This year, La Center High School has hired a Career and Technical Education teacher with 25 years of experience in the trades, including woodworking, general construction and internal combustion engines.
“I saw that this opportunity opened up and I felt like all three of those elements that I had were exactly what they were asking for,” said La Center CTE teacher Evan Holt. “I jumped at the opportunity and they accepted, so here I am.”
Career and Technical Education is a program that allows people who have been in trades to teach in schools by earning a two-year accreditation instead of having to spend several years earning a teaching degree.
Holt himself has been in the trades for almost all of his life, coming from a lineage of woodworkers going back five generations, but he knew one day he’d want to teach.
“I got a master’s degree in fine art about 10 years ago with the idea that I would end up in teaching once the construction side of life got too hard on my body,” Holt said. “I’ve always been searching for this kind of opportunity to open up.”
After being hired and spending just four months on the job, Holt discovered that this job wasn’t going to be a breeze, no matter how much he felt he had prepared himself beforehand.
“It has been a joyful but very difficult experience,” Holt said. “This is the first time I’ve been completely around high schoolers full-time, and they just have an energy level that is exciting but also can pull in tons of different directions.”
Holt finds that the students who attend his classes aren’t the typical students who thrive on lectures, but rather those who enjoy the hands-on experience of building and making things and preparing for trade work right out of high school.
“My goal is to get all of the students generally familiarized with tools and with systems around working,” Holt said. “We spend half the time making things and half the time looking at building your résumé, interviewing and looking at different types of careers.”
The different nature of the class also creates a good energy outlet for some students who might otherwise be labeled as troublesome.
“I’m able to take them and find that their energy isn’t towards sitting and learning rote style, theirs is towards hands-on skills,” Holt said.
By channeling the students’ energy into the class, Holt is also able to help them learn portions of other subjects that class lectures might be unable to communicate to them.
“I give them projects that still have connection to science or math, but in a hands-on approach,” Holt said. “We look at the geometry behind why things go together, the physics behind why things work, I try to show them that all these subjects are connected.”
In his class, he finds fun and creative ways to complete this task, including projects such as making mini-golf putters and building an actual catapult.
“This very simple looking little three piece tool is actually using a lot of different pieces of equipment,” Holt said. “They’re learning safety first and foremost, but they’re getting to use their hands and they’re reaching for a fun project that I find is fun along the way.”
In addition to the putters, students are making mini golf courses that must be completed in a single shot.
The creativity, the hands-on opportunities and the fun of a catapult are just a few ways that Holt is able to share his own passion for the trades with the students and prepare them for their own potential careers.
“The construction society has been saying for the last 20 years that the craftsmen out there now are wanting to retire and they need someone to fill their shoes,” Holt said. “What I’m seeing is that the money and the resources and the volunteering time and the commercial investments are just fantastic that are being put into the programs to re-envision a new society where we have shop class again.”
