In today’s installment of Adam Savage’s One Day Builds, Adam re-created the first thing he ever engineered with a releasing mechanism: a ping pong ball launcher. He first made one as a 16-year-old high school student. It involved 3 rubber bands, a spoon, a length of coat-hanger wire, a hinge, some twine threaded around a path marked out by eye screws, and – critically – the trigger mechanism from a circa-1980 pricing gun, all mounted on a plywood structure. And it worked. Reliably. Exactly what you would expect from an Adam Savage circa-2020 build.
Adam set out to make his replica as much like the original as possible. He quickly abandoned the idea of full-on replication though. At least, he quickly ditched the idea of using inexpensive hand tools as he had with the original. He has much better tools now, many of them power tools, which saved a ton of time, effort, and frustration. He did faithfully stick to the original design though – only deviating when he proved to himself that a detail of the original was too flawed. As he always does, he regularly tested mechanisms as he completed different parts of the build to make sure they worked. At a couple of points, he found aspects of the original design that didn’t work quite right. In particular, his design used a string of rubber bands to propel the ball and it was set-up essentially like a slingshot. The bands mounted across two posts, the ball is placed in their center and drawn back to stretch them, and when the ball is released, the rubber bands pull it forward, between the two posts. As he tested that mechanism with his original design, the posts frequently interfered with the path of the ball, so he modified that part of the design to move the posts out of the way. He also made the plywood stock a little longer. Otherwise, he followed the design he had worked out 38 years earlier.
I should probably point out that he was not working from plans. There was no record of the original plan except what remained in his memory. And 38 years later, he remembered all the details – including much of the problem solving process that got him to the eventual design. 38 years later.
At the end of the video, when he fired the ping pong ball across the room, you could hear in his laugh, and see in his face, pure joy. There is a child-like joy in much of what he does. Even so, you could see this was special. He said he knew it wasn’t a particularly effective weapon. But it was never about that. He reproduced a thing that had been deeply meaningful to him and the profound satisfaction of being reunited with it was palpable. It is a deeply personal joy.
His ”One Day Build” videos usually start with Adam explaining why he chose the thing he is building. Often it is a practical reason – he builds a lot of things to streamline his shop and make it more usable/functional. Sometimes, he builds a thing in response to questions or requests from viewers. Other times he builds stuff he enjoys: components of costumes for Comicon, replica weapons from his favorite nerdy-shows, or even just nostalgic things. The ping pong ball launcher was none of those.
His intro to the ping pong launcher build was longer and more involved than most – and he stood in front of his workbench, in a 3/4 shot, gesticulating with his whole body while he talked. It was uncharacteristic of the laid-back feel of most of his videos. It was not intense, by any means. But there was an emotional heightened-ness about it that stood out to me as I watched.
The launcher was something he had built as a high school art project. He talked about what an important influence his art teachers had been – and he specifically talked about them by name to call out their influence. They had recognized his burgeoning maker identity and nurtured it – and he had seized those opportunities to explore ideas deeply. He said he often went WAY beyond requirements of assignments, turning in several separate works where only 1 was required. At some point, his teacher included some of his work in a public show at the local library. The ping pong ball launcher was one of those pieces.
As it turns out, Adam also worked at the library where his work was being shown. One day, as he was shelving books, a woman interrupted him to ask if the ping pong ball launcher was his, then told him how much she enjoyed it – particularly the whimsy of it. Adam said that was not only the first time a stranger had appreciated his work, but also the first time someone recognized part on HIM in the work. It hadn’t occurred to him that his personality could appear in the things he created. So the ping pong ball launcher wasn’t just nostalgia for Adam. It was a hugely important formative experience – an epiphanic re-orientation of his identity as a maker.
I don’t know that there is another individual more associated with – or who more fully embodies – the maker movement than Adam Savage. And he is such an avid and encouraging supporter of makers and making. He routinely highlights the work of other makers in his videos – doing for them what that woman did for him at the library 38 years ago. I am one of the people who discovered a host of amazing makers because Adam’s team pulled them together for their project egress build, creating a venue for all of them to promote each other. In one of his videos, he responds to a viewer’s question about what makes a person a maker. He began by thanking the questioner for the opportunity to express his hatred of gatekeeping, saying “gatekeeping is almost always a fools errand or a cruelty.” He talked about his concern over the number of people who tell him they don’t see themselves as makers, because they don’t think they are accomplished enough. He then pushes back on that perception by defining “maker” in a way that is inclusive of anyone seeking to creating things – regardless where they are on the path of skill development. And he ends by looking into the camera and telling anyone who desires to make things that he ordains them as makers. It is ceremonial. And it is a welcoming message of belonging. It is such a welcoming message of inclusion, in fact, that I used it as a springboard for my welcome to new doctoral students who started my class this past fall. Adam Savage is the epitome of someone who reaches back to extend a hand to people trying to follow a path he has struggled and succeeded on himself.
And the ping pong launcher is a pivotal moment in his origin story.
And his school principal threw it away.
Fucking vogon.
The art show ended and the pieces were returned to the school where the art teachers stored them, along with so many other examples of Adam’s (and other students’) work in an art room. Summer came. Students and teachers left for the break. And they returned in the fall to find the principal had decided to “clean” the art room.
Fucker.
The principal apparently kept some of the other things that had been stored in the art room – a popsicle-stick model of the Globe Theater, for example. But Adam’s wooden and cardboard creations got tossed in a dumpster.
Adam didn’t build anything for a year.
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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes Vogons as:
one of the most unpleasant races in the galaxy – not actually evil, but bad tempered, bureaucratic, officious and callous. They wouldn’t save their own grandmothers from the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal without an order, signed in triplicate, sent in, sent back, queried, lost, found, subjected to public enquiry, lost again, and finally buried in soft peat for three months and recycled as firelighters.
They destroy beautiful things for sport. They stubbornly refuse to evolve. And, as Ford Prefect says in the movie, “They can’t think. They can’t imagine… They just run things.”
It is also noteworthy that, while Douglas Adams changed details of the story each time The Guide was adapted to a different medium, one of the key plot points that was consistent in all of them was that vogons are responsible for the destruction of nearly all of humanity.
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I will be the first to admit that my attitude about educational administrators was, and sometimes still can be, unfairly cynical. When I re-read The Guide after I had become a teacher, I got to the entry about vogons and my knee-jerk reaction was “oh, he’s describing educational administrators.” I first read The Guide when I was in high school. And then I re-read it again as an undergrad. I hadn’t thought much about the vogons in either of those readings – except that it was an interesting twist to make the villains mindless and unconcerned with competence rather than framing them as evil. But it wasn’t until I started seeing myself as a teacher – and hanging around with other teachers – that I started associating administration with vogonary.
In my defense, the most positive thing I had heard anyone say about an administrator to that point was ‘yeah, I guess he’s a pretty good dean – I mean, he let’s me do my job without being an impediment.’ More often I heard stories of micromanagers, short-sighted decision-making, imposed priorities and the like. I have also heard stories of autocratic authoritarianism, but those seem quite rare to me. Most of the stories I have heard – or experienced – of poor or mediocre leaders are ones of benign disregard or clumsy in-charge-ness. For example, one of the other doctoral students in my cohort once told me that her principal had arranged to observe her teaching one day, so she put a ton of effort into preparing a great inquiry lesson, with different activities at each of several different learning stations around the classroom – and the kids were all up and moving around and engaged. She was really proud of how well it was working. The principal walked in, took one look around, and said “I’ll come back when you are teaching.” Not evil. Just bureaucratic, officious, and callous. Not thinking. Just running things.
To be clear, I have worked with great leaders too. I have gotten to see, first hand, administrators who created environments in which people were empowered to do their thing – who fostered a culture of collaborative excellence. I get to work with some of them now and it is energizing to work with people who care deeply about supporting the people they lead – and know how to do it well. And that has made me realize my cynical classification, administrators = vogons, was wildly unfair.
But the fact remains: there are many administrators about whom the best I can say is ‘at least they are not an impediment.’ And there have been far too many, in my experience, whose incompetence has created problems. Incompetence in educational leadership looks like a failure to recognize the standards internal to the task – namely that education, done well, opens new possibilities for learners. Incompetent educational leaders instead prescribe outcomes for learners – without regard to the learners themselves. They take pride in orderliness, consistency, numbers of agenda items covered, numbers of votes taken, and the like. Nothing to do with learners or learning. These are the people who monitor the number of hours colleagues are “in the office” as though the superficial display of (toxic) busy-ness is a mark of moral superiority. And they are the same people who walk into an art room, decide it needs to be de-cluttered, and throw priceless mementos of learning in the garbage. They don’t think, they just run things.
It is not just administrators that are the problem though. I worry it is endemic to our educational system that we are busy measuring things unrelated to – even contrary to – opening possibilities for learners. Beth Hatt captures the problem in her study of the ways “smartness” is used as a means of control in a kindergarten classroom. Teachers in her study celebrated compliance by making a show of calling those children smart. They also re-inscribe privilege by denying the label “smart” to children whose parents did not have the time to work with them to develop abilities that can be easily measured – such as shoe tying – or expected the teachers to teach their kids the things that would be evaluated. Nothing actually to do with learning. The teachers weren’t thinking. They were just running things. Hatt’s findings are not unique to the classroom she studied though. It is but one example of a problem that has been growing for decades. Education is less-and-less about opening possibilities for learners. It is more-and-more about what can be straight-forwardly measured. This industrial management strategy originates with administrators, but it has been increasingly internalized by teachers as well.
Part of me is super hesitant to critique teachers. Teachers are cruelly maligned by a general population who presumes to know better, in a shameful display of ignorance-fueled arrogance. People presume to tell teachers how to do their jobs in a way they NEVER would other professionals. Imagine someone following an electrician around their house nattering at them ‘that’s not how my electricians did it 30 years ago’ or ‘I don’t care what other houses need, you should make exceptions for mine’ or ‘I know what is best for my circuit-breaker box’ or ‘stop using those new-fangled materials and go back to using the things I recognize – like what I had in the house that burned down’… It is no wonder there is a crisis brewing with dwindling interest in teaching as a career. But I also can’t excuse vogons in the front of the classroom. Teaching is important – important enough that educational malpractice pisses me off. So I can’t point fingers at vogons in the front office without also calling out vogons in front of classrooms. Both are forms of educational malpractice.
There are some excellent teachers in Adam’s story: his art teachers, his shop teacher, his parents, and – importantly – the woman who took a moment to say the couple of sentences that reshaped his world as an artist and maker. His teachers and circumstance set him up to be ready to hear what she had to say – and it was serendipitous that she said it at the right time for him to hear it. But she did – and it mattered. All of those people, working in concert, expanded his world, opening new possibilities they saw in him. Specifically in him. That takes time and intention – and a bit of serendipity – to see what was in him and find ways to open those possibilities. And it was such a formative experience, he remembered even the minutia well enough to re-create the launcher 38 years later. But one vogon of a principal almost fucked it up with a single agenda item. And that is the thing I found most upsetting about Adam’s story. It is a corollary to Brandolini’s law – the vogon asymmetry principle: years of good work by a collective of good teachers can be undone by one action of a single dipshit.
Adam Savage was resilient enough to overcome his vogon of a principal – albeit a year later. How many kids don’t have the resources Adam did for overcoming their vogons though?
Adam’s joy in being re-united with his creation is heartwarming – like seeing a kid reunited with a pet he thought he had lost. It is wonderful to watch. It reminds me of what happens when grown-ups discover they can still wonder. It would sure be nice if so many people didn’t need to be reunited with treasured facets of themselves decades later though.