Last night I was thrilled to check my message inbox on kickstarter to find they had approved the project!

Thanks Kickstarter!

And thanks to my brooklynite friend Lee, who intrested me in Kickstarter in December. And, thanks to my wife Amy who did editing kung fu on my proposal while caring for our little daughter at the same time!
I'm super excited to switch into a higher gear as the project goes live, around next week sometime. I'm working on the video and doing sketch sessions for the mini book and top level incentives right now. The sun is out and my shop is humming with pre-production.

On NPR today I heard a piece about the Environmental Protection Agency and the future-looking new head of the department. He said that he sees a future where the EPA is less and less needed because humans will have learned how to use non toxic chemicals and chemicals mimicking natural compounds. He's even going so far as pushing for EPA's own scientists to come up with their own chemistry solutions to our cess pool of a system.
This got me relating this approach to education. What if teacher's were incentivised to take educational solutions into their own hands?
I take a further look at this approach. I think teachers, along with open source communities, co-op business through the lens of the internet, we can take educational solutions into our own hands. This approach gives me great hope. In the last 6 years, I have been routinely stupified by the beauracracy that runs our education system. To top it off, I am now seeing that the way we train teachers to work in our schools has it's own set of problems, disjointed from the education system itself.
I am going to become a credentialed teacher. That is, a publicly accepted member of the teaching community(I think I already am). I just think it is going to be in a whole new way than any solutions either bureaucracy-ladened system can dish up to save how we educate our youth.

Decided to throw around some names for my line of youth educational blocks and came up with 'creative city blocks'. While my son and I are in the playroom, I usually end up building buildings with my son's blocks since my preoccupation is passive solar architecture. He loves knocking them down.
Looked up 'creative city' later on and found a wikipedia entry. I don't know if I would necessarily make a top level brand of the name, but they certainly are

creative city blocks

no matter how you look at it.

The following is the questionaire for starting a kickstarter project.
What would you like to create?

A friend recommended I try out Kickstarter. I am really excited and think it is the perfect way to really get my personal shop ideas off the ground. I mean really off the ground. For years I have taken an extreme DIY approach to building my shop in many many stages, with reclaimed materials and gifted tools from neighbors and family. I have taken steps that are scary for me and I've reached a point of no return in some ways, so I think finding kickstarter now is just perfect.
I am going to focus on a handful of different childrens toys, plus small art frames. I make everything with reclaimed wood I get from construction sites, the side of the road, or peoples' garages. Often times it is really good quality first growth wood, deemed unusable becuase taking the time to clean it up and figure out how best to use it is apparently not worth our time. The way I look at it is that we had better find a way to use useful materials so that we can save our future generations some real headaches when they grow up and find out we've dumped a huge problem on their hands. Landfills in my area are expected to fill to capacity in my lifetime, which makes it not so much my problem, but my children's problem.

thinking about the approach to developing the hands-on classroom development, I have been dwelling on the problem of how teachers will train for industrial and career/tech classrooms. The student demand is there, but even if most of the administrators wanted to open more "shop classes", there is a shortage of teachers properly trained to be safe and effective in a shop setting.
When the boomers leave public school shops, we need to take action now to capture the vast wealth of information and know-how these teachers are hard pressed to pass on for lack of administative support, and teacher training programs suitable for shop teachers to take their places.
It's a tough problem from any angle, but today I struck me that a good starting place for developing these shops is not at first building student demand, finding administrative support, or training teachers properly. It struck me that even if the perfect storm of all of these came together, the state of most public school shops is less that state of the art. In a lot of cases they are pretty dangerous places, with tons of old, out of tune, tools and machines. But it's nothing that can't be fixed and maintained.