Students at Healy’s Tri-Valley School learned some “MacGyver skills” in this Career Tech class. It is something they will always remember.
This is Alaska, after all, so in this class, students discover the ability to creatively solve a problem using whatever materials are readily available.Then they practice it.
“We have to come up with creative ways to level things without levels, make things fit, and use unconventional techniques to get a task completed,” said senior Addison Walker, when he presented some of the projects to the Denali School Board.
One of their Career Tech projects this year was building a new trophy showcase for hundreds of student trophies collecting dust in storage.
The school has always had one giant trophy case in the front hallway at the school’s main entrance. But it became crammed with trophies over the years.
After a thorough summer cleaning, older excess trophies were stashed into boxes for storage. But no one liked that idea.
So students in the Career Tech class opted to build a second trophy case, near the school gymnasium. Now trophies won by students through the years are on full display.
“One notable and unique feature of this class, beyond the fact that it is a hands-on career-type class,” said Walker. “Is that all the projects we have completed would fall into a true service-learning experience.”
Service-learning is an educational approach that combines academic learning with real-world service projects. Students target a need, then learn how to implement that need for the community.
At a recent school board meeting, Walker gave board members a tour of the project, which included several different stops along the way.
The projects, he said, included preparing the chaotic and disorganized shop area for the class, designing and building a structure outside to store the school lumber, drafting and building a functional hockey stick rack for the high school hockey team, as well as planning and building a trophy showcase for the hundreds of trophies and awards that were collecting dust in storage.
“We are truly learning skills and serving our school at the same time,” Walker said.
The end result hasn’t always been perfect, but that’s where the learning comes in.
“We have one of Mr. Frisbie’s sawed-in-half sawhorses to prove difficulties in the process,” he said. “We simply corrected that mistake by learning how to build a sturdy new sawhorse for him.”
Daryl Frisbie is the class instructor.
Another lesson: learning the hard way that screwing down metal sheeting takes careful adherence to the teacher’s instructions on keeping the screws in an absolute straight line.
“Don’t eyeball it,” Walker said. “Use a chalk line.”
Luckily, a strong collaboration with another CTE class means that mistake will be covered by some student-made metal art.
