In the Fine Woodworking Intersession this year, led by Humanities Teacher Jamie Murray and Math Teacher Mark Hespenheide, students learned about types of wood, design, and how to use power tools like the table saw and miter saw. Throughout the week, students applied this knowledge to create unique tea boxes. Every aspect of the Woodworking Intersession, from the atmosphere to the tea boxes, was heavily influenced by the people in it.
Intersession teacher Jamie Murray called it “the perfect four-day project.” He added, “We’re not rushing. When you rush into the wood shop, you open the possibility of danger. But it’s also not too casual. So people have to kind of always be working toward the next steps.”
Although the small wooden boxes were not super complex, they took a lot of dedication from our students to complete. Atticus Resch (‘26) shared his experience creating the boxes: “There’s just a ton of stuff that I didn’t know how to do. I did not know that making a box was that hard… You had to sand it a little. It still didn’t fit. You’d do like 30 minutes of just being like, I’m sanding it. Sanding it until it finally fit. Then eventually, you’d sand too much. Then you had to restart, which I did twice.”
Every student worked at a different pace. Elise Foster (‘29), who participated in the second week of the intersession, finished her box two days early. She credited her speed to the Lunch Line Mentality: “Just get in front of people in the line and then like, do it… I just cut the line,” she explained.
For the Woodworking Intersession, like most others, the people in it shaped the atmosphere. Murray noticed this year the change as the student groups rotated between the first and the second weeks. “It was just a totally different vibe,” he recalled. He explained how the first week was more competitive and the second was more encouraging. “But both were really fun to work with.”
Just like the students did, the teachers made a big difference in the environment. Resch said one of the main reasons he chose the intersession was because of the teachers: “I really like Jamie and Mark, and woodworking sounded really cool because I think building stuff is fun.”
One of the best parts about this Intersession was that the students got to take home a final product. As Murray put it, “We don’t really have a product a lot at the end of the day. It’s tough to look at something and say, I made that. Something that didn’t exist in the world beforehand. So I love taking a break from living in the world of the mind and being able to live in the world of make.”
