What sounds do you imagine when you think of carpentry? The rasp of saws? The pounding of hammers? If this was the 1950s, you’d be right. But Carpentry II at ACC is not your grandfather’s woodshop class. In our high-tech classroom, you’ll hear the whirring of electric saws and the industrial rumble of the dust collection system. But despite all its state-of-the-art tools and machinery, as a new class that’s only been available starting this year, Carpentry II has an enrollment problem. This year’s class has only six students. The good news is that we can interview all of them!

Enter Carrie Tiroff, an enthusiastic Arlington Tech senior with a passion for high level joinery. She’s making a toolbox using the finger joint method, a complicated process involving many interlocking parts. She says that “Carpentry means being able to make something out of nothing, to experiment and to learn new, better ways of building.” She’s been accepted in the Residential Construction Management program at Penn Tech, but is still thinking about trade school.

There are also two Arlington Tech juniors: Akshay Kuchibhatla, a programmer who loves to saw, and Issac, a hater of dad jokes. Akshay says “Carpentry is an art that so few appreciate,” and Issac compares it to therapy, because of how calming it is. They are the only Arlington Tech students who will be able to take Carpentry III if it is offered next year.

There are also a couple of Yorktown students who make the bus ride over to the Career Center every day just for this class. Charlie Whitmore, a thorough senior who prefers independent projects over assignments from the project book, jokes that “Carpentry rocks, I mean, it woods.” Diego Gonzales, a junior with a killer handshake who hopes to build “the next Noah’s Ark,” says he likes Carpentry II because he likes doing big projects.

This class, which has brought together a group of students from different schools and different grades who would otherwise never have known each other, would not be possible without its instructor. Mr. Godfrey, an ex-middle school teacher from Pennsylvania who is a father of two and passionate about his craft, says that Carpentry is a class that can be useful to anyone, regardless of their career plans. “You don’t have to leave this class and become a carpenter,” he says, “but most people live in a house when they grow up, and in a house things break, and if you have just a little bit of proficiency with power tools, you can fix almost anything.” That’s what Carpentry, with all its state-of-the-art machines is for: so that a passionate few can become professional carpenters, and the rest can leave with enough knowledge and confidence to reattach a door when the hinges break instead of having to hire someone else.