East shop students make beautiful music

Teacher beats drum to do well and do good

By Lisa Ryckman, Rocky Mountain News (Contact)

Thursday, May 8, 2008

Matt Mcclain / The Rocky

Drying violins hang from the ceiling of Joel Noble's East High classroom. At center, Alex Farwell, 17, picks up a guitar he's building for another of Noble's classes.

Matt Mcclain / The Rocky

Adele Vrooman, 15, right, polishes a violin she built in Joel Noble's woodworking class at East High School. Student-made violins and drums will be given to Bill Roberts School at Stapleton.

The smell of sawdust drifts down the hall outside Joel Noble's East High School classroom, where the day's lesson is fashioned from wood and good will.

His students sand, glue and polish, putting final touches on a project that's been going on all year. Forget about birdhouses and bread boxes: Noble's students are making the means to make music - a pile of violins and a corner full of drums.

What goes on here goes out the door in a week, when Noble's woodworking classes hand over the instruments to children at the Bill Roberts School, a new kindergarten through eighth-grade school on the edge of Stapleton.

"It's nice for the kids to build stuff for themselves," Noble said, "but I wanted us to do something that would really impact the community."

Wood shop classes have gone the way of the dinosaur: Noble said his is one of only a few left in Denver Public Schools. That makes it even more imperative that they do something useful, he said, and helping out a music program - another victim of budget cuts - makes perfect sense.

Building instruments has long been a passion for Noble, who began making guitars while a student at East in the 1980s. For seven years, building electric and acoustic guitars has been part of his curriculum, but this is the first time his students have tackled violins and drums.

Lowe's supplied a $5,000 grant and Kolacny Music supplied a violin for comparison purposes and has been consulting about the new violins to make sure they're ready to be put in small hands.

"I think it's actually really cool, helping out some little kids," said student Jason Laub. "If I made something, it would just sit in my house and I wouldn't use it at all. This is going to get used."

Some of the violins had to be cut and built, while others came in kits, semi-constructed but still in need of fingerboard, chin rest, tuning pegs and strings. Some have gotten a coating of blond or mahogany varnish and now dangle from a line like laundry.

"It's an interesting process because I don't play violin, and I've never built one before," said Noble, who also teaches architecture, civil engineering and design.

He gathers his students in the shop to talk about the next step, the intricacies of lining up the sound post, which has to be carefully inserted inside the violin.

Patient and encouraging, Noble brings a new dimension to wood shop by incorporating math, history and English into student projects, said Megan Wernig, an educational interpreter who works with hearing- impaired students in his class.

"He goes way above and beyond," she said. "And he takes time out to talk to them about being the right kind of person and doing the right thing. I really admire what he does. And how much he does."

Adele Vrooman, one of four girls in the class, still has the game, the gumball machine and the letter holder she made in woodworking class at Morey Middle School. But she has no problem giving away what might be the best thing she's ever made.

"We're doing it for a really good cause," she said.

ryckmanl@RockyMountainNews.com