Back when little Matt was in high school at the tender age of fourteen he decided to become a welder. To get into the trade program at his high school he needed to put in two hundred hours working in a shop. I happily took him on. Matt had little experience then and had much to learn. Under my watchful eye he learned about working in the shop doing all manners off jobs. I insisted he learn his fractions back then although he resisted mightily. In the end I knew just the way I would teach him. When he came in one Saturday there was a very large pile of plywood scraps in the corner, each marked with numbers that included fractions of course. His instructions were to mark each board accurately with a square and then carefully cut them to size according the the numbers I had marked on each board. I told him I would check of course. After many hours of labor by Matt I did check a few boards and then told him he had done a great job - which he did. I then told him to collect all of the pieces in the wheel barrow and throw them into the dumpster. When he gave me a mighty eye roll I told him that we had accomplished two important things. The scrap lumber was now small enough to fit easily into the dumpster without wasting space and he now had a good handle on fractions.
And so it went for two hundred hours. Once Matt got his welding ticket he lived with us and worked for us for some time before going out into the big world on his own. He did us all proud. He's back in the shop for a few weeks helping us with the welding on the Viking ships for Dubai. Matt is soon going to go back to school as he works his way to a carpenter career. He must have enjoyed cutting all those boards back when he started with us years ago. :)
