Jack Perrin teaches kids to use power tools at the Gorge Makerspace in White Salmon, Washington.
Julia Oppenheimer / OPB
Jack Perrin is not your typical science teacher.
“I really love hands-on stuff,” he said last month when I visited him in White Salmon, Washington. “If kids can use their hands, learning goes a lot deeper.”
Perrin was my science and math teacher all through grade and high school at a small private school in the Western Colorado town of Paonia. He caught my attention right away when he introduced a course titled ‘bubble-ology’ to my second grade class. By the time I was in high school, his lessons had evolved in a more athletic way: we would pop off to Utah for a week of backpacking, learning how to start a fire with flint or cook pasta inside a sleeping bag.
“I think for me, teaching has always been about relationships,” he says. “Paying attention to the…
