I hate glue. It’s globy, gunky, irritating, and it gets everywhere. To echo someone more eloquent than myself, I feel about glue the way Anakin feels about sand. The source of my glue vendetta is that glue has one job—to stick things together—but too often it gives seemingly no effort to achieve this task. In my opinion, it causes more harm than good! Leading nature camps this summer, I’ve watched countless kiddos take their craft time projects on a hike only to have them become disassembled in a matter of minutes.
A favorite craft of the kids, the bowl turtle, is a frequent casualty claimed by the trail. The bowl turtle is made by gluing construction paper strip “legs” around the rim of a paper bowl “shell.” Their craft turtle’s legs and head will slowly fall off throughout the forest hike, littering the trail with dismembered turtle bits and disappointed campers. A camper can take a glue stick to a craft project, smear a hefty glob onto the two disjointed pieces he’d like to connect, and no matter how much glue he lathers on, those pieces will never be truly joined. They’ll flop about, rotate, and eventually separate at the slightest hint of a breeze or faint drizzle of rain.
When craft time turns into a frustrating heap of sticky paper, the whole craft time deal feels like a waste of time. Why spend time helping campers make a flimsy craft that they’re going to throw away the next day while that time could be spent exploring a rhododendron thicket or a burbling mountain stream? On top of that, it’s plain wasteful to cut up paper plates and bowls, cover them in marker and glue, and have them end up in the trash at a camper’s home within the week—if the craft even makes it that long. Remember that scene from Toy Story 2 when Jessie gets left by the curb and Sarah McLachlan’s melancholy voice falls like tears in the background? That’s what comes to my mind whenever a bowl turtle falls apart and a camper walks away.
And yet I’m always surprised by how much kids love craft time. Their voices get quiet in concentration and their artistic expression comes out through colors and imaginative narratives woven into the crafts they create. When they’re finished, the kids develop a sense of pride for what they’ve made with their own hands. Their interest in the finished product may be fleeting, but their sense of accomplishment during the process is priceless. I love seeing the kids show off their creations to each other—that’s why I try to make time for crafts each day of camp.
As we grow up, craft time is more or less weaned out of our schooling. When educating young kids we acknowledge that craft time is important for developing motor skills and expressing creativity. But after middle school, the focus of education shifts toward intellectual pursuits. Craft time becomes relegated to art classes and shop time, both of which are electives. The focus of education becomes more about acquiring knowledge and less about the process of creating, expressing, and inventing.
This is a significant setback for our society. For one, we have a generation of young adults now who lack the knowledge of how to fix basic household items—myself included. When something stops working, we’re encouraged instead to buy a new one or pay an expert to do the repair. Often, our products aren’t designed to be repaired at all, and the only course of action is to throw the thing away and buy another. In that scenario of planned obsolescence, what’s the point of developing craft skills, repair skills, or knowledge of basic tools? Well, without knowledge of how things work or the ability to fix what’s broken, we might assume that planned obsolescence is the only choice we have. But, if we teach kids how to work with their hands, to be creative, to learn how the gadgets in their lives work, then maybe more of them will grow up wanting to purchase simpler gadgets that can be replaced and given longer life spans, thereby saving the user money and also giving more people a sense of pride in what they’ve fixed.
Damn the glue—but keep craft time.
Jon Gorter (‘17) graduated from Calvin with degrees in English and environmental studies and holds an MS in natural resources from the University of Michigan. He enjoys fly fishing, mushroom foraging, and waterfall scrambling near his home in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.
This piece hits me on so many levels. Like as a fellow “person in charge of kids at summer camp,” crafts were the bane of my existence—projects were always half-finished and littered on the floor and I certainly didn’t value the scribbled coloring pages. As a CS teacher, however, I find myself constantly cajoling my students into creating while at the same time working in a school system that is actively sucking their creativity dry. As an average person, I was very delighted to notice that the shell pattern is made from lentils and split peas (genius!!).
So yes to all of this. Craft time seems so useless, but it may only be useless from a certain (production) viewpoint. I, after all, still carry around a fuse bead kiwi from a camper that I can’t seem to part from.
In some ways, I wish that I had been taught how to do basic “fix-it” things around the house, and yet at the same time I don’t. Like, I understand it’s super helpful, yet it’s a pain also. I suppose that’s sort of the bane of creativity too, in some sense, that it’s needed but often feels like a chore.
Thanks for being what I fondly think of as “the nature guy” (among the several people who posted about the outdoors here at the post calvin). I don’t get outside much, and so this opened a door to me that I was able to thoroughly enjoy. I hope your apparent love of the outdoors continues to flow into everything with which you interact.