The Hammer Outline

Sunday 05 August 2007 at 03:03 am The Hammer Outline: Why literal thinking does not always work for electronic portfolios.

My grandfather was a Tool and Die Maker in Detroit through the hay days of the auto industry. He loved to work and tinker in his garage on weeknights and weekends. His garage was emaculate - truly a place for everything and everything in its place. For many years, he had a wall dedicated to tools hanging on a make-shift peg board. The brown board had plywood cutouts of each tool painted in red. There were three hammers: a claw, a mallet, and a ball pein. The ball pein was a traditional look and feel. The mallet was a hard rubber mallet with an oiled, well-worn handle. The claw hammer had a short head with a tightly curved claw, which the plywood outline mirrored perfectly. One day, when I was 9 or 10, my grandfather’s wood-handled, antique, long-lived claw hammer bit the dust. The handle cracked around the head of the hammer leaving it useless. My grandfather - not a man of modern tools and technologies - went out and bought a brand new fiberglass shaft, padded handle, and hardened steel head, with a claw that was long and straight - the head was almost twice the length of its predecessor’s. After he bought it, he gave it to me and said, “head out in the garage and hang the hammer where it belongs.” I ran out into the garage, stared at the outlines, and thought to myself, “where does it go?” You see, as electronic portfolios permeate the higher education landscape, we must be very cautious of overdescribing or overprescribing what assignments are put where to illustrate what competencies. In this case, I was not proficient in determining two different shaped hammers were still claw hammers.