Building Chairs Designed to Build Character

What does students building three-legged stools have to do with language arts?

As it turns out, quite a bit.

Just ask Sean Wheeler’s 10^th grade language arts class at .

More than 70 of his students put their three-legged chairs on display for the WikiSeat Show at the on Monday night.

Wheeler said the project was designed to engage his students with a creative problem-solving challenge.

The students were given one piece of angle iron and lessons from Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau about ingenuity and individuality. 

“I let them know that they could do this,” Wheeler said. “It was sort of Dead Poets Society. I told them ‘the chairs are a metaphor for you.’”

“It was a message of self-reliance.”

In addition to some good reading and learning how to craft a wicked three-legged chair, Wheeler said the students learned planning, creative approaches to obstacles, failure and success.

But they also learned about themselves. 

“What problems does your chair actively solve? The kids started saying things like ‘when my mom comes home from work she wants to sit down by the door and take her shoes off. She works three jobs.”

Other students, he said, wanted their chairs to be representative of themselves.

“I wish we wouldn’t take such an academic approach to school,” Wheeler said. “I want to take more of a craft approach, where it’s more about iteration, design and problem-solving.”

Wheeler’s progressive teaching style is part of Lakewood High School’s LHS 2.0, a “school within a school,” that with the help of a $250,000 grant combines “proven teaching, grading and testing methods with a technologically relevant classroom and online experience.”

“We covered all of our state standards, but no one told me how to teach them,” Wheeler said. “It’s a new world of connectivity. But instead of working with the technology, we decided to work with our hands.” 

The Beck Center will keep 11 of the approximately 70 chairs on display for the exhibit.

Just up the hall, at the meeting on Monday evening, high school principal William Wagner beamed with pride about the program.

“It looks like a low-tech project, but it was actually a very hi-tech project,” he told board members. “It’s a wonderful project.”