Thanks for the tip Mark. I will enjoy this while flying back to N Carolina this week. Alan -- Alan McCoy, RPT Eastern Washington University amccoy at ewu.edu 509-359-4627 (message Pacific time) 509-999-9512 (cell Pacific time) ________________________________ From: Mark Schecter <mark at schecterpiano.com> Reply-To: CAUTlist <caut at ptg.org> Date: Thu, 25 Jun 2009 10:46:20 -0700 To: Pianotech <pianotech at ptg.org>, CAUTlist <caut at ptg.org> Subject: [CAUT] "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 donât 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 âmetacognition,â 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" -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://ptg.org/pipermail/caut.php/attachments/20090630/a0c0453e/attachment.htm>
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