our own part of the shop away from the boys who had finished their boards. I suppose it was considered appropriate punishment for our being so useless with these awful tools.
Now I hate to take full credit for being the worst, but even though there were others who toiled on their own boards week after week, I believe I was the very last person to get my wood perfectly square, cut out a pig and sand it, and by then the year was nearly over. And I only managed to do this because the last time I picked a board out of the shop's wood dung heap it came with all but two ends perfect to begin with, and those two that weren't square were the narrow ends of the board, not the large flat faces, and I'd learned to excel at perfecting the narrow ends, especially when they went with the grain.
So finally I had won and my planing farce ended, but right about then so did the school year. I got to take my pig home. I don't think we ever once cut anything on it. I think I hid it away from view, for it was not a great specimen nor something I would have been proud of, even after all that work.
The shop teacher gave me a D that last 9 week period. I had never seen such a letter on a report card before except in the area where they spelled out my first name. Thankfully I think my mother tossed the pig away within a year or so; actually she died two years later and if she didn't, I know I tossed it. I didn't want to be reminded of that class ever again.
