Teacher carved out new career for himself
Published: September 16, 2005
Two decades ago, Brian Kelly was a high school graduate working in the Florida construction business. But after years of blazing heat, long hours and back-breaking work, he was pining for something different.
That’s when he came across an ad in a popular woodworking magazine about a furniture-making program in Boston, and decided it was time to carve out a new future for himself.
“Concrete work is tough. I don’t miss a minute of it,” admits Kelly, who made the bold move to Boston and earned his woodworking certificate at the North Bennet Street School in the North End.
The move would set off a chain of events that would have lifelong ramifications for the Wellesley Middle School teacher, who is in his ninth year with the school’s consistently popular woodworking and ever-growing robotics program.
Kelly’s road to the middle school was a fortuitous one. After earning his woodworking certificate, he stayed on as an instructor at the North Bennet Street School, where he taught for more than a decade. During that time he also ran a part-time furniture business specializing in high-end, custom-made furnishings.
After a decade at Boston’s oldest trade school, Kelly accepted an interim position with the Wayland Public Schools, before being recruited by Wellesley’s Middle School principal, John D’Auria. With the teaching bug firmly cemented in him, he went back to school at nights to earn his teaching degree at Lesley College, and now, after many years, he is a mainstay with the middle school’s technical programs.
Looking around the shop, it’s easy to see how both teacher and student could develop such a passion for their work. Both intricate and simple woodworking items - nightstands, coffee tables, Adirondack chairs, storage boxes and book shelves - are reminders of just how much the students can accomplish in a semester.
Kelly said it’s remarkable the amount of confidence students can gain from finishing a project. It’s not unlike sports in that way, he explained. “One of the things this does for people is it really engages them. It physically engages them and it mentally engages them,” he said.
Currently, students are in the process of drawing up sketches of their projects and getting together their stock lists for this year’s projects. This year, sixth-graders will be making bubble gum machines and seventh-graders will be building compact disk racks, he said. Sixty-five eighth-graders who take the course as an elective will be able to work on a more complex project of their own choosing.
Most of the eighth-graders’ work, Kelly points out, falls into the Shaker-style category, with simple lines and plain ornamentation.
Kelley also prefers simplicity. His favorite furniture makers are California’s Green & Green, who reached their height of popularity between 1910 and 1915 with their arts-and-crafts movement. Their simple honest work was a reaction to the excessively ornate Victorian period, he said.
Years after building his first pieces, Kelly still maintains a studio in Medford, where he builds one or two handmade furnishings a year for individual clients. He said these pieces tend to be expensive and take hundreds of hours to finish. For example, an armoire could take about 200 hours and fetch between $30,000 and $50,000.
Kelly points out that while most will value the experience and confidence they gain from his classes, only a very small few will pursue it as an occupation. “Just building furniture is a real struggle. It’s a tough way to make a living,” he said. For most Wellesley students, woodworking can be much more than a career, it can be a pretty serious hobby, he added.
Those who have a passion for the work can continue their work at Wellesley High School, and four former students who are high school sophomores are now taking an advanced woodworking workshop at the North Bennet Street School, Kelly said. While there are a rare few who possess a natural predisposition for woodworking, anyone, he believes, can get to a certain level of proficiency where they can build something nice for their home.
In addition to teaching the woodworking classes, Kelly wrote the curriculum for a middle school robotics program, using a Wellesley College program as a model. Like woodworking, the robotics class engages the mind and the body in a unique way, he says.
For example, in that class, the students - who can take their work to a regional competition - have developed a piano-bot that plays “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” a firefighting robotic device and a robotic arm for pouring drinks.
“Robotics is getting very popular,” Kelly said.
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