Why We're Starting The Bench

A founder's story

I have a lot of fond memories of being with my father down in the “basement shop.” The musty scent of iron & pine. The weight and noise of the power tools. The hand tools on the wall, still just out of my reach.

At first, my favorite thing was simply hammering nails into the top of an old fold-out step stool. Other than showing me how to avoid hitting my own hand, I don't remember my dad coaching me much. He was nearby. He let me have fun and figure things out.

And ruin his shop stool.

We always worked on projects that were of high interest to me. A little wooden aircraft carrier for my toy planes. Four small boxes that enabled two single beds to be stacked into bunk beds—an engineering marvel to me at the time. As I got older, I did more of the work myself, slowly developing my skills.

From Shop to Classroom

But I didn't set out to open a woodworking school. I ultimately set out to be a teacher.

Much of the inspiration for this came from my own path as a student. I struggled early on—sitting still and absorbing information secondhand chipped away at my confidence. But I went to a school grounded in whole-child education, including experiential learning, and it was there I first experienced what happened when I could get up, use my hands, and work through something real instead. I understood it faster. I felt it more deeply. It stuck.

That wasn't just true for me. Even before I had the words for it, I could sense that learning in groups mattered just as much as the work itself. None of this is new to education — hands-on, social learning has been studied for well over a century. What I noticed, working inside schools, was less about the idea itself and more about how much distance there often was between that research and what a typical classroom actually looked like.

I went and got a master's degree in teaching, then spent years testing hands-on, experiential teaching in different settings: public and private classrooms, one-on-one tutoring, outdoor education, coaching. Along the way, I kept noticing the same pattern from two directions. Kids seemed to respond to problems with real stakes — something they could see, touch, and be responsible for. And home economics and woodshop classes kept disappearing from schools, even as sewing studios, pottery classes, and makerspaces kept showing up outside of them, in cities and suburbs alike.

Families were reaching for this kind of learning again, right as schools stepped back from offering it.

The Idea Comes Together

Not unlike my early struggles as a student, my early years as a teacher raised questions about if mainstream classroom was really the right place for me. I needed a break, and instead of another teaching job, I took an apprenticeship in a cabinetry shop. During a couple of years there, I began to think more deeply about how to teach the kinds of things I was learning in the shop. That's when I came across Educational Sloyd.

Developed in Finland and Sweden in the late 19th century, Sloyd brought woodworking and other handcrafts into ordinary schools not simply as vocational training, but as a form of general education. The approach used real tools and a progression of projects that became more challenging one step at a time.

Reading about it, things started to come together. The woodworking I had loved as a kid. The engagement I'd seen in hands-on learning. The opportunity to step outside your comfort zone and build confidence, character, and life skills. And my own interest in giving kids the kind of learning that seemed to be disappearing.

Even the name came together outside my own head. I asked my wife and daughter what they thought the school should be called. They asked me to name some of the tools and processes a woodworker uses. When I got to “there's a bench,” they both said, almost in unison, “That's it.”

Why Woodworking, Specifically

I could have built a program around any number of hands-on crafts. What kept pulling me back to woodworking was how completely it demands the whole kid — body and mind together, not one waiting on the other.

A block plane isn't something you think your way through — it's something you feel and physically work your way through. Foot placement changes the stroke. The angle of your shoulder changes the cut. The pressure in your fingertips tells you as much as your eyes do. The thinking and the doing happen in the same motion, at the same time, because the material won't let them separate.

A block plane either sits flat through the whole stroke, or it doesn't, and the wood tells you immediately, in sound and feel, which one just happened. There's no faking a good cut, and there's no partial credit for looking like you're paying attention — the feedback runs through the hands and the ears and the whole standing body, not just the eyes or ears.

Hand tools raise the stakes in a way that I believe kids respond to. A sharp edge demands real, physical attention — weight balanced, hands positioned, focus present in the moment, not performed just to get it done. That's not a bug I'm managing around — it's the whole mechanism. Kids can't drift through a woodworking class the way they can drift through a lot of other activities, because drifting shows up instantly in a wandering plane or a crooked cut. The tool holds their whole body accountable, and that's precisely what makes the lessons about patience, persistence, and focus arrive, as a byproduct of the work, rather than as the lessons themselves.

It also happens to produce something they can hold. A sanding stick, a box, a stool — a physical answer to a question like, "what did you learn today that you didn’t know yesterday?" That tangibility matters at any age, but particularly for an 8 to 14-year-old.

Opportunity by Design

The Bench is structured as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, and that wasn't an incidental choice.

Every kid deserves the chance to build something real with their own hands. Shop class disappeared from most public schools a generation ago. What's replaced it—private lessons, specialty camps, well-equipped makerspaces—tends to come with a price tag that can quietly sort who gets to build character through making and who doesn't. The Bench is, on paper, part of that same list: another paid program a family has to be able to afford.

If I believe this kind of experience matters, then access can't be an afterthought. I don't want The Bench to just relocate that sorting into a new building. That's why the model stays simple on purpose—standard tuition, and a tuition assistance option a family can actually use, not a maze of paperwork that quietly discourages the people it's meant to help.

I want to give every child the opportunity they need and deserve—which means it has to live in the pricing model, the enrollment process, and the way a kid walks through the door on day one.

Where We Are Now

The Bench isn't open yet. Right now, we're continuing to build out; staying in touch with families, shaping the curriculum for elementary and middle-school-aged kids, and locating the space in which it will all happen.

Focus groups and pop-ups continue to help us test and refine our assumptions about The Bench, including its impact on children. The kids have started telling us what they think in their own words.One child told us, “I like that I'm responsible for the tools.”Another said, “I feel powerful when I'm working with these tools.”And one, without any prompting, put it about as well as I could have:“I realized that I like learning things when I get to do the thing I'm learning.”

There's still work to do before we open the doors for real. But the bones of it—the philosophy, the projects, the people helping us test it—are already taking shape, one plane stroke at a time.

I think about my dad's basement shop a lot these days. Sure, he gave plenty of instruction. But there were almost as many times that were like the old step-stool. He just stood nearby and let the hammer, the nail, and the stool teach me.I'm building The Bench so more kids get that same opportunity: real tools, a real task, and a steady presence nearby to provide a safe space that prioritizes them getting to figure it out.

If any of this resonates, I'd love for you to follow along. And if you want your own kid(s) signed up at a bench before we officially open, join the waitlist — you'll be the first to know the moment we do.

Bern

Founder, The Bench Woodworking School