[pianotech] "Shop Class As Soulcraft"

[David Ilvedson]

Mark,

I went to the website and read the beginning excerpt...I liked it and it felt familiar...then tonight on the Colbert Report was Matthew Crawford...amazing

David Ilvedson, RPT
Pacifica, CA  94044

----- Original message ----------------------------------------
From: "Mark Schecter" <mark at schecterpiano.com>
To: pianotech at ptg.org; caut at ptg.org
Received: 6/25/2009 10:46:20 AM
Subject: [pianotech] "Shop Class As Soulcraft"


>Lists,

>I would like to recommend this book to all piano technicians, and really
>to almost everyone I can think of. Written by Matthew Crawford, "Shop
>Class As Soulcraft" is subtitled "An Inquiry Into the Value of Work." In
>a most penetrating and insightful exploration, Crawford puts his finger
>on the aspects of human nature, and of our modern social and technical
>reality, that to me describe beautifully why I love my work, and why it
>is vital that we appreciate the importance of work done by humans with
>hands.

>The author earned his PhD in political philosophy, and worked briefly in
>a Washington think tank, but soon returned to the work he had begun
>earlier in his life, repairing machines. He understands the deep
>connections between using the hands and using the mind, both in learning
>about the world while growing, and in addressing the reality one
>confronts daily, grappling with the challenges presented by life in
>general and work in particular.

>Here is a link to an article written by the author in The New York Times
>Magazine, titled "The Case For Working With Your Hands". It is worth
>reading in itself, and should serve to introduce the author and his
>book. (See excerpt below sig).
>http://tinyurl.com/o2t9ox

>In case you're interested enough to want to hear the author interviewed, 
>here's a link to a local broadcast from 6/12/09 (52 minutes long).
>http://tinyurl.com/m5tgty

>Enjoy.

>-Mark Schecter, RPT
>  Oakland, CA


>----- an excerpt from the magazine article ---------

>"Some diagnostic situations contain a lot of variables. Any given
>symptom may have several possible causes, and further, these causes may
>interact with one another and therefore be difficult to isolate. In
>deciding how to proceed, there often comes a point where you have to
>step back and get a larger gestalt. Have a cigarette and walk around the
>lift. The gap between theory and practice stretches out in front of you,
>and this is where it gets interesting. What you need now is the kind of
>judgment that arises only from experience; hunches rather than rules.
>For me, at least, there is more real thinking going on in the bike shop
>than there was in the think tank.

>"Put differently, mechanical work has required me to cultivate different
>intellectual habits. Further, habits of mind have an ethical dimension
>that we don’t often think about. Good diagnosis requires attentiveness
>to the machine, almost a conversation with it, rather than
>assertiveness, as in the position papers produced on K Street. Cognitive
>psychologists speak of “metacognition,” which is the activity of
>stepping back and thinking about your own thinking. It is what you do
>when you stop for a moment in your pursuit of a solution, and wonder
>whether your understanding of the problem is adequate. The slap of
>worn-out pistons hitting their cylinders can sound a lot like loose
>valve tappets, so to be a good mechanic you have to be constantly open
>to the possibility that you may be mistaken. This is a virtue that is at
>once cognitive and moral. It seems to develop because the mechanic, if
>he is the sort who goes on to become good at it, internalizes the
>healthy functioning of the motorcycle as an object of passionate
>concern. How else can you explain the elation he gets when he identifies
>the root cause of some problem?"

>    --from "The Case For Working With Your Hands"