An important part of our learning is by touching or physically experiencing what we are trying to learn by using, primarily, our hands. The most common description of a great learning experience is “It was truly a ‘hands-on’ experience,’ and I learned a great deal.” Many things look easy to do before you actually try doing them yourself. Two that I have experienced myself, are laying brick and oil painting. From an observer’s point of view, they both look easy. When I was eighteen years old, I was working as a hod carrier for a company in Bakersfield, California, building an elementary school. My job as a hod carrier included mixing mortar (mud), and building scaffolding as the bricklayers moved up the side of the building. I supplied the bricklayers with brick, mortar, wall ties, etc. When they were through building a section of wall,I would tear down the scaffolding and clean the brick wall with an acid solution to clean the mortar off that was splashed on it from above. I watched the bricklayers and sometimes thought their job looked easy and that I could do that. One day, the foreman asked me to join the bricklayers. I was a hard worker, and he said that I could make the company more money laying brick than I would as a hod carrier. He handed me a trowel, a joiner and said, “Get up there on the wall and lay brick.” I finally had a chance to lay brick, “hand’s on,” but it was a different story altogether. The trowel was awkward in my hand, and as soon as I had a trowel full of mud to spread on the brick, the trowel was really heavy as well as awkward. Bricklayers made laying a brick in the mud they had spread out look as easy as just putting it down. But to lay brick perfectly straight end to end, without having the face of the brick either tilting in or tilting out, that is what turned out to be a real art. That’s why a journeyman bricklayer goes through three years as an apprentice. Contrary to my earlier beliefs, laying brick was not a piece of cake; it was hard, and it was definitely a skilled trade. I did get pretty good in a relatively short while, but I watched the other bricklayers very carefully, and whenever they had a word of advice for me, I was all ears. I was drafted into the Army a few months after that and was two years soldiering, without laying any brick. When I was discharged, I went back to the same company, for the summer, to continue my apprenticeship. I had actually been approved by the local union to be an apprentice right after the foreman asked me to lay brick. That fall, I was married and started school at Utah State University. I got a job working half days for Nielsen Brick and Tile Company. After my first week on the job, the foreman passed out paychecks for the week’s work. I looked at my check and told the foreman that I had received too much. I had been paid journeyman’s wages instead of about half that amount which I should have been getting as an apprentice. Instead of taking the check back and having a new check cut for me, he gave the check back to me and said, “Get in there and earn it then.” So all the while I was attending the university and working as a part-time apprentice bricklayer, I was paid a journeyman’s wages. Yes, I did work hard, and I believe I laid as many brick and as straight as any other bricklayer during the course of a day. I received my Journeyman Masonry card the same year that I graduated from the university. The “Hands-on” experience was a great deal different than just watching a bricklayer lay a brick. It is definitely a trade where an apprenticeship, a significant training period, is essential.
The other example is the art of oil painting. After we moved into our home on Woodland Dr., we had no paintings decorating our walls and no money to buy any. So being a rather brazen person (and sometimes abrasive), I decided that I would buy some art supplies and paint some pictures myself. I took a class for about two or three weeks, but the teacher was so good that I felt embarrassed at my work and quit. I kept on painting though, and after a while, I did paint a few pictures that turned out fairly good—even good enough that my children were not embarrassed to hang some of them in their own homes. I do not believe many artists would say that oil painting came natural to them. Mixing of paints and applying it to the canvas so that the end product looks somewhat professional is what they call an “art,” and the person able to do it is called an artist. I am not an artist, I am only a person who has tried to paint artistically.
Many things require time, training and primarily “hands-on” experience before a person can become proficient. The examples I gave are only two of many that I could relate. Never having completed even the ninth grade in school, I missed out on many things, including how to type, a skill that in later years was sorely needed by me. While a university student, my wife typed all my papers that had to be turned in typed. Some teachers accepted handwritten papers; fortunately she did not have to type them all. After graduating and eventually becoming a university administrator, I had secretaries who typed my reports, etc. But after I retired, I had to do my own work, and I started learning the keyboard. Now, as an old man, I can type about twenty two words a minute with only two fingers. I call myself the “bald-headed two-fingered key pecker.” Yes, “hands-on” is ultimately the primary key to learning. First it is watching, and then it is hands-on. Watching is just the warm up period.